Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1276973
46 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 Matties: As soon as it shows up at the fabrica- tor, and your team has to start working on the files, oftentimes, they do it before the sale is even made just to make a quote. I look at that as a cost of sales. And your engineer should probably get a sales commission because they help close the sale. Almeida: But with the engineer, when they sent that design off, they're done, and there's some transitional time there. By the time any issues may get back to that engineer, they're on a whole different design. They would have to stop what they're doing, bring the other design back up, get re-familiar with it, find out what the issue is, and test it to see how to make the right fix. They've moved on. And I think that kind of transition creates these little hiccups. Matties: Ray, from your experience, why is a manufacturer going to change? It sounds like this is just part of what they do and part of their value-added services. Fugitt: It really is. Here's another example from my past. I remember we were getting bad data from one source over and over again, so I said to our inside salesperson, "Let's talk to them and see if we can help them put out a better package." We went over to the Valley, and the designer said, "If you can't deal with the data, we'll go somewhere else." Matties: We hear that we're in this era of early collaboration, from design with fabricator and assembly. Do you see more of that? Fugitt: I do a seminar at PCB West every year with Dave Hoover of TTM. We talk about the same issues that we're going through right now. The first thing out of Dave's mouth as an AE is, "I need to be involved in that process before the design even starts." It is the way to do it—to get that person involved early on— and, hopefully, it's the way we're moving as an industry. Matties: How do we get people to embrace this in a stronger way? Is there hard data or some empirical information data out there that would make a case? Or how do you get this to happen? Almeida: I think the first thing is that there's an educational piece to it. When people think about getting a board manufactured—and this is still prevalent in the design community— they look at the design as being that holy grail of all the information. They don't look at the outputs of that design with that same level of importance. If we, as engineers, were to focus as much attention on the accuracy and the quality of the handoff pieces and deliverables, you'd see better improvement between design and man- ufacturing. But it gets taken for granted that whatever was on this top layer is automatically going to get translated into the top layer of the Gerber file when it's a translation in both cases, and whenever you have a translation, it would behoove you to verify that that transla- tion happened correctly. Matties: My understanding is that it could be a multi-day process to create a proper set of fab notes. Almeida: It is, and a lot of these companies are smart, where they have templated fabrication notes, but they change based on the features of each different design. Fab notes are good, but in reality, they're only one piece of the holistic documentation piece, specification, or prod- uct. And what's happening is, more and more so, the fabrication drawing seems to be further and further neglected. We tend to rely more on text, as well as assembly vs. the fabrication process. But both pieces of documentation are equally important. Matties: Are the tools getting better, in terms of being able to provide the graphics and the necessary data? Almeida: They are. If you look at BluePrint, one of the reasons why we did it was to unhar- ness all the CAD limitations for preparing doc- umentation so that you'd have more flexibil-