Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1285883
SEPTEMBER 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 79 that it's worth the extra effort of having pro- cesses and monthly design meetings. We have monthly principal design meetings with five of us principal designers. We all have 30+ years of experience, and we go over the fab notes and other processes. A lot of companies, especially smaller ones, don't see the value in doing that because they have limited resources, but we benefit from the effort of doing that. Kolar: A lot of electrical engineers look at the layout as a connecting-the-dots exercise. They don't value the effort. They balk on quotes that include time for iteration and documentation. There's a lot of pushback on that, and many service bureaus only care about billing by the hour. We bill by the hour, but our employees are not pestered or paid based on the hours they bill. We aren't trying to have our designers billing at 100%. We typically think, "Do you have about 24 billable hours out of each week?" Barry Matties: A couple of things strike me. One, it looks like you're looking at this not from a price point of view but a total cost point of view, which makes a lot of sense. The other is that it all starts with design. It's a domino effect: it's crap in, it's crap out. Warren: I agree. That's funny; that's what I heard when I started as a designer. Johnson: Shifting gears, what trends in design do you see? We know that there are a lot of new high densities, smaller packaging, etc. Kolar: It seems like new aerospace companies pop up about every other minute, such as new satellite companies. Warren: Everyone wants to launch something into space. They don't know what it is, but it's going into space. Shaughnessy: What's your greatest challenge right now? Kolar: We have a lot of different big projects going on, and we tend to see cutting-edge stuff a lot. That's pretty fun. A lot of times, we'll have challenges in finding a vendor who can build the designs. That has nothing to do with design. It's just, "Here's the customer require- ment. We need a vendor that can build this." That's where we end up. Because we are on the cutting edge a lot with design, it's a chal- lenge to find a fab vendor that can build some- thing. Then, it is working with the customer to figure out, "It could be built if XYZ." We try to iterate with our vendors and customers, rather than just saying, "This is impossible." We work with the fab vendors or the assem- blers, and say, "In which case are we okay with violating IPC rules? In which cases are we okay with doing this? If we just did this? Yes, they would accept the rest and build it." That's where we have the biggest challenges. Other- wise, it's just time. Everybody wants things faster than possible. Warren: One of the things I see as a challenge is that everything's getting smaller and smaller. We were just talking about DFM and early DFM involvement by the designer. Instead of waiting until the end of the design, I just finished one part that had the smallest clear- ances, and the smallest vias I'd ever done on a board. I wish I could tell you details, but I can't because it's propri- etary. But I went through three DFMs with the fab shop before we came up with something that worked for me to get the design done and worked for them to get the board fab kit. I started early with DFM once I got the CPU pinned out. I had a pretty good feeling that I could do it in X number of layers. I knew this is what I wanted, so I threw it to the fab shop. They came back and said, "Okay, that sounds good." But once I got into the routing and was about halfway done, I ran it back to the fab shop and had them do a full DFM on it. They came back and said, "This is good. But this clearance here has to go because we need more space." They Dan Warren