Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1293772
50 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2020 Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team In the first part of this conversation, "Mon- soon Solutions: Achieve Greatest Reliability With Optimized Panelization, Part 1," Nolan Johnson and Andy Shaughnessy spoke with Jennifer Kolar and Dan Warren of Monsoon Solutions about common issues that design- ers should think about when they're paneliz- ing their designs for reliability. In Part 2, the conversation turns to best practices for putting multiple board designs on the same panel. Nolan Johnson: Let's talk about one of the other bugaboos: Jamming in as many different boards as you can. Jennifer Kolar: We hear this a lot when we have customers that are doing small test boards, such as a series of them or variants of them. They know it's not going to use up a whole panel, and they don't need that many, or they always need them together. They're the same stackup, so they think it will be a lot cheaper and more efficient, and just send them to the fab shop to deal with. The problem is the way most assemblers work—if they're working off pick-and-place data or the origin in ODB, that's based on your board data. If you send indi- vidual board data to the fab vendor, and they now panelize two together, then there's no cor- rect XY data or origin location for the assem- bler to use to program how to assemble that array. They're going to have to scan it them- selves and try to recreate that data, which is a time-intensive process. When we do multiple designs per board, we will put them in the same database, and we will output them together so that we don't have conflicts on reference designators. Oth- erwise, if you are not careful, you end up with two different designs with two different R1s that are different parts. That's a really big problem in programming. You can also end up with so many different kinds of designs that the programming is really complicated, even if it is within one database. We'll try to reduce or minimize just how many different designs go into one database because it makes the pro- gramming so much more complicated. If we do have people who want to put multiple boards in one, rather than having the fab vendor pan- elize them together, we do that first. We'll put it in one database, panelize it, and then send Monsoon Solutions: Achieve Greatest Reliability With Optimized Panelization, Part 2