Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1327102
JANUARY 2021 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 63 arts people who make printouts look crystal clear, which makes the stackups easy to read, and that's useful. Shaughnessy: When you're planning these tools, is it primarily based on feedback from customers? I'm just curious what the process is. Gaudion: It's feedback from customers. It's a huge challenge, because every four months or so we have a planning meeting to run through maybe 200 to 500 requests from people who say, "I really need Speedstack to do this." Clearly, we can't do all of the requests. We have to prioritize and figure out which thing we do, and which will be useful to the most people. The challenge to make the enhance- ments benefit everyone is quite an interesting process, because you want to make sure that what you do for one customer doesn't mess things up for another. I'm sure you're aware of software where you get an update, there's lots of new features, and your favorite feature in the old one has gone away or it doesn't work quite the same. We try to avoid getting stuck in that trap, and sometimes that limits us as to what we can do. But it is customer-led rather than us hav- ing a good idea. I think when we started off we had a good idea and then the customers took over and drove it; and that's where we are now. a better way of doing things. With very complex boards, the bigger OEMs certainly work on stackups and have recommended stack- ups for different types of design. It's certainly our recommendation for complex work that you think about stackup first. Shaughnessy: We hear these hor- ror stories where somebody will design a board, it gets prototyped in America, and it'll have five-mil traces, and then they want to send it to their Chinese volume guys who say, "We can't do that; we can't go that small." It's like they didn't even think about that. Of course, the designers, in their defense, often don't know where it's going to go for volume. Gaudion: And that's where I was talking earlier about brokers. Some of the brokers are very good. If you speak to these brokers and say, "We'd like a prototype shop and a volume shop," they'll know who to speak to about both the prototype and the volume. I think bro- kers have got quite a role to play in that area because they're doing this for lots of people. If you're a designer, you're going to spend most of your time designing, not doing stackups. You don't get that skilled on stackup because you're spending all your time doing the layout. Using somebody who's familiar with stackup is a good thing. Shaughnessy: Since you haven't plugged your own company, I have to mention that someone recently told me, "Thank God for Speedstack." They were manufacturing a fairly complex board overseas and the CAM people didn't speak much English, but the software was so visual that they could look at the stackup and see, "Oh, yeah, that's what they mean," and it worked fine. Gaudion: Yes, we're lucky that the lead engi- neer on Speedstack has a background in fab- rication. We've got some really good graphic