Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1398328
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2021 Matties: e designer validates step-by-step, contributing to the digital twin, and can see that this board passes DFM. You're digitally validating and fabricating before it even gets to the fab. Does this then bring the responsibil- ity of purchase—or at least vendor selection— to the designer? Because we hear, oentimes, it's the purchasing agent making the purchas- ing decision and not the designer or engineer, which can create a problem. Ford: In reality, a digital twin would be adopted that contains a variety of manufacturing config- urations, made from potentially many vendors. Policies would have to be in place to define what to do if any specific configuration from a potential vendor would not work correctly where certain design decisions are made. is is also the reality today, which results in poor manufacturing performance. With the digital twin, these issues are avoided at source. You can see how these things happen. On the materials side, selection decisions depend on the product and the designer. In some cases, approved vendor lists are very design specific, but the requirements of which are not communicated in a good way today. Current instructions will specify to use vendor A, B, and C. When the manufacturer must say, "A, B, and C aren't available here right now, so I'd like to use vendor D. Is it actually possible? Was vendor D considered? Who am I going to call? Who should I ask?" Decision makers today must understand the difference between vendor D, and vendors A, B, or C, and the reason why vendor D was not included in the first place, for which the information is not always available. Matties: e nuance of a design could create a problem with vendor two vs. vendor one, for example, even though they're on the AVL. But if they had this digital twin, they could be run- ning the step-by-step process with each of their AVL partners at the same time. is would drive the decision back to the designer, not the purchasing agent. Ford: It could also be a digital twin solution that purchasing uses, based on the interopera- bility of the design digital twin data. at solu- tion should be able to make the same decisions as the original designer would have. One challenge with this currently is that infor- mation about materials is not always accurate and is not available to the degree of precision that is oen needed. Component documen- tation is oen still usually on pieces of paper, including PDF documents, even though, all the materials are of course designed electron- ically. What we are looking at to help in this area is another new standard that is coming soon from IPC. I do keep talking about these new standards. ere is a model-based design (MBD) standard coming from IPC in which the component manufacturers themselves will be able to output their existing component design data into a standard format, which can then be used interoperably as part of the digi- tal twin. e IPC-2581 DPMX design data commit- tee is also looking into this new MBD stan- dard to enhance the DFX approach in both directions. Firstly, doing the sanity check that everything will work with your selected part- ners, and second, analyzing data coming back from manufacturing, as they have the new DFX data definition within the IPC-2581 revi- sion C. Plus, if you're looking at the data aer the fact, using the traceability data, which is also a part of the digital twin manufacturing, you can then start to say things like, "I'd like to report material vendor A's performance against ven- dor B's performance, with respect to this par- ticular kind of symptom or fault that I had on the line." at's completely possible, and can be used to refine the rules for the choice of vendor. Matties: e designer validates the chip suppli- ers and component suppliers are publishing all their modeling. We're talking about a lot of dis- cipline, aren't we?