Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1398328
22 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2021 the designer was consider- ing. ey're defaulting to whoever their supply chain partner happens to be for fab. I think those two parties have to be really well aligned internally in the organization for it to be successful. Matties: If it's an ongoing relationship, though, the purchasing agent is going to use the AVL (approved vendor list). Your designer should know where it's going. Vaughan: Yes, but even on an AVL there could be very different capabilities within that. Just because there's three printed circuit board fab- ricators on the AVL, they don't have the same equipment set or capabilities, and in many cases, they are using different material suppli- ers or different processes. ere is much vari- ability there. I've seen the most success when the design team is lined up with the board fab- ricator early on, and they're a part of that team for impedance modeling, stackups, material selection, and all those things. All that should be happening in concert, in my opinion. Matties: Kelly, you've been on the design side, and you've probably been in both circum- stances where you've known the fabricator and where you have not known the fabricator. What's the contrast between those two? Dack: e contrast can only be parsed out by examining the different levels of communica- tion. When I say communication, I mean what is communicated through documentation. Matties: ere has been a longtime conversa- tion about communication. What's going to shi that? Eventually you must communicate once your purchasing agent chooses the ven- dor and there's a problem. e vendor stops very closely with the PCB fabricators. Even the EMS guys must define what the aspirations for the product or the program are. I think that the transactional busi- ness becomes more difficult when people are primarily shopping price or one-offs. But when you're building a business and you're building partnerships, all those things matter a lot on the front end to understand. Dack: In the context of new design, one of the challenges between both designer and sup- plier, and why I emphasize communication, is that so oen the designers have no idea where the board is going to be built in a production phase. ey're usually tied in with bare board suppliers for prototype supply, and therein may lie a seed of potential problems having to do with capability. Designers are in touch with prototype supplier capability and will tend to design their layouts to achieve that capabil- ity. at's what we do—incorporate design for manufacturability. But when the manufactur- ability changes—the shi changes from pro- totype to production—that is where we oen have the biggest challenge. Capabilities change between onshore pro- totype manufacturing and offshore produc- tion manufacturing; they're different things that designers don't realize suppliers deal with every day. e problem can be identified as poor DFM caused by missing communication. Vaughan: I agree 100%, Kelly. at was my point as far as the cross-functional alignment within the organization, within the OEM. Oen, those guys are siloed up; as you said, the design guys are doing their thing, the files become com- plete, and then it's tossed over the wall in their own organization to the procurement group that really isn't considering all the items that Kelly Dack