Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1401769
30 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2021 PCB preparation or PCB post-processing— taking the design from the virtual space to the physical space more efficiently. e analyses required to accomplish this are being run earli- er in the process and the successes companies are realizing that have adopted such tools and formats speak for themselves. Dan Feinberg: You're saying that the fabrica- tor and the designer communication could im- prove significantly? Joe Clark: at's always the case, yes. Feinberg: But there is some communication between the designers and the fabricators. Max Clark: Not oen. Frequently, the designers have no idea where their board is even going to be made. Joe Clark: Max is right, but you've got to sepa- rate the market. A military OEM is limited in terms of where they can go to get their boards. ey also have a very tight handshake with the few vendors that they've blessed. All those oth- er companies that could go anywhere, that's the problem. I'll even throw out the economic argument that I believe fabricators (and CMs) grapple with and that we touched upon earlier. As a fabricator, I'll take anything you've got be- cause I want my capacity to be utilized as close to 100% as possible. I think that's a part of it as well. It's not just the technology, it's also a fear. It's that fear that the customer can and will go somewhere else if one pushes back. Feinberg: Here is a quick example. I was a sup- plier for what was, at that time, the largest circuit board fabricator in the world—West- ern Electric in Richmond, Virginia. ey're no longer there now. ey wanted something with their photoresist and we told them, "We can't do that. We can't give you that frequency response and we can't give you that color that you want." ey were dying their own auto- ly owns the design? Because if you're moving the design downstream to let the fabricator do the heavy liing, who owns it at the end? Joe Clark: ere's an analog to this that Rick and I discuss a lot. Back in the day when there were tools like Quad Design and Quantic Labs for signal integrity, such tools were so specialized and difficult to use that there was this "end-of- the-line verification" process where you sent your design when done, and someone would run this magic test using Quad and Quantic and provide the results. If there was a prob- lem, you had to go back "upstream," address it and repeat; this resulted in lost time and all the risks that go along with this. But what you really want is to do the signal integrity analysis in line as you're doing the design, not as an af- terthought. at's where a tool like HyperLynx came in and exploded in the market because of its ease of use and lower cost of ownership. e same thing is happening here. You had these big, heavy tools that were best in class at that time. ey were expensive, and the fabri- cators were the ones that ran them. But now, with the acceptance and the embrace of these intelligent data design formats, combined with the analysis tools being greatly improved, de- signers can run, for example, DFM analyses in line on their designs rather than wait until the end, or even wait until the fab runs the analysis and reports back. We no longer talk about just CAM in the design space, we now talk about What you really want is to do the signal integrity analysis in line as you're doing the design, not as an afterthought.