Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1428512
32 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2021 later. It doesn't happen in my factory, and I'll never identify it, but it will make those prod- ucts safer in the field, in the future. Where we always thought we could use this resin and this thickness, we might need a little bit more resin, making things thicker than we've been doing for years—the designers, the fabricators—but it's awareness that you're leaving pathways for CAF, and you can put more resin and fill it in and eliminate that. We've always used thin- ner ones. Well, maybe we shouldn't have been doing that. Johnson: For quite some time, IC design has been working with manufacturing simulation processes. PCB design, however, maybe not so much. How is that going to change? Partida: Yeah, there's a lot of education that needs to be reinforced, and we must dedicate it to the designers to understand fabrication, fabricators to understand what the design- ers need and want. ere are a lot of excel- lent guidelines within the IPC design guide- lines that most people don't know about; they don't read them. ey are three or four revi- sions behind, in understanding what the fin- ished performance specs are when we finished the circuit board. I did a lunch-and-learn here today at PCB West, and I took 15 topics that designers may not know there's an actual rule in IPC and made them aware that when you bend these rules, just let us know because you may have bent a rule and we can't build your board to the compliance you're stating. It's just education. ere's a lot that our industry needs to do. We have the EDA soware more in the hands of the actual EE rather than a designer who's got 30 or 40 years, who's retiring with his expertise and knowledge not to violate certain rules. It's very easy in EDA soware to do stuff because it's convenient, easy, and quick—but not compliant. You've just made the board less reliable and we're going to have lower yields. I reviewed some of those types of rules and it reinforces that we need a lot more education and engagement between the design activities and the fabricator so we can help each other, and so the designers design PCBs that we don't need to ask questions, that jobs don't go on hold. We get much higher yields, and it's very impactful across the whole electronic supply chain. We get designs where people just turn on the auto-router, set it to 3.5 mil line and space, and just let it rip. It will make three-and- a-half mil space in the design, but it could have been a four-mil design board. e design is just done once. Even when they rolled a revision, they're not rerout- ing, they're just adding a component here or there. It's not really a full reroute of the whole design. But when you change the spacing in a design from three to four and spend an extra week or two building it, any time one of the cores is etched, the yields go up, there's less loss. You're going to get more product on time at full quantity. It's just that if you invest that time in the design phase, the yields just sky- rocket in manufacturing. Johnson: ere's room here to use some fore- thought in the design phase to make sure what you're designing will be manufacturable, that you can have better yields. Does that extra design effort take the pressure off test and inspection? Partida: Yes. What happens when you push the envelope of finer lines and spaces, defects are There are a lot of excellent guidelines within the IPC design guidelines that most people don't know about; they don't read them.