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JUNE 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 27 ing design that allows you to decide if this is going to be easy to assemble. I think the more important component, that Hitachi and the Japanese took up, was whether the product could be built by automation. It's really significant what Hit- achi did with the philosophy. ey not only took the "do it right the first time" approach but then asked how they could do it simple enough that robots and automation could build it. e Japanese did this because they wanted to build all these first-generation prod- ucts in a building next door in Japan and not ship it offshore like Americans were doing. Contrast that with Apple Inc. Apple designs products that are impossible to automate. ey're so complex. ey're really fanciful, but they have to be built by human hands. You've got 8,000 17-year-old teenage girls in Shenzhen building these Apple products. Foxconn put up money to install 1 million robots to replace these girls. Today only about 400 robots have been installed out of that 1 million, because they found out the products they're building for the Americans can't be automated. I refer to DFM as being design for manu- facturing the first time. We're not just design- ing it, running soware, finding the errors, going back, redesigning it, checking again, going back and re-spinning it until it works. I'm alone in this definition unless you hap- pen to be knowledgeable about Dewhurst and Boothroyd, which most people in printed cir- cuits aren't. Shaughnessy: I would imagine. Holden: Manufacturers such as General Elec- tric, Westinghouse, or General Motors under- stand Dewhurst and Boothroyd, because it's taught at universities. e automotive guys are really big on trying to simplify parts in automo- biles to make them more reli- able at lower costs and easier to be built up by automatic systems. But in electronics, it's never caught on. One of the reasons is that Dewhurst and Boothroyd were mechanical engineers. ey worked off the kinemat- ics of how many motions it takes to assemble something. How much fixturing, connec- tors, or screws and bolts it takes to do it. at's their pre- dicting methodology. e simplest form of automation is the one- axis pneumatic cylinder, or air cylinder. It just goes up and down. If you're going to assemble something on a conveyor belt, with just up and down motions, that's the cheapest automation. Some of the most complex assembly is assem- bling flexible circuits, which I managed for Foxconn. It's one of the reasons they kept showering me with money to automate out these 8,000 girls I had in Shenzhen who would do the final non-conformal part assembly of flex circuits, because they would work for six months on Apple products. When Apple stopped ordering aer Christmas, the girls would sit around for the next four months and knit, because there were no orders. We couldn't fire them or lay them off because they were too highly skilled. ey sat around and knitted and painted walls and things like that until Apple started order- ing again. en they all went back to work. One of the highest priorities I was given, with an unlimited budget, was to automate out these girls, so that when Apple stopped ordering we'd just turn the switch off. I told them the bad news was, "Well, maybe in 10 years." DESIGN007 To read this entire article, which appeared in the September 2017 issue of The PCB Design Maga- zine, click here. Happy Holden