Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1470111
14 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2022 generic quick-turn, customers are paying for speed. ey don't have time to spend two days to fix the data or make it perfect. You've got a short amount of time to get it in and out to the floor because the board is shipping in two or three days. To your question, in that environment, no, they may make some assumptions, fix some things, and may ignore a lot of things because they will make enough yield to ship to meet the cycle time. But in a volume environment when you may lose half a million dollars, or lose a customer if your design comes out wrong, then you're trained to not make assumptions. I always trained my folks by saying, "If you're in doubt, ask questions." We hear, "Well, the customer hates us asking ques- tions." I don't care. I'd rather ask too many questions. ey'll eventually appreciate why we're asking so many questions. Another response is, "e last guy didn't ask that ques- tion." Well, I can't speak for the other person's process or process control. It's our job to make sure we understand what the designer's intent of the board is function- ally and then also map it against what the pro- cess engineers say they require to make the projected yield for the board. Shaughnessy: At the SMTA Atlanta Supply Chain Roundtable, I asked a group of design- ers, "How many of you know where your board's going to be fabricated?" I think one guy raised his hand. A lot of them said it wasn't just a lack of communication with outside entities; it was a lack of communication in their own company. Korf: I did an IPC presentation a few years ago. I said, "A common Gerber package problem is the fab print dimensions don't match the Gerber file." I just looked out at the audience and asked, "What would you do in that situation?" Every- one responded, "Use the Gerber." en they all started laughing. ey all realized they had the same workaround. No one ever said, "Use the print." Use the Gerber data. It's conflicting data; even if you fix it, when it gets to the next designer, they don't know that it was bad. ey'll just copy it and send it on again, and it's a kind of internal com- munication. Or you build revision two aer you negotiated all the issues on revi- sion one, but the poor designer's already late on the next design. Feinberg: A n y b o d y ever come in and ask, "We need you to do this, this and this. But by the way, would you also design for Six Sigma?" Has that ever come up? Korf: Not design for Six Sigma. It's kind of assumed. Feinberg: It's assumed. Korf: Assumptions again. One of the issues, Andy, to your point, is that there are style issues in this. We had a merger of several fabri- cation facilities at a company I worked at pre- viously. I was responsible for all the front end, so we said, "Okay, let's send one design out to every site and have two people at each review it. en we're going to collect all the issues they found, put them together, and see how common they are."