Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1470111
46 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2022 type to full production stage. is includes full product assembly, sourcing all the materials— including mechanical parts, programming, testing, and virtual warehousing—because, for a lot of people, prototypes are only one of the first few steps in the product journey. In fact, your product oen goes through sig- nificant changes when it hits the factory floor, so for a number of years now, MacroFab has been in the business of building the digital thread from the prototype stage all the way to the factory stage. We are exclusively in North America, which gives us access to over 75 fac- tories in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. at includes low-cost manufacturing regions, so we see a lot of customers moving from Asia to 100% North American manu- facturing where they can seamlessly move between low volume U.S. factories which operate at a very fast speed and can deliver very quickly. e service can be done as quickly as 10 days, and we have factories in Mexico that operate on a very high-volume scale. In fact, the way that we usually go to mar- ket and engage with our customers is through engineers first. But it's never been a seamless experience. First, the engineer has to output the design files, either in a native design for- mat or an ODB++ format or—at worst—in Gerber. Ultimately, we interpret that input into our platform and identify a starting point for your design: "Is this what you really want us to build?" What's really exciting about our work with Altium is that Altimade is an end-to-end tool- chain, so the translation layer is unnecessary. Customers have a much faster on-ramp to a true manufacturing company. We can go straight from Altium Designer all the way to hundreds of thousands of units produced over multiple years in a high-volume factory. MacroFab has been at this for a number of years, and we have a tremendous amount of experience. Pawela: Another key thing about MacroFab is that they have scaled beyond their own capac- ity, in that it is a factory network, not simply a single line or factory that MacroFab operates. On top of that, there are other partners who have come into the Nexar ecosystem as well, not for manufacturing, but to bring in things like signal integrity and EMI prediction. We're even making the API open so that competi- tors such as Cadence can come in and use this. In addition to the big footprint that we have on the design side, with over 55,000 licenses, MacroFab likewise has a large active user com- munity and, most importantly, they've got the scale in terms of the factory network to support our users. We think that we're not just making a subtle evolution to this designed-to-realization process, but we're actually revolutionizing it. Shaughnessy: It sounds like you're trying to re- create the benefits of the captive companies when everything was under one roof, and you could just walk your design down the hall to manufacturing. Pawela: Yeah, I think the key you're talking about is like the benefits of having a vertically integrated supply chain, and we're trying to do that in a way where it doesn't have to be one company that does it all. We don't believe that one company can pull that off, and we don't believe that you can create a walled garden Misha Govshteyn