Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1489778
50 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2023 waste of glass fabric and of resin. In the old days, it had to be 1.6 mm because it needed to fit into an edge connector. When was the last time you saw an edge connec- tor? Why is it still 1.6 mm thick? A double-sided plated through-hole board of 1.0 mm is rigid enough to support the components. Why not take out two, three, even four pieces of glass fabric? Morgan: It comes to the need. What is the requirement? e user doesn't always know what he needs or what he can get away with. He just says, "Well, it's always been that way." You see this mindset all the time in so many differ- ent industries. e first step in designing a solu- tion for someone is understanding what they need. Don't ask them what they need—most of the time, they don't know. ey really don't, so you must ask the right questions. My son's involved in UX—user experience— and so much of that is relevant here. He walks through that process with users. He calls it a "design safari"—pretend you're going on a safari where you must stop at each new thing, think it through, and ask, "Why do we do that?" Until you've done that, you don't know what the cus- tomer needs, and they don't know either. You must go through each stage. Once you've iden- tified the real need, you can develop an efficient method to deliver that need. We've seen so much waste in pursuing this, haven't we, Mark? On a few occasions, we've nailed it down and saved huge amounts of resources. If you can get everyone to be open and have that discussion, get them to genuinely share with you, you can make big gains. Goodwin: ere must be a willingness and open- ness to move forward, but all too oen we've discovered there are too many closed minds in this business. Morgan: Some people will design something and never change it. e design might have been right when they first did it, but then they don't change or review it, in some cases, for 20 years. is is crazy. Johnson: We've come to a place where pricing and sustainability are such important factors because we're using copper which is in tre- mendous demand. Morgan: Cost—not price—is the issue, though. We can work on the cost. Johnson: But isn't that the motivating factor? Isn't that where you can turn around and say, "You know, we can save you money if you mod- ify the spec to reduce the resource?" Morgan: You would have thought so. Goodwin: I usually hear something like, "at's great, Mark. We'll take the price, but we don't want to do the work involved with the change." I've been in the circuit board industry since 1983 and in laminates since 1990. In my experi- ence, there is a resistance to change. ey want the savings, but they don't want to do the work. ey don't want to commit to making changes. e automotive business is particularly focused on cost reduction, but also highly resistant to change. We are running out of road to get one without the other. Morgan: We all have to work together to make this happen. Goodwin: I'm not pointing the finger at the printed circuit board market here, either. Usu- ally, they're constrained by somebody up- stream or downstream of them. e folks telling them what to do are so far removed from how a printed circuit board or laminate is made. ey have no idea what they are or aren't restricting. Alun Morgan