Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1509257
OCTOBER 2023 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 63 and failure. Maybe that's another term for standards: iterative excellence. So, failing to "build to code" because of ignorance is one thing, and that's why we at IPC are focusing so much on education about our standards and printed board education in general. But to willfully ignore stan- dards, and the thousands of years' worth of collective knowledge that they rep- resent? In other words, to willfully build your house to fail? Forgive me for being frank, but that's a whole universe of dumbness that I don't want to live in. I would implore any rogue designers to re-evaluate their knowledge with respect to the greater cosmos of collective understanding that standards represent. We're publishing the IPC Checklist in our I-Connect007 library very soon. Why should designers—and manufacturers—download this document? I worked on the Checklist revision and it's very comprehensive. It provides a thorough over- view of every manufacturing process from soup to nuts, and it details which standards and guidelines can help manufacturers build their products, replete with handy diagrams of every area of a shop floor and which specific processes correlate to which IPC document. I personally think we should sell posters of those diagrams because they're very helpful. For designers who are on the front lines of a product lifecycle, the stages of manufactur- ing can seem opaque, especially for design bureaus that are completely detached from a shop, or for larger companies with (hopefully unintentionally) siloed departments. Having a resource that outlines every step in the lifecycle can help designers understand their impact on that lifecycle, and how their choices during the design phase ripple through manu- facturing. (Another great primer is to read the IPC- 2231 DFX Guidelines docu- ment.) Of course, not even the best brochure is a com- plete education, but this is a great launching pad for a designer to seek out more information and become involved in IPC standards. Also, the IPC Checklist includes an exhaustive table of every standard, guide- line, and white paper that IPC has published since 2010 (unless they've been obsoleted or superseded). is table also lists the IPC com- mittee responsible for the maintenance and development of a given document, which we hope will inspire readers to volunteer their time. We welcome volunteers, and I guarantee you will learn a lot. What's your goal for standards soon, and maybe in five to 10 years? I'd like to at least get through IPC APEX EXPO in April, and then maybe we can talk. But seri- ously, I want to make sure that the standards I am personally responsible for stay as up to date as possible, while becoming more usable and relevant in a modern context. For example, there are quite a few documentation standards (such as the entire IPC-2610 family) that are still used extensively but haven't been touched in more than a decade. We believe that these standards can be consolidated or revised to be more applicable to modern ECAD environ- ments. I am working on reaffirming those stan- dards so they can be revised as needed. I also would love to see IPC-2581 take a much more prominent role in design data transfer, because it's so powerful as a smart data format, and I don't think designers are taking full advantage of it yet. Patrick Crawford