Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1517130
36 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2024 ment. You can test your design for compliance with those rules, and you can communicate freely with the manufacturer that has provided these DFM profiles. Our friends at IPC see this platform as critical to their objective of promoting the transparent transfer of necessary information. IPC came on board and provided nine DFM profiles, which enable our users to test for compliance with various aspects of IPC design standards. Evgeny Makhline is one of our "power users," and he can speak a little about how Nistec has been using those profiles. Evgeny, walk us through how you use these DFM profiles. Evgeny Makhline: At Nistec, we provide ser- vices for private companies looking for differ- ent levels of PCB design, including medicine, military, communication, and automotive. In one day we might check five or six differ- ent layouts, and PCBflow allows us to check every layout according to IPC standards: IPC class 2 or class 3, for example. We can also check accord- ing to the differ- ent manufacturers' specific profiles or according to our own profile, which I built and defined separately. We are able to get results in five minutes, and that is very important to us. I can observe the results and be sure that we can send our files to manufacturing in exact compliance vs. having just a "good enough" estimate. We save a lot of my time, so we can move faster and end up with better quality. PCBflow also has a friendly GUI. It's very useful. So, there's not much of a learning curve? Makhline: No, not at all. e GUI is very sim- ple and understandable, and everyone from our office, for example, can open the results reports and see reports for every issue found during checking. With the results report, we can see each issue or error, and then fix them. The data doesn't have to be in any specific format, correct? Kayesar: Yes, it's format-agnostic. When you come into the system, you could be creating your design in any EDA tool, with any data for- mat—Gerber, ODB++, or IPC -2581. Even if you don't own an EDA tool, you can still investigate the results of the DFM analysis in the PCB- flow online viewer, and it will actually point you to the exact XY location of the issue. So, if you have access to any CAD tool, you can directly jump to those results and change your design to comply. Makhline: Right. is is an independent sys- tem; this means that I can skip some rules, then check to see if we're missing something during layout and send the ODB++ files for checking. Because it's an independent system, we can have different profiles and rules disconnected from the physical layout to get our own inde- pendent results. is is very important for us. Designers say that some fabricators don't want to share their capabilities, but this lets manufacturers put their capabilities right in front of the designer. Kayesar: Yes. Each manufacturer is a little bit unique regarding what's important to them, and what design challenges they see repeat- edly, so they can put the emphasis where they want it. But the IPC profiles are enabling both the designer and manufacturers as well. Manu- facturers can benefit from those IPC profiles.