Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1522071
20 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2024 at's right. Without collaboration, anything can happen. Let me tell you about another design and manufacturing challenge that hap- pened recently. is board design came in that was an eighth of an inch thick; it was a big power distribution board that has to carry about 50 amps. Nobody runs 50 amps on a board and makes it easy to assemble with a sol- dering operation successfully. But they just did it. ey put four-ounce thick copper on about 10 layers. ey got it fabricated, no problem. But guess what? We can't solder it. Now, here it is an eighth of an inch thick, and you need a blowtorch to get these through-hole compo- nents through all 10 layers. e excessive heat required would delaminate the FR-4 material. ey didn't follow any IPC standard rules for thermal relief or anything close to that. For a special type of board like this, you'd think the customer would meet with fab and assembly early in the design cycle. Right. In this case they may have had a thumbs up from the fabricator, but that's a totally different stakeholder. Of course, they could pull the materials and laminate it. ey knew they wouldn't have to solder it, and the board moved forward. e prototypes may have been assembled in the customer's lab by hand, which is totally different from a pro- duction assembly line. It was another sad case of one stakeholder answering for another. It ought to be a crime, I tell you. On the other hand, sometimes customers will just send us the board's CAM files and ask for a request for quote. Our people look at it and say, "It's green, and it looks like a circuit board. I bet we can build it." So, we take it on, and it goes to manufacturing, where they say, "Yep, looks like a board. We will run it down our surface mount line." But guess what? We're getting cold solder joints on this thing. It's not working. Only then do they come to design and ask, "What do you think the problem is with this board?" I know the problem: It wasn't designed right, and now it's three months later. e customer thinks their board is being built, but we can't build the board. Occasionally, we need to force a stakeholder meeting with them and say, "Here's what you'll need to do from a design standpoint so that we can build your board to the standards you've specified. Let's collaborate." But they say, "e other guys can do it. Why can't you?" What are some of the barriers to setting up a collaborative culture? It always comes down to communication. It's a matter of everyone speaking the same language. Every stakeholder has to be transparent about their capabilities, processes, a n d t i m e f r a m e s . T h e biggest challenges occur when people are not t r a n s p a r e n t . Being transpar- ent is important, especially when there are problems found between program stakeholders. Let's say our expectations for a fabrication stakeholder were high, but the performance was low. What do we do? We don't say, "Off with their heads! We'll never do business with you again." We have a follow-up meeting with the fabricator, and we say, "Show us how this will be fixed, how this will never happen again." We have a kind of post-mortem, and they'll say, "We have mea- surable processes. Here's what went wrong in our process, and here's how we'll fix it." e collaborative process is handled by formal communication via a corrective action report (CAR). I like to preach that every PCB pro- gram stakeholder should be able and willing to fill out a CAR when things go awry within one's process responsibilities. If manufacturing stakeholders are expected to issue a CAR when We have measurable processes. Here's what went wrong in our process, and here's how we'll fix it.