Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1522071
18 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2024 stakeholder: testability guys, test engineer, mechanical engineer, PCB designer, electri- cal engineer, manufacturing engineer, and supplier management, who have to go buy all these parts and source the parts. is is the foundation of what needs to happen. e IPC CID program preaches that it takes a village, so to speak—a team of all the stakeholders—to buy in to make the product successful down the road. at's basically the start of any con- versation on collaboration. Ideally, the project manager is the one who will pull all the stakeholders together, includ- ing the designer and engineer, so they can hear from each other. For instance, does this board need to be 100% testable? For one recent board, we went through several prototype develop- ment layout cycles just to get the circuit perfor- mance dialed in. Tragically, we found out aer the layout was complete and functioning that it had to be 100% testable because the customer was going to pay for a test fixture. Design for testability (DFT) must be implemented at the start of design, or there will be no room to add the test points. e worst time to implement DFT is aer a board design is locked up and performing well. So, to prevent this from ever happening again, what did we do? We created an internal stan- dard that said all boards shall be 100% testable. at's good, but the problem is that this takes a lot more time and rules checking because we have introduced test points that could affect performance. Oen, PCB design engineering teams get their first feedback from the supplier manage- ment group, saying, "Hey, we're spending a lot of money for several of these components. Could we investigate looking at these substitu- tions?" is oen happens when the pilot-run prototype is in the lab. e pilot run gives the first taste of the board to all the manufacturing stakeholders and the other stakeholders. It's aer that point where they get buy-in from all the stakeholders that it can get pushed into the first run of production, and it scales up from there. Again, this is the ideal situation. But what's happening for many companies is the "same old, same old." It's the lack of communi- cation between design and engineering, elec- trical and mechanical. ey're just doing what they can and dealing with things as they go. What is the role of standards in a collaboration culture? e standards definitely enable collaboration. I would say IPC's CID sets up a framework for collaboration, and the standards enable it if all stakeholders agree on which standards shall be met. At IPC APEX EXPO, there was a lot of back and forth about whether certain standards should be changed to "guidelines." A standard is interpreted as pass or fail, but a guideline says, "Well, you vary from the stan- dard due to certain circumstances, and here's the reason." You need both. Often standards come first and guidelines come from standards as they develop. Collaboration is key to making these decisions.