IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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16 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 when an ambitious design collides head-first with the laws of manufacturing physics. DFM has been the rulebook for decades, and the premise is simple: if something can't be manufactured easily, it probably shouldn't be designed that way. Fair enough. But at one point, our conversation took a hard left turn when Chad said something that seemed obvious once you heard it: We didn't land on the moon, and we certainly won't get to Mars, by designing within the limits of the machines, materi- als, and processing we already had. At some point, manufacturing had to catch up with the idea. That's where MFD happens. Invention has an annoying habit of demanding materials that don't exist, requiring processes nobody has figured out yet, and asking machines to do things they've never done before. Innovation often leaps into advancement: Designers specify something just beyond current capability, and, if they want the business, manufacturers figure out how to make it happen. Sometimes that works, and sometimes the manufacturer laughs and hangs up. Stop Saying 'You Can't Do That' For decades, the PCB industry has been very good at telling designers what we can't do. DFM is essentially a long list of guardrails meant to keep designers from driving their layouts straight off a cliff: Too small. Too thin. Too weird. Too expensive, made of "unobtainium." Those guardrails are useful, but MFD allows us to ask a different question: What if manufacturing's job wasn't just to enforce limits, but to remove them? The goal becomes providing designers with what you might call extreme design capability, meaning the shape, material stack, and architec- ture of an electronic system aren't dictated entirely by the constraints of traditional fabrication and assembly processes. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Consider the early prototype of the Apple-1 computer, hand- wired by Steve Wozniak in his apartment 50 years ago. At that stage, scalability was the least of any- one's concerns. The goal was simply to make the idea work. Only later did manufacturing figure out how to produce it. In some ways, modern prototyp- ing tools are bringing us back to that mindset. The Desktop Invention Lab Today's designers have tools that would have looked like science fiction 50 years ago, including advanced CAD tools, powerful simulation engines, affordable additive manufacturing, and, increas- ingly, 3D-printed electronics. Designers are experimenting with curvilinear cir- cuit geometries, embedded components, flexible substrates, and structures that look less like tradi- tional PCBs and more like something that escaped TA RG E T C O N D I T I O N Figures 1 and 2: Mars Perseverance Rover utilizing extended length flex assemblies. (Source: Pioneer Circuits)