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16 The PCB Design Magazine • July 2014 Inter-Discipline Collaboration The most common example occurs between design engineers and layout designers. Origi- nally, it was a very serial process, with an engi- neer defining the logic on paper, then handing to the designer to draw the schematic and lay- out the board. Today, logic design, constraint definition and layout are expected to proceed concurrently, with initial board definition and placement occurring while the schematic is still under development. Of course, even if a sche- matic is proclaimed complete there are almost always going to be ECOs (something that the recent Aberdeen study identified as a major obstacle to efficient design)—being able to eas- ily update the design is critical. An engineer is basically communicating intent to the layout designer (e.g., packaging, connectivity, con- straints, and component floor plans/groups). In an efficient collaboration this is done without side documents or "voice-driven mouse." The other common collaboration is between layout designer and manufacturing (typically with an NPI engineer acting as the middleman). This also used to be a very serial process, with manufacturing waiting until the layout was complete and with outputs generated before doing the first checks for manufacturability, creating a ton of design re-spins. Today, best practices involve leveraging the DFM rule deck from the target fabrication and assembly houses during placement and routing to optimize the layout before it's finished (known as concurrent manufacturability validation). The hand-off to manufacturing has also been streamlined, with ODB++ being leveraged as the single source of data for manufacture (replacing the multitudes of separate files that used to be passed to man- ufacturing, requiring time-consuming, error- prone re-integration to produce intelligent data for manufacturing). Every PCB must have a mechanical enclo- sure. Traditional collaborations were done with very conservative constraints (limiting PCB de- feature OPTIMIzINg COLLABORATION FOR PCB SySTEMS DESIgN continues Figure 4: Collaboration can significantly compress the traditional serial design process.