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12 The PCB Design Magazine • November 2014 opposite. In good economic times and bad, OEMs still need to accomplish all tasks, com- plete the PCB design, and ship a product that is high quality, on schedule, and less expensive than the next company. This is the axiom that our competitive industry operates on: Better, less expensive, and we need it sooner! If your internal staff of PCB designers has plenty of bandwidth and exceeds all of your needs, congratulations. I thank you for your time. But if you and your managers have con- cerns about meeting your current or future workload, please read on. How does the need for outsourcing arise? Many different events can cause your firm to consider outsourcing as the solution or comple- ment to your existing PCB design needs. I have listed a few below: • Many startups have no PCB staff and an engineering development cycle that does not utilize a PCB designer full time. If they did have any designers, they might sit idle for significant periods throughout the year and become a fi- nancial burden. • R&D often creates the need for outsourc- ing PCB designs. During this phase of prototype development, the need to innovate technology is always demanding in our time-sensitive mar- ket space. • Many companies that have a PCB designer, or staff of designers, might encounter a project that is beyond the bandwidth of the staff. • The technical requirements may exceed your staff's experience. Often the in-house de- signers may not be exposed to the latest indus- try trends in design, software tools or manufac- turing processes. • Some projects have schedules that require multiple boards that must be completed at the same time. • A particular project may require an accel- erated schedule. • Often there may have been a reduction in staff through retirement or designers relocating to other companies. • Your engineering staff may wish to keep the work local so the EE can effectively oversee all of the progress. • Your staff might be new to a software plat- form and lack proficiency. • It's hard finding good help these days, especially PCB design talent. Designers are be- coming scarcer, and many OEMs seemingly can't hire enough good designers. Lastly, many companies have tried to hand off layout duties to their engineers, with vary- ing degrees of success. Some software salesmen promise CAD managers that after purchasing their tools, the engineers can merely press the "easy button" and a PCB design will pop out the back. I say this in jest, but after you've pur- chased the software, the salesman may be long gone and the EE will need to master this tool as well as mastering PCB design. With the complexities of today's software tools and the frequency of the layout cycle, the EE of today is seldom equipped to be proficient with the software tool, solve the circuit, and master the field of PCB design (you can learn to use a socket set but that does not make you an auto mechanic). Also, I would suggest that this may not be the best use of the engineer's skill set. We have seen many designs where the EE has raised the white flag and said, "Please take this and complete this design." This type of design is often more difficult to repair than starting from scratch. What Outsourcing is…and is Not Outsourcing PCB design is not the same as outsourcing manufacturing. With manufactur- ing, your product definition is fixed and sub- mitted to a proven manufacturing repeat pro- cess. But PCB design is not a commodity; it is ThE VIRTuAL CAD DEPARTMENT: ThE CASE FOR OuTSOuRCING DESIGNS continues feature