Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/553274
20 The PCB Design Magazine • August 2015 feature inspections and better qualifications. As an end user, we always encourage you to come to the fabrication level and actually dig through their process and look at what they're doing as far as everything from the daily titrations in the wet process area to how they deal with certain aspects of design in the CAM stage. Shaughnessy: it's funny you mentioned site vis - its. i ask designers all the time when they last vis- ited a board shop. about half of them say, "20 years ago," and the rest say, "never." Thompson: It's been too long. The gentleman we had in yesterday for a tour is a great ex- ample. He's an old dog, an owner of four lo- cal companies that we've built boards for all these years. He came in and he'd never been on a tour. At the end of the tour, he said to me, "You know, things haven't really changed in the last 20 years. It's the way you deal with them." That was a very critical statement. That's absolutely true. How do we deal with defined geometries, 0.1 millimeter lines and spaces? Everything five years ago was 8x8 and dealing with 14 mil holes. There was a whole lot of tolerance involved. Now, you have so much less tolerance. Shaughnessy: right. are you seeing that people seem to be a little more educated now because there are so many classes and webinars and seminars and all these things that are available in design and manufacturing? are you seeing that people are a little more informed now than they used to be? Dack: Education—or metaphorically, intelli- gence—is one of the defense strategies that we can em- ploy in the war on failure. Historically, there has not been enough educa- tion, especially formal education, in the area of printed circuit board design. A sad result of this lack of formal education is designer failure due to intellectual inbreed- ing within a company culture. This happens in an engineering department when "good ol' boy knowledge" is passed on from design- er to designer with a process methodology of "that's the way we've always done it." Well, the technology is changing fast and without outside knowledge about how everyone else is doing it, good ol' boys will not keep up! Designers are doomed to fail if they design in a vacuum. In the war on failure, communication and education are critical. There are many sourc- es for education that have evolved and have come about over the years. IPC has been key in educating and organizing designers in the ways of process, design and manufacturing specification through the Designers Council. There are training companies which exist — like the widely known EPTAC organization, who is in the business of training and certi - fication in the areas of these specifications, including designer certification or CID. Shaughnessy: it's also a good networking op- portunity to go to any of these conferences like DesignCon, PCB West or the design forum at aPex. Thompson: Absolutely, we've seen huge val- ue in the things like Kelly was talking about, like IPC's Certified Interconnect Designer