Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/553274
16 The PCB Design Magazine • August 2015 feature plication issues based on surface finish and we don't have any assembly issues based on surface finish, but, gee, it's the most popular thing, so I think we're going to jump on that bandwagon." This happens with surprising frequency. Blind and buried vias can be of the same nature as well. Boy, there was a time in this industry where it seemed that was the vogue way of dealing with tight-pitch areas and breaking out of very fine-pitched land pat- terns. The "only" solutions were blinds and burieds. Now, people are realizing, "Well, that's not necessarily true." Now, we can have the best of all worlds on the same board and still be able to deal with fabrication con- straints. They don't have to go down to the absolutely crazy 2x2 mil design pitch limiting them to only a very few manufacturers here in the United States. Shaughnessy: so, how do we prevent failure? Does it start with communication? Dack: Yeah, most definitely. As design and manufacturing allies, we need to provide a united front against failure. This needs to be done through communication, with every - one speaking the same code. Our communi- cation vehicles are design data, documenta- tion along with manufacturing and inspec- tion data. These are the only proven methods to check and verify our manufacturing result meets our design intent. Thompson: I think, very simply, it comes down to due diligence and continuous qual- ity improvement. As you evolve in your continuous quality improvement plan, one would hope that any violations or consistent things that you're tracking, if you're finding some- thing that's continuously an issue or if you have three weeks of low copper or three weeks of low gold, obviously, the intent of the system is that, at that point, you can issue a corrective ac- tion, permanently correct that and then move forward. Ultimately, what we're looking for when we're talking about charting and tracking these things is, if I could look at a year's worth of data and everything was very sporadic and few and far between, I'd say we're probably doing pretty well with our quality system. If I have three weeks of the same type of anoma - ly, clearly we have some issues. Dack: Mark comes from a manufacturing background. I'm always very impressed by manufacturers and the data that they keep regarding their processes. If a failure occurs, a manufacturer is expected to be able to point to their travelers and inspection reports and tell a customer exactly where and how the failure occurred. I think we as designers need to take note the next time we request that corrective action report. Do designers have design processes in place where we check and verify that our design and layout meets the intended design constraints and design speci - fications? Do we check for those before we ever send design data to the manufacturer? If we don't, isn't that a lot like being really good at giving orders without being able to take them? I'd like to give a nod to a wonderful group manager I worked for over the past couple