Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/666328
20 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2016 you might be prevented from doing your own designs. Companies have broad expectations and rules also. This shouldn't be a point of fric- tion; it should be mutual work toward getting the job done. In my experience this has only been a sore point when the PCB-specific folks felt like their jobs were going away. I don't think this will ever happen as I have found that only about 1/3 of EEs want to do their own lay- outs. We can and should help each other out in getting to that end goal: solving our customers' problems. Shaughnessy: Is there anything else you'd like to add? Hageman: My experience at Hewlett Packard was the best as far as teams go. There was no blame, if anyone stumbled and fell, the rest of the team would pick the guy up, dust him off and we would all get on with it. I try to remem- ber and mimic this behavior as much as pos- sible. I also find that keeping focused on who is paying the bills, namely our shared customers, helps in keeping the inter-team friction down. It doesn't always work, it isn't easy and it needs to be worked on continually. Shaughnessy: Thanks for your time, Steve. Hageman: Thank you, Andy. PCBDESIGN the roLes of the Designer anD the Design engineer As you all know, we survey our readers fairly often. We want to know what's going on with PCB design- ers and design engineers, especially the challenges and pain points that you all face. After we sift through the percentages, we focus on your comments. The comments are a source of great information. They may be emotional, unscientific, and sometimes rambling comments, but it's accurate and from the heart. I recently asked my readers to name the biggest challenges that they face every day. Here is a sample of the comments. Do these sound familiar to you? • lack of time (too tight production deadlines) and on time feedback from the clients (often resulting in massive amounts of extra work). not getting timely feedback from initial testing. Our policy against slapping the snot out of idiots. • Getting people to attend design reviews. • Things like solder mask defined pads in some areas and copper defined in others, with PCB suppliers using global copper defined rules, lack of understanding of the soldering process in things like wave solder. • Making symbols and cells for our CAD system. • Meeting SI requirements for signal integrity. Placement of critical components within very tight areas and still meeting DFA requirements. • Defining the stackup and impedance critical signals without a good tool. Getting a PCB description direct out of the tool. • Time to market! engineers can get too involved in the little details, and fail to achieve time to market goals. • Feature creep from the customer to the senior engineer and the designer. • electrical constraint requirements not described in schematic. • not enough man-power. • Specifying alternative parts (second and third sources). Critical areas (noise, heat, vibration, etc.) indication. lack of useful communication on what the designer and ee consider important to the design. • Bean-counter management types who don't understand today's challenges. • Manufacturability, testability, and reworkable design, as parts get smaller, with high-density pinouts. • Keeping cost of fabrication reasonable using fine-pitch devices, i.e., avoiding blind and buried microvias for devices 0.5mm pitch or less. • HDI technology with several via types. Definition of power/ground systems for better eMI. High-speed signals. Ceramic boards with thinner tracks. embedded parts. • Real estate, signal noise, and thermal electric offsets. • More things to pay attention too. Power drop with in the PC board due to low voltages now. Thermal dissipation from small package with higher wattage use. And the Survey Said: What are Your Pain Points?