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74 The PCB Magazine • December 2016 New product realization and design for manufacturing and assembly (DFM/A) have now started to become more visible as programs that can improve a company's time-to-market and lower product costs. Many programs are underway by many companies and what is now needed is a framework to coordinate the applica- tion of these programs. This column will cover the interactions of DFM/A and the need for de- velopment of a new framework to coordinate the trade-offs. These trade-offs cover six key de- sign topics: • Optimization of PCB design grids and layout • Minimization of assembly costs • Analysis of test coverage • Minimization of PCB substrate costs • Use of preferred parts • Partitioning of ASIC pinouts Concurrent engineering has been the basis for electronics design. Its one-way interactions with manufacturing constitute the old way of thinking. This column will propose a new framework, predictive engineering, patterned after the manufacturing software framework of con- current manufacturing. This framework will pro- vide the inner-operability for manufacturing capabilities and characteristics to be planned into electronic assemblies before the traditional CAE/CAD processes. As part of this framework, the basis for trade-offs will be the basic DFM/A metrics that have been developed by different companies. Predictive engineering is comple- mentary to the growing application of com- puter integrated manufacturing (CIM) software and product data management (PDM) software used in electronics manufacturing. Introduction We have all seen how electronics technolo- gies' capabilities are growing at an ever-increas- ing rate. Unfortunately, those of us in manufac- turing have also seen a corresponding increase in the complexity of packaging. Modern EDA by Happy Holden Understanding Predictive Engineering HAPPY'S ESSENTIAL SKILLS