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16 SMT Magazine • November 2017 Communication: Still the Best Tool in the Book In any manufacturing environment, com- munication between the supplier, manufactur- er, and customer is key to production suc- cess. In the PCB supply chain, it is no different, especially when dealing with HDI boards. According to Burns, in his more than 12 years in the elec- tronics contract manufactur- ing industry, there's only one company that came to them to talk actively about the design of the board prior to them bring- ing it for manufacturing. "That was an interesting journey. It end- ed up working really well," he says. "They went through a lot of iterations of the board design before we final- ly got one that would work, but the vast majority come to us with a product and say, 'Here, we're ready for you to start building this.'" Burns notes that they have to convince cus- tomers that there's value to be added in col- laborating with them in the very first stages of the design. "It's not just designing the perfect circuit, but it has to be manufacturable, and that's where our input comes in," Burns says. "If I could put in my two cents from a fab standpoint, I would have the same comments as most everyone else: Suppliers very rarely get involved early," says Torres. "If I can be so bold, I see it as a comment on business in general that everybody is just concerned with their own respon- sibility, their own expertise. You've got to start acting like partners, not only with suppliers, but with your in- ternal customers as well. If that de- signer understood the cost problems of the purchasing department, one phone call to the fab manufacturer before the design is completed could save a lot of time and mon- ey. If you design something for manufacturabil- ity, it's going to be more cost-effective for their company, and obviously if you go one step fur- ther and design for automation, that's even bet- ter. "I think the companies that embrace team- work in all facets are going to win. When you start talking about the designers, do they know that the prototype is going to go into big production? In some cases, they do; but if they had a system to always call the fab house to have that relation- ship, why not call the assembly house and get all of the feedback before the design is completely made? Then you have a winner in all facets and you're not chas - ing your tail after the fact. You're saving time and money upfront. The goal is to work together as a team and share our expertise with one anoth - er. I think the niche in the market- place is not to simply take the Gerber files and build it, but to really be a partner to the end- customer. Be a help to them and talk out the design and get something that is not only reli - able, but manufacturable." "I've been in this industry since '79, and the things that we care about now are so different from the things we cared about then," says Bird. "For instance, who cared about the height of a trace or a trapezoidal shape back then? Now we're try- ing to squeeze gaps down, and all of a sudden we get this metallic bathtub where we are hitting the spacing limits because we can't etch out the gaps cleanly. We use ENEPIG a lot. But now we're get- ting to a point where nickel, the thickest metal in the stack, is too lossy. It just goes against our den- sity and performance goals. There- fore, we are going to be evaluating EPIG, actually more accurately EPAG (electroless palladium/autocatalytic gold). We're looking at metal thicknesses and trace features that I never thought we would see during my career. Also, as PCB technologists, we have to be willing to go out and scour the globe, not just within our approved vendor database, COMMUNICATION STILL THE BEST TOOL Vince Burns Steve Jervey