Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/935136
20 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2018 further downstream you get, the more likely the communication is to settle in. We're living up in the spot where the BOM is changing, where the design is changing. There is a lot of flux going on, as you settle it out. And maybe there's too much noise there. But at the point that we're finished and handing it down, there should be enough signals to make it useful to the next step. Beaulieu: Yes, I think you're right. The other extreme I see is this: a more traditional PCB prototype company that has a barrel full of testimonials from customers who praise them for calling them up and saying this is wrong and things like that. By the same token, they have an equal barrel full of customers who are furious, who say "just shut up and build a board, quit bothering me." The same group of salespeople went to one of the major fabri - cators located in New Mexico, and they had a group of designers there that said when they were trained, they were told never listen to the board shops, they don't know what they're doing, designers are what you want. This PCB company ended up doing a lunch and learn. Another PCB company I work with also ended up doing a lunch and learn, and they were very, very well-received. They both came up with rooms full of people anxious to understand what goes on in a circuit board shop. And don't forget, most of us around this table grew up when people visited circuit board shops. But times have changed. When I managed designers for ASI, I had 30 design - ers. ASI had a board shop, and just three of them had ever been in that board shop. They were all 20-year people. That's the kind of communication that I'm really struggling to make happen—going to a PCB shop and understanding how a board is made. It's not a plastic card, you know? Johnson: We have plenty of customers who are angry at us because we're calling them back to ask and not just making the part, and then we have other customers who are trying to figure out why we aren't talking to them more often. That's never going to go away for us. It's always about how to walk that line. And you're right, Dan. I have a customer that I've been working with here for the past year or so. Sunstone's done a case study on them; the company is Eagle Harbor Technologies, out of Seattle. When I first started talking with them, they were giving us designs that were effec- tively unmanufacturable, and I was digging into them about why. It took talking to the customer. What I learned from them was that they're a startup. They're a team of physi- cists. None of them are EEs. They're all high- end physicists and they're building very fast switching, high voltage power supplies. This is some really cutting-edge stuff that they're doing, and the boards that they're turning in look like they should be automated test equip- ment probe cards. They're circular, nothing's on an angle. They're all over the place as far as that goes, and the DFM rules are really stressed when you're checking on them to see if they're manufacturable. And yet we talked it through. Helped them understand exactly what the chemistry is going on inside the facility. Got them so that they had a real-world vision of what's happening once they finish their design. It helped change their perspective. It's not just, "Well, if I can define it in the CAD tool, it's got to be manufactur- able, right? The tolerances and precision on everything is perfectly infinite." No, it's not. And as they understood that more, they started changing their designs. As they changed their