Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/937683
FEBRUARY 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 29 think about it, when you're building a box or a product, there are things that happen when you're actually building it, such as if this screw was moved one eighth of an inch, they would be able to fit this in. That kind of stuff, that's important too. I worked on a project years ago where it was a board part, but it was a part assembly with a copper core with two polyamide skins over it. The core was live, so the boards had to con- nect through the core. Those boards cost al- most $3,000. The designers called us in and asked why these boards cost so much, and what can we do. My partner simply went up to the boards, drew a picture of the core, drew a little slot in it, said "You put a connector over the top here and it won't hit the dimension of the board. And now these boards will cost like $600 and you're getting everything you need." I've seen contract manufacturers doing a lot of that. That one necessarily is on boards, but they're doing a lot of that kind of insight to help the customer who's fighting for nickels and dimes, lead time, and time to market. It does apply as well to contract manufacturers. Sometimes even more. Johnson: That's a great point, Dan. That's why you're using contract manufacturer nowadays, because they are doing that sort of work. They have that experience. They have a lot of oth- er jobs from a lot of other customers. They've done all of this before. They can often have the practical experience that can tell you how to do it better. From my perspective. I'll just speak from my perspective on this one. I represent PCB123, at Sunstone as well, so that's the PCB sche- matic capture, physical layout, has an autopla- ce, autorouter in it. We just came out with a new version that connects to a startup called SnapEDA. And part of the whole part substitu- tion issue is understanding if the part is a new part, or it has just been given a warning that it's going obsolete, or it is on a long lead time to get supply from the manufacturer. All the statuses for this and how it is going to affect your project. It's one thing to be having the conversation with the assembly houses and sitting there with your bare board, and they're telling you that the part is on a 12-week delay; and the other one is actually knowing that in- formation when you're designing your board. If you can get some of that information into the CAD tool, you can make adjustments to supply issues. If you can make the designers aware of that, then they can make some adjustment de- cisions while it's still cheap, while they're lay- ing out the board, before they've committed to something. And that's exactly what we've been trying to do at PCB123. I saw this years back when I started my career at Mentor Graphics, and we were working with PCB123. We have the bill of materials that we've built up as you're laying out your design and, right now, you've got one source. You can query DigiKey to get a sense of the pricing and availability of the parts in your bill of materials, right inside the CAD tool as you're designing. Just go over and click a button and it gives you some informa- tion about that. If you've got a serious issue, you could figure it out. One of the side effects for our customers, is when they come back to a design they did a year or two ago, it's a one click process to find out what things of their bill of materials have gone away. Sent to them in seconds. In September, we introduced sup- port for SnapEDA, a great product in the sense that the SnapEDA team is out there building a cloud-based library of parts definitions for schematics, physical layouts, 3D, working with