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Iron Atom: Changing the Way the Industry Views DFM
January 11, 2013 | Dan Beaulieu, D.B. Management GroupEstimated reading time: 10 minutes
One of the things that is the most enjoyable about my work is getting to talk to new companies, especially companies that have come with new and innovative ways of doing things. In some cases companies that have come up with new ways to do things that we have been doing for a while, but doing them better.
Iron Atom is one of those companies. When I was at in California for the PCB West show a couple of months ago, I met up with Iain Wilson. He's president of Iron Atom, a new software company that uses cloud computing as its basis. I was fascinated by this start-up and how they were changing the industry, so I asked Iain to sit down with me and discuss what he and his company are up to. It’s a great story; check it out.
Dan Beaulieu: Iain, first of all, thanks for taking the time to sit with me today and tell me about your company. I have to say that I am pretty excited about getting to know more about what you guys do and how you do it so let’s get started. Where did the idea for this company come from and how did you get started?
Iain Wilson: Well, Dan, thanks for the chance to talk about my company, I’ll do my best to explain it to you. For the last five years or so, the enterprise software industry has turned its full attention to cloud computing. As a product manager at Consona, I was asked to look at how we could migrate or deploy our products to the cloud. Meanwhile, I started working with Ucamco as a partner for the Cimnet product line. I’d been following progress of their Integr8tor pre-CAM product as is developed over the years. It was an ideal product to complement our pre-production suite. I had a "light bulb" moment realizing it was an ideal product to offer in the cloud. Further with its high level of automation I realized we could take it to another level whereby the user wouldn’t need to actually use the software at all. I talked to my friend Alex Federici, who is a software architect also looking at cloud deployment. We both got pretty excited about it and decided to form Iron Atom to offer the service.
DB: What is your initial product offering using this technology?
IW: We provide automated DFM/Pre-CAM on demand. There are two keys aspects to our service. First, the automation, which comes from Ucamco’s Integr8tor product and our technology layer that we’ve called CloudGate™. Intgr8tor provides the automated DFM and pre-CAM processing and CloudGate provides the link between our website and the cloud computing resources we use. The on-demand aspect comes from how we offer our service to customers. As the name suggests, there’s no upfront investment or ongoing maintenance required. Customers only use and, more importantly, pay for the time their jobs take to process.
DB: That makes sense. But let me put you on the spot here. There are many DFM products; what makes your different? Better? Why should companies come to Iron Atom?
IW: Yes, there are dozens of DFM products available today. However, they are all manually operated, only handle one job at a time, and lack the powerful features the new breed of pre-CAM products offer, like automatic file recognition for example. The speed and accuracy of these new tools is unprecedented and if the pricing was the same as the much cheaper manual products, then everybody would use them. Since the pricing is prohibitive for most small to medium companies, they can take advantage of these new tools using our service. Fabricators can fully off-load their DFM work to us or supplement their current process and use us for high-demand situations when they don’t have enough capacity. Designers and OEMs can verify their designs using state-of-the-art tools prior to the manufacturing stage and minimize or eliminate issues that would normally cause a rework cycle and delay time to market. There’s no need to be an expert DFM tool user or to know which critical points of PCB manufacturing the design may affect. Finally, we eliminate the need to purchase and maintain software tools, computers and IT resources. You pay for what you need when you want it.
DB: Interesting. I’d like to hear a little bit about you. What is your background and how did you come to be in charge at Iron Atom?
IW: I started in PCBs in 1983 when I was hired as an apprentice for MEPD, a Scottish PCB manufacturer. My apprenticeship involved two years of technical college, then two years of university. In addition, apprentices worked in all of the main operational departments in the company. These included manufacturing, engineering, sales, purchasing, and quality and so on. After completing my apprenticeship, I was hired as a pre-production engineer and worked in that department for nine years. During that time I worked on various CAM systems and became a systems administrator for them.
MEPD bought Cimnet’s Paradigm ERP system and I was transferred to IT to implement it. After successfully implementing the Paradigm, I was hired by Cimnet in January 1996 and moved to Chicago. I worked with the Paradigm product as an implementation consultant with companies in the U.S., Canada, Europe, South Korea, China, Thailand, and Singapore. I then founded the quality assurance department to ensure acceptable product quality levels as it transition from DOS to Windows-based applications. In 2000 Cimnet decided to create a new standalone engineering product called Engenix. I was made product manager for Engenix and led the design and development effort and brought the product to market, first in the PCB industry. After Cimnet was acquired by Consona I became product manager for all of the Cimnet product lines.
DB: I see. So, how did you get from there to here?
IW: Alex and I were both working full time when we started the project. So we worked on it nights and weekends. As things began to take shape we saw that it really was going happen and we founded Iron Atom so we could have a legitimate business. When we completed the development work it was just a matter of time to move to Iron Atom. Then in August this year Consona and another software company were acquired by a venture capital group and merged. I got caught in the resulting shake-up so I took the opportunity to focus on Iron Atom. I would have actually liked a little more time to make the transition, but life’s not like that.
DB: What milestones have you passed since starting the company?
IW: Since we literally started from scratch, we had a lot of design work and evaluation of various technologies and partners to complete. Alex got a prototype working fairly quickly so we could prove it all out. After that Alex redesigned the architecture to make it very easy to deploy almost any other suitable product. Once completed we knew we really had something--we called it CloudGate. Partnering with Ucamco was also a critical step. We decided to have something to show them first before proposing a partnership so we had some risk that they would not be open to the idea. However, Karel Tavernier, Ucamco’s GM, was very interested and saw the potential of the untapped markets we would open up for them. Just recently, we certified Amazon’s GovCloud for use with ITAR data. This was critical for us in the North American market. The GovCloud is a special part of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure that meets with ITAR regulatory requirements. This allows us to process ITAR data for our customers.
DB: Wow, you have been busy. How long have you been at this? How long have you been in business?
IW: Although we started work a few months before, we officially started Iron Atom mid-July 2012.
DB: Iain, what is the biggest challenge you face doing business today?
IW: As a start-up, we need to get recognized in the market. You really don’t see a lot of new players coming into PCBs and the current companies are well established and known. The same applies to the process and tools used today. We are all familiar with CAD, CAM, DFM and so on. In general, I don’t think most people are necessarily looking for a cloud solution as a way to improve or automate. Cloud computing is relatively new and so people are naturally hesitant and generally don’t like to change. Concerns about security are a common first reaction folks have when I discuss it. Certainly cloud companies are wholly aware of this--it’s critical to their success and have put numerous levels of security and redundancy into their products. I really see the cloud as the future standard computing platform but I know a lot of folks will take a wait and see approach. Hopefully I can nudge them along a bit.
DB: What is the biggest challenge we face as an industry right now?
IW: From a supply chain perspective, we need to finally adopt a true data standard that wholly works from design through manufacturing and assembly. Having this in place would improve data exchange, efficiency, and eliminate the manual error prone redundancies we have today. The IPC-2581 Consortium is well on its way to completing that data standard. As an industry we need to adopt it as the final data format that describes a PCB.
DB: What technologies are most important to your business today?
IW: Obviously cloud computing is key to our business. We selected Amazon’s AWS platform since they are currently the market leader and biggest cloud player right now. I’m sure that cloud computing will continue to grow so we will be keeping an eye on other options that may serve us and our customers better.
DB: As you look toward the future, Iain, what do you feel are the most important goals for your organization to achieve?
IW: We’re just starting to get established in PCB’s so we have to keep working hard to complete that phase, that’s the next milestone. Next we want to find other suitable software products to offer to the PCB market and we’re already looking at a few candidates. Beyond that I want to expand into other markets.
DB: What do you most look forward to as you look ahead?
IW: Seeing Iron Atom grow. Alex and I put a lot of work into this. It’s something we really believe in and want to see our ideas come to fruition.
DB: What do you enjoy most about your work? What has working as a part of this industry meant to you personally over the years?
IW: I’ve always liked computers and software, whether gaming or CAM,and I even like spreadsheets. I’m definitely a techy, so PCBs is a great industry to serve. I’ve worked in PCBs since 1983, so there’s no question it’s a big part of my life. Through it I’ve traveled the world and had the chance to experience different cultures and met many great people along the way. Not everyone gets those opportunities and I’m grateful for it.
DB: Now here is your chance to talk about your company. Why should they consider using Iron Atom for their DFM and other software needs? And, finally, how do they go about getting in touch with you to get started?
IW: We talked a bit about the advantages before, but here’s a list:
- State-of-the-art automated DFM and pre-CAM on-demand;
- No software to buy;
- No maintenance to pay;
- No hardware to buy;
- No user training; and
- No commitment.
Getting started is easy; you can try our service for free. Just go to our website; you can review all the details there and create an account and upload up to three designs. We’ll handle the rest and e-mail you when the results are ready. If you like us then keep using us. Ad-hoc users can pay on a job-by-job basis and volume users can pre-pay for monthly usage.
DB: Well, there you have it. It’s always great to meet with creative people who are doing new and innovative things. Honestly I think this is a great idea and a great product that is going to change the way we do business. It is also an integral part of the “concept to reality” idea that we are seeing more and more. Good job, Iain, and thanks for being with us today.