-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueProper Floor Planning
Floor planning decisions can make or break performance, manufacturability, and timelines. This month’s contributors weigh in with their best practices for proper floor planning and specific strategies to get it right.
Showing Some Constraint
A strong design constraint strategy carefully balances a wide range of electrical and manufacturing trade-offs. This month, we explore the key requirements, common challenges, and best practices behind building an effective constraint strategy.
All About That Route
Most designers favor manual routing, but today's interactive autorouters may be changing designers' minds by allowing users more direct control. In this issue, our expert contributors discuss a variety of manual and autorouting strategies.
- Articles
- Columns
- Links
- Media kit
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
Gary Ferrari Shares His Thoughts on PCB Design and More
August 5, 2015 | Barry Matties, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Gary Ferrari, the director of technical support at Firan Technology Group Corporation (FTG), on numerous topics related to PCB design. Our conversation ranged from CID training to the need for reaching high school students as a way of introducing more young people to career opportunities in our industry. We also covered strategies for helping customers design and build better product, and keeping designers provided with the most critical part of their supply chain—information.
Barry Matties: Gary, please begin by telling us a little bit about FTG.
Gary Ferrari: FTG is a circuit board manufacturer—that's the circuits division. Then we have an aerospace division and their products are keyboards, bezels, and panels for the avionics industry. When you look at all the gauges on the dashboard of a cockpit, you are looking at the items we manufacture.
Matties: Is it more for military applications?
Ferrari: It’s for both commercial and military avionics. Our products are on helicopters and military aircraft. We're also on many of the commercial aircraft. We're on the new C919 from China. Actually, we have a plant to build those units over there. We have an aerospace and a circuits division in Toronto, as well as an aerospace and circuits division in Chatsworth, California.
Matties: What is your position at FTG?
Ferrari: I am the director of technical support—that means that I get into the customer prior to the design or during the design phase and I help them with their design issues. I look at manufacturability from a fabrication standpoint, as well as assembly, DFM, test, etc. I try to help them design a good product in the long run. That's where I serve best.
Matties: When you talk about working with customers, is that at the pre-circuit level when they are just imagining this stuff or is it beyond that?
Ferrari: They have already done the imagining, and now they need to bring it to the physical world. Sometimes they just don't understand the tolerances or the processes, the sequences in building a stack-up, material characteristics and combinations, buried vias and all those little details. I work with them so that they understand how to build something that's manufacturable and cost-effective. Anybody can design something, but when it comes down to getting fabricated, it could end up being a million-dollar design when it could have been maybe a thousand-dollar design, but they messed it all up. We try to help them out with that, and that's what my job is.
To read this entire article, which appeared in the July 2015 issue of The PCB Design Magazine, click here.
Testimonial
"We’re proud to call I-Connect007 a trusted partner. Their innovative approach and industry insight made our podcast collaboration a success by connecting us with the right audience and delivering real results."
Julia McCaffrey - NCAB GroupSuggested Items
Coherent Announces Agreement to Sell Aerospace and Defense Business to Advent for $400 Million
08/15/2025 | AdventCoherent Corp., a global leader in photonics, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Aerospace and Defense business to Advent, a leading global private equity investor, for $400 million. Proceeds will be used to reduce debt, which will be immediately accretive to Coherent’s EPS.
KYZEN Partners with LPW to Elevate High Purity Cleaning with Cutting-Edge Cyclic Nucleation Technology in North America
08/13/2025 | KYZEN'KYZEN, a global leader in advanced cleaning solutions, has reached a major milestone in high-purity cleaning with the addition of a state-of-the-art Vacuum Cyclic Nucleation System at its North American Application Lab.
Jeh Aerospace Raises $11M to Boost Aircraft Supply Chain
08/12/2025 | I-Connect007 Editorial TeamJeh Aerospace, the high-precision aerospace and defense manufacturing startup founded by Vishal Sanghavi and Venkatesh Mudragalla, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Elevation Capital, with support from General Catalyst, to scale its commercial aircraft supply chain manufacturing in India, according to OEM.
New Frontier Aerospace and Air Force Institute of Technology Sign CRADA to Advance Hypersonic VTOL Aircraft
08/05/2025 | PR NewswireNew Frontier Aerospace (NFA) is excited to announce a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) aimed at advancing an innovative rocket-powered hypersonic Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft.
Honeywell Advances Technology That Lets Fighter Pilots Breathe Easier for Peak Performance
08/04/2025 | HoneywellHoneywell has developed and launched a new technology that allows military pilots of high-performance fighter jets to breathe easier under extreme conditions.