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Beyond the Rulebook
What happens when the rule book is no longer useful, or worse, was never written in the first place? In today’s fast-moving electronics landscape, we’re increasingly asked to design and build what has no precedent, no proven path, and no tidy checklist to follow. This is where “Design for Invention” begins.
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From the growing role of AI in design tools to the challenge of managing cumulative tolerances, these articles in this issue examine the technical details, design choices, and manufacturing considerations that determine whether a board works as intended.
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Orange Co. Designers Council Meeting July 18
July 3, 2019 | Scott McCurdy, Freedom CAD ServicesEstimated reading time: 2 minutes
The Orange County Chapter of the IPC Designers Council will hold a “Lunch ‘n’ Learn” meeting on July 18 at JT Schmid’s Restaurant & Brewery in Anaheim.
The special guest speaker will be Julie Ellis, field application engineer with TTM. Julie will present “How Fabrication Processes Determine DFM Guidelines: A detailed look at fabrication realities to help you understand capabilities and trade-offs.”
PCB designers struggle with many challenges when planning a layout, as many factors in the fabrication process must be considered. Board shops must constantly invest in equipment and process technologies to improve their manufacturing yields as complexity grows.
Julie’s presentation will help attendees design a better PCB through a deeper understanding of major processes demonstrated in PCB101. For example, design rules are different for mechanically drilled vs. laser drilled holes, and using laser drill pad diameters for through-hole requirements may kill your project in production.
Julie will define key fabricator concerns caused by the interplay between material and process tolerances and how they stack up. The end results are minimum DFM guidelines that will generate the highest yields at the fabricator. Each fabricator’s site guidelines are established based on their unique equipment sets. The equipment sets are selected to support different technologies ranging from heavy Cu to microBGA designs.
At the end of this presentation, attendees will understand why different fab facilities have different capabilities, as well as how to identify and apply the correct design guidelines related to registration, aspect ratio and annular ring for mechanical through-hole vs. microvia blind hole, etching, plated layer vs. non-plated layer finished Cu thickness, and VIPPO (via-in-pad, plated over).
Location
JT Schmid’s Restaurant & Brewery, in the Reagan Room
2610 E. Katella Ave.
Anaheim, California 92806
(Across from the Honda Center)
Cost
The cost to attend this “Lunch ‘n’ Learn” event is $15 at the door. We are pleased to have Altium’s sponsorship to help us with the cost of the luncheon. Please RSVP no later than noon on Wednesday, July 17, so we can get a good headcount.
There are two ways to RSVP:
- Click here to RSVP
- Or email your RSVP
Thank you!
Scott McCurdy
President, IPC Designers Council, Orange County Chapter
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