Design Problems: From the Designers’ Viewpoint

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It seems like everyone has something to say about PCB designers and the way they do their jobs. Everyone involved in the process likes to chime in with advice for the front-end folks. But what do designers think about their segment of the industry? This month, we asked PCB designers and design engineers to discuss their biggest pain points.

Jen Kolar - Monsoon Solutions

Q. What is your main concern for PCB designers?

Communication. It all comes down to that. Are they asking clear questions of their customer or manufacturer? Are they reading the customer’s full email or documentation and responding to everything? Vice versa for the customer. Is someone sending key summaries from verbal conversations to make sure everyone is on the same page? How much design is happening in chat applications (Slack, Chime, Teams, etc.) vs. a more structured, traceable way? Is the customer providing the necessary data in an organized fashion or in dribs and drabs? While PCB design engineers may be good at design, they also need to be good at customer and project management. This is especially true in a service bureau environment like ours with external customers, but it still applies to internal customers.

Make sure the requirements and decisions are clear from both ends. The difference between having a brick vs. a useful board can come down to one conversation. I see many projects drag on due to the customer being slow to reply and the designer not managing their customer well to keep them moving. Sometimes there is nothing the designer can do but, often, setting clear expectations about the inputs needed and clearly calling out when the project is on hold is a good way to keep the customer moving. The designer sometimes needs to help them realize when they aren’t quite ready to move forward and that they need time to figure things out.

Designers need to be good at communicating. Depending on the scope and size of the project, daily updates of progress may be important. For much longer projects, it might be weekly, but the customer should not be left guessing where things are, and the designer shouldn’t get too far ahead of customer review.

Q. What issue do you think PCB designers should be more aware of?

The ever-changing technology of the end manufacturers, especially of fabricators. It is easy for designers to get caught up on “standard best practices” or “rules of thumb.” It is also common for designers to not always know the capabilities of who will be doing the manufacturing, so they necessarily (or hopefully) are more conservative in their layouts. Fabrication tolerances and practices don’t always just get tighter and more advanced. The back and forth I’ve seen on stacked and staggered vias is one example. Thoughts continue to change on reliability of stacked microvias and each vendor or manufacturing expert will have a different opinion.

I think PCB designers should be diligent in pushing to get up-to-date manufacturing capabilities from the planned end-fabricator for each project. It may be them, a project manager, or the customer requesting the information, but taking the time, especially for more complex projects, is critical. Nothing is worse than finding out in DFM, after a six-month layout effort, that you need to increase your annular ring size or trace spacing in a dense high-speed design. The information listed on vendor websites or capabilities documents is often not sufficient to make design decisions on multi-lamination cycle and high-density boards. It is important to have that conversation early and not make assumptions.

To read this entire article, which appeared in the June 2023 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.