A Standards-driven Design Environment

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

For this issue about standards, we interviewed Jen Kolar, VP of engineering, and Cory Grunwald, director of designer development, at Monsoon Solutions, a design bureau in Bellevue, Washington. In this conversation, Jen and Cory explain how they created the company’s internal documentation process around the requirements of IPC standards. They also discuss their onboarding system for new hires, including the standards that the new designers should become familiar with.

Andy Shaughnessy: How about if you start by discussing your protocol for new hires, and the standards that your onboarding process is built around?

Cory Grunwald: Sure. When bringing on a new designer, we have a lot of internal Monsoon documentation and standards that tend to work specifically for ourselves and our customers. If we're teaching our new designers how to do footprints, we've got our own quick reference guide on footprint creation, as well as references to IPC-7351. The designers know that if they can’t find it in our internal documentation, they can go to the IPC standard. We usually provide the quick reference guide for our documentation and a handful of good-to-know IPC specs for designers, such as IPC-7351, Generic Requirements for Surface Mount Design and Land Pattern, and IPC-2221, Generic Standard on Printed Board Design. Another standard we provide is IPC-A-600, Acceptability of Printed Boards Endorsement. It covers class 2, class 3, and what's acceptable in board production. While we don’t expect new hires to read through all the standards, we do expect them to know what’s in them and where they can go to find more detailed information.

Shaughnessy: Your internal documentation is largely based around IPC standards?

Jen Kolar: Yes, because reading through standards isn't necessarily user-friendly. So, we will have one document that includes the standard’s image and numbers, and then we can say, “Here's exactly what you're looking for.” We condense it down to what we really need to think about day to day.

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