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The Shaughnessy Report: Pulling Together

Our cover image for this month’s issue of Design007 Magazine is a great representation of the PCB development process: Design, fabrication, and assembly are all beautifully intertwined. All three disciplines must be integrated to have a successful end product. As a result, all these stakeholders need to know something about the other stakeholders’ processes.

The axiom, “We’re all in this together,” comes to mind.

But designers, sitting at the front end of the entire development cycle, must have more than a passing understanding of the processes downstream from them. PCB designers and design engineers need to know quite a bit about the chemical and mechanical processes taking place after data handoff to design a circuit board that can survive manufacturing stresses and be used by the end customer. Designers should be well versed in fab and assembly processes just to do their jobs.

As our contributors often point out, designers really are the first step in the manufacturing process, not a separate, standalone entity. Designers and design engineers have a lot of responsibilities; they wield the power to affect change, good or bad, in the manufacturing process. Some analysts estimate that 70% of the cost of the final board is determined during the design cycle. That’s a lot of responsibility for designers.

Many design for manufacturing (DFM) issues can be avoided if designers communicate with their fabrication and assembly providers before and during the design cycle. But designers often operate in a vacuum; they may have no idea where their board is being prototyped, much less where it’s going for volume production. So, designers need to arm themselves with as much knowledge about fab and assembly as they possibly can.

This month, we asked our expert contributors to share their thoughts on the absolute “must-know” aspects of fab, assembly, and test that all designers should understand. We have interviews with APCT’s Tony Bell, Summit Interconnect’s Laura Martin, The Test Connection’s Bert Horner, and Aster Technologies’ Dean Poplett. We also have a feature article by Lea Maurel of ICAPE Group, and feature columns by Vern Solberg, Tim Haag, Istvan Novak, and Martyn Gaudion. You’ll also find regular columns by Matt Stevenson and Joe Fjelstad.

The new year is here, and trade show season is upon us. In the next few months, we’ll be covering DesignCon and IPC APEX EXPO. I hope to see you all on the road.

This column originally appears in the January 2023 issue of Design007 Magazine.