Designing for Cost to Manufacture

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

ICAPE's Richard Koensgen, a seasoned field application engineer with a rich background in PCB technology, shares his journey of working with customers and manufacturers through the intricacies of circuit board development and emphasizes the importance of early-stage collaboration with PCB designers. With a focus on tackling the most challenging aspects of PCB design and manufacturing, he discusses everything from layout considerations to the thermal challenges of today's technology when it comes to designing for cost.

Marcy LaRont: Richard, please tell me about your background and your role at ICAPE.

Richard Koensgen: I work for ICAPE Group in Germany as a field application engineer. Essentially, if you're doing something really tricky with your PCB or your project—maybe you run the danger of nobody being able to manufacture it in the first place—that’s when I get involved.

LaRont: How long have you been working in the PCB industry?

Koensgen: I started working in this industry in 2016 for a company that was later acquired by the ICAPE Group. At that time, I was mostly handling customer complaints. So, I essentially learned my trade by aligning customer expectations with reality, or the other way around. How do we learn best? Usually, it’s when something is broken and you need to understand what's going on. Fixing a symptom can be easy. Fixing the root cause is a little bit harder.

LaRont: You are helping your customers resolve manufacturing issues causing defects by performing root cause analysis.

Koensgen: Yes, and sometimes a customer doesn’t even know where to start. I saw a board once that had the copper traces nearly burned away. They weren’t dimensioned properly, and there was too much current flowing through. The corresponding trace for the power that went through it got hot and literally burned away. That was my profile picture on Microsoft Teams for quite some time.

LaRont: ICAPE Group is a manufacturer that engages across the PCB technology spectrum. What are your customers most challenged by?

Koensgen: Usually only the very special situations end up on my table. But more commonly, I’ve seen requests for standard layout stackups to meet their requirements, customers asking for something that has already been proven based on their impedance requirements, etc. They may be running into the danger of needing exotic materials because nowadays, even if you look at just a USB port 3.0, it’s a high-frequency connection. You need to think about the impedance of your USB connector.

LaRont: That makes sense.

Koensgen: I've encountered it enough that I created a webinar all about impedance, and that example is part of my introduction. I had a customer who was unaware he had an impedance-controlled connection on his PCB when he switched the build to us. He didn't provide any documentation regarding layer stackup or impedance. So, of course, our manufacturer used the most standard, cost-effective stackup. Now, the trick about USB controllers is they are so well designed they will detect a misconfiguration on the impedance and throttle down or fall back to an earlier version’s performance standards so the drivers and transistors don't get damaged.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the November 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.