Speaking the Same Language as Your Fabricator

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” —Strother Martin as the captain in “Cool Hand Luke”

Strother Martin might have been talking about PCB designers and fabricators when he uttered the most famous line of his acting career. We do indeed have a failure to communicate; designers and fabricators often seem to be talking past each other, which can lead to jobs being put on hold.

We asked Jen Kolar, VP of engineering for Monsoon Solutions, and columnist Kelly Dack to share their thoughts on ways that we can break down the communication barrier between design and fabrication. As they point out, a design kickoff checklist and a solid review process can be invaluable tools in a designer’s toolbox.

Andy Shaughnessy: Welcome, Jen and Kelly. What are the most common communication mistakes, miscues, and missteps that you see between design and fabrication? 

Jen Kolar: Oftentimes, we ask our project manager, “Can you please remind our designers to actually follow our process?” We have a standard process for how all outputs and packages should be created. However, many of our customers add their own tweaks. Speaking of language, when fab shops don't have CAM350 and they're using a lower-end tool, I have seen issues flagged as errors when they were not actually errors. It’s happened many times. I try to avoid having designers send both Gerbers and ODB++ because invariably, the fab vendor will have differences, and you'll spend a lot of time with the fab vendor trying to resolve this.

Kelly Dack: Jen and I have had similar experiences. She hit the nail on the head about sending ODB++ and Gerber in parallel. One North American supplier built it using the ODB++ data, and when the boards came in, the customer asked, “Why is this different from the PCBs we received from our offshore supplier?” Well, it turned out they had Gerber data different from the ODB++ data. Jen, where does it all start with the design tool? It's so easy for designers to start clicking away and have our layout tools guide us through the process using the standard design rule settings. New designers don't know what they don't know, and they may be relying on standard out-of-the-box settings from their layout tools.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the March 2025 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.