Target Condition

July 01, 2025

Target Condition: Are Autorouters Friend or Foe?

For PCB designers, just hearing the word “autorouters” can trigger everything from eye rolls to heated debate. We all have stories—some painful, some comical—of boards gone sideways at the hands of an overzealous routing algorithm. But these tools aren’t going away, and frankly, they shouldn’t. Used wisely, they can save some project teams hours or even days. Used blindly, they can cost weeks. So, where do autorouting tools stand today, and is interactive routing the smarter path forward?

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June 05, 2025

Target Condition: From Dream House to Drill Files

If you caught the movie “Barbie,” you may have laughed at its over-the-top utopia where every day begins with perfect weather, perfect smiles, and a perfectly pink commute. But beyond the plastic glam, the film subtly critiques the illusion of perfection—a message that feels surprisingly relevant to the world of PCB design and manufacturing.

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March 27, 2025

Target Condition: Designing vs. Inventing

After hearing me rave about IPC APEX EXPO for years, my boss, Chad Orebaugh, joined me at the show for the first time last year. We met at the registration counter, got our badges, and he said, “Okay, Kelly, impress me.”

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March 04, 2025

Target Condition: ‘Boomer to Zoomer: Do You Copy?’

Let’s just admit it. The baby boomer PCB designers are looking at retirement, but it’s been a good run. In the 1980s, many of us still “taped out” our PCB artwork layers and then drove them over to the graphic art service to be photo-reduced onto film positives and negatives. Then, almost overnight, the PCB design industry changed.

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January 02, 2025

Target Condition: Advanced Packaging Technologies—Look Before You Leap

Every so often, I’m disappointed by a high expectation that didn’t work out. Some of these disappointments in the PCB design and manufacturing industry have been related to “new and advanced” PCB design products or services which proved to be impracticable for too many PCB designers (including me). Often, my unmet expectations have involved automated or next-generation PCB layout software products that show well within the confines of a canned trade show presentation but fail miserably when applied in a real-life design.

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August 27, 2024

Target Condition: My Anti-venom to PCB Cost Adders

As a kid, I remember long, hot, cross-country trips to the Midwest with my grandparents to visit relatives. Riding in the backseat of a 1970s station wagon without air conditioning, the only thing I had to look forward to was stopping at Stuckey’s in Oklahoma, which had a snake farm right next door. As luck would have it, after a hundred miles of passing signs advertising “Ramona’s Snake Farm,” Grandpa pulled in and made my trip come alive. I’d never seen a poisonous snake up close, and there were hundreds of them.

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August 08, 2024

Target Condition: Taking the Stand at Your Own Design Review

It can be risky to take the stand in your own defense during a trial. You never know what could get brought up, and you might not be prepared. In PCB design, ignorantia juris non excusat (“ignorance excuses no one”). No one is above the laws set by the “court” of design for performance, manufacturability, and test (DFX). Let’s lay out some of the facts of this case. First, the PCB design industry is constantly changing, as new designers don’t know what they don’t know, and old-timers think that no one knows as much as they do. How can this range of PCB designers operate under the PCB design system I’ve suggested?

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December 19, 2023

Target Condition: Designing Unconventional Geometries

Geometric interference: In terms of a PCB design, this is a condition in which a mechanical feature on a finished PCB could come into unwanted contact with a significant counterpart, thereby affecting further assembly or electromechanical performance.

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November 02, 2023

Target Condition: What the Heck? A PCB Tech Spec Check

In 1972, learned the adage “Measure twice, cut once” from my seventh-grade woodshop teacher, Mr. Fenoglio. To this day, I hear his voice every time I use a pencil to mark a piece of wood that I’m ready to cut. I mark it and then re-measure the edge to which it will join before sawing or drilling. Over time, I’ve saved a lot of money avoiding costly personal woodworking and building project errors. I wish I could say that my PCB design record over the years was similarly as error free in regard to form, fit, and function.

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July 07, 2023

Target Condition: Keeping Your Design on the Road

Is CAD data output alone enough to move your design through the processing leading to global manufacturing success? Form, fit, and function are often referred to in the context of part interchangeability: How well parts will fit together with other parts after rolling off a manufacturing production line? Without key specification limits for these physical performance requirements, a PCB design is destined for quotation delays, no-bids, or outright manufacturing rejection, which can kill time-to-market product development goals.

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March 15, 2023

Target Condition: The Tale of Five CAD Monkeys

Many electronics engineering groups have a hierarchical structure, with senior-, mid-, and junior-level engineering personnel possessing various depths of subject matter expertise. The head of an engineering group is usually one who has risen through the ranks of the organization and has fought and won many project battles; they’ve survived and can pass on knowledge, wisdom, and guidance.

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October 27, 2022

Target Condition: Scaling PCB Design to the Power of 10

I often reflect on the formative years of my PCB design career when a senior design engineer gave me some sound advice: “Kelly, never design anything that can’t be built.” I think of his words every time I begin laying out a board and while I’m reviewing and performing DFM audits on customer PCB designs which are being transitioned to volume production. The process of design shapes an idea into a readily producible, physical prototype which can be evaluated for functionality and performance. With regard to “build-ability,” these days, once a prototype materializes, we are challenged differently than when I began back designing boards in the 1980s.

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September 01, 2022

Target Condition: Practical Packaging Density in PCB Design

Just as I tend to exhibit discomfort in oversized conference halls and meeting rooms, I self-diagnose as agoraphobic when it comes to entering PCB layouts full of wasted space. Mechanical constraints which utilize the printed circuit board substrate material as a mechanical or structural “filler” within an electronic product, under-utilizing the material for its intended purpose to support conductive circuitry, grate on me like nails on a chalkboard. I’ve seen an eight-inch, triangular shaped support bracket designed out of 0.093" thick FR-4 laminate material. It was contrived and specified by an uninformed mechanical engineering overachiever who proposed transforming the original sheet metal bracket into a “dual purpose” PCB solution in order to support the electronic engineer’s connector and associated circuitry. The circuit added to this clumsy “printed circuit bracket” monstrosity occupied just over a single square inch and seemed a ghastly waste of resources.

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June 09, 2022

Target Condition: Designing With the 5Ws and Other Acronyms

Who, what, when, where, and why with? I’ve slowly become disillusioned over the past decade with the whole “design-for” schtick. Design for manufacturing or “DFM” has become extremely subjective. I must say I am even becoming hesitant to splatter the acronym “DFM” when referencing job descriptions or when considering a layout tool’s manufacturing analysis audit anymore because the term is so cliché. I know it shouldn’t be construed in such a way, but from my perspective, running a DFM check on a PCB design layout is inadequate unless the audit routine checks against the manufacturing constraint values of the volume supplier which in most cases it is not until it is too late.

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May 17, 2022

Target Condition: Happier in a Vacuum: The Design Narcissist

Without a doubt, arrogant workplace attitudes have existed in this industry over the decades. Hopefully, as a profession, PCB designers are moving forward and accepting the fresh, positive signals from the many training leaders and trade organizations emphasizing the importance of stakeholder awareness. These visionary champions are conveying the message that we are better off when we look out for all our important industry stakeholders’ functions collectively, as we perform within our personal areas of expertise.

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May 05, 2022

Target Condition: Mandatory Masking Guidelines

Solder mask is a fair topic to cover here as there are a few designer opinions which could use a little a little masking themselves, as they appear to be uninformed and can come across as downright dictatorial. After spending a few years now as a captive PCB designer working within the walls of PCB fabrication and assembly, I am qualified to say that it takes exhaustive communication efforts to work with our manufacturing stakeholders when a design does not allow for a manufacturer’s unique manufacturing process capability.

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February 23, 2022

Target Condition: Livin’ in a PCB Stakeholder’s Paradise

A few months ago, I was offered a unique opportunity to serve as the AltiumLive Connect 2022 show host for the virtual event during the last full week of January. It started with an idea I had during a meeting with Altium last October to create a musical promo for the annual summit. I love to write songs and I’ve written a few which have been used commercially. But for a technical electronics trade show, I knew that would have to reach far outside my normal styles of composition.

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December 07, 2021

Target Condition: ‘Dealing’ With PCB Design

Welcome to Kelly Dack's new column, Target Condition, where he will be pursuing the need for stakeholder advocacy in the printed circuit board industry. He will be deliberating topics essential to helping all of us understand what each PCB project stakeholder needs in order to achieve 100% acceptability for their stake in a PCB design project. These requirements will be expressed using the same helpful, graphic target condition example methodology which is utilized in the IPC-A-600 & A-610 specifications. He said, "I’m looking forward to exploring along with you the PCB stakeholder target condition requirements for PCB sales & business development, engineering, design, procurement, manufacturing, test, inspection and customer satisfaction."

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