Closing the gap: How Manufacturing-Driven Design is transforming PCB engineering
Previously on episode 24 of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez brought together two seasoned experts—Max Clark, Product Strategy and Technology Director at Siemens, and Gerry Partida, Vice President of Technology at Summit Interconnect—to unpack a growing concern in the electronics industry: why so many designs still stumble at the finish line due to poor design-for-manufacturing (DFM) practices.
With nearly eight decades of combined experience, Clark and Partida didn’t hold back on highlighting the systemic misalignments between PCB designers and fabricators—and how Manufacturing-Driven Design (MDD) might just be the fix the industry needs.
From “throw it over the wall” to strategic partnership
Chavez opened the conversation by calling out a frequent disconnect: many PCB design teams still lack a formalized, documented process. “When I ask how many people have their internal process written down, barely any hands go up,” he noted. “And if they are accounting for DFM, it’s often done manually—error-prone, outdated, and slow.”
Partida echoed this, explaining how board shops are often left cleaning up ambiguous or inconsistent design data. “You’ve got imbalanced stackups, fab notes that contradict themselves, drill holes missing, and conflicting IPC specs. We’re expected to make it work—then blamed when we catch issues too late.”
As someone who’s seen designs live and die on the manufacturing floor, Partida had no shortage of war stories. One stood out: a five-lamination design with poor drill compensation assumptions was running at 25% yield. After applying industry-standard DFM rules and realigning spacing assumptions, the yield jumped to 88%.
“We went from 9,000 dangerous locations to just 30,” he recalled. “That’s the power of understanding what’s really in the design—and collaborating.”
Clark emphasized that this is precisely where MDD fits in. “DRC came first—it was basic width, spacing, annular ring,” he said. “But DFM evolved because we realized we weren’t just checking for legality—we were checking for buildability.”
Design for Manufacturing vs. Manufacturing-Driven Design: What’s the difference?
While Design for Manufacturing has been a standard practice for decades, Clark and Partida explained how Manufacturing-Driven Design represents a mindset shift. It’s not just validating after-the-fact. It’s integrating manufacturing intelligence directly into the design phase.
“In the past, we left-shifted DFM from fabrication into design,” Clark said. “But designers were left guessing. MDD enables a real-time feedback loop—validating both electrical and manufacturing constraints as you go.”
Summit Interconnect now shares its DFM profiles with clients using Siemens’ toolsets. That means engineers routing a board can see, in real time, what will or won’t work for a specific fabricator—before the files are ever handed off.
“If manufacturers are the ones doing DFM, it’s too late. What we’re really doing is manufacturing despite the design.” Clark advocated for tool-agnostic platforms like PCBflow, which allow any designer to validate their output—even if they don’t know which manufacturer they’re using yet.
Partida added, “Most designers don’t send us files until the design’s already finalized. If we find a mistake, like a bad dimension, it can cost the customer $30,000 to revise and re-approve it through all their internal stakeholders.”
With IPC-based rules now built into platforms like PCBflow and Siemens enterprise tools, PCB designers can catch these “low-hanging fruit” mistakes long before fabrication—and avoid spiraling costs and delays.
Chavez posed a tough question: even if teams have a process, are they getting consistent feedback from manufacturers?
Often, the answer is no. Partida explained that sometimes fabricators themselves don’t catch low-yield designs until they’re producing in high volumes. “You might need five boards and we fit six on a panel. You don’t notice the yield loss,” he said. “But scale it to 1000 boards and suddenly you’re hemorrhaging yield—and nobody knows why.”
By tracking defects across customer portfolios, Summit is able to spot trends and flag root causes—such as one customer whose design accounted for a quarter of all build errors. “We showed them the data, helped them redesign one section—and the results were immediate,” Partida said.
Clark and Partida emphasized that this transformation isn’t just about technology—it’s about people. “You can’t apply complex design rules to a board if your team doesn’t even know they exist,” Partida said. “We still see designers using semiconductor test board specs for full production boards. It worked once, so they assume it’s fine.”
Manufacturing-Driven Design gives engineers the tools and the context to make smarter decisions upfront—like not applying 6-mil drill rules across a full 6-layer board just because it worked for one chip test.
“If the rules have been established by the IPC design rules, they could take their designs, throw them in PCBFlows, and get feedback for that low-hanging fruit based on just IPC rules across the board, and do that before they finish the design,” said Partida. “By using PCBFlow based on the settings that IPC has set up, they can do that shift left. And when they’re done, it’s going to work fine for any fabricator.”
Smarter design starts with collaboration
The conversation with Clark and Partida emphasized how the more complex PCB designs become, the more essential it is for design and manufacturing teams to collaborate early, often, and intelligently.
“It’s about getting the right data, into the right hands, at the right time,” Clark said. “And tools like PCBflow make that possible—not just for Siemens users, but for any team looking to validate their design against real-world manufacturing rules.”
As Partida summed it up, “No one likes technical queries. The earlier you catch issues, the fewer TQs we all deal with—and the faster, cheaper, and better your boards come out.”
Learn more on manufacturing-driven design and design for yield or listen to the podcast episode.
