Dear designer: A wish list from the factory floor

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (00:03.28)

Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in to the Printed Circuit Podcast, where we discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities across the Printed Circuit engineering industry. I’m your host, Steph Chavez. Every PCB design begins with engineering intent, but eventually that design has to be fabricated. And with that, the conversation can sometimes change or it could go south.

What looks perfectly acceptable in the CAD environment may introduce challenges on the factory floor, manufacturability concerns, unnecessary complexity, tighter tolerances than application requires, incomplete fabrication data, and design decisions without clear understanding of the manufacturing process. So, if the factory floor can write a letter to every PC designer, you know, what would they say? In this episode, you know, titled Dear Designer: A Wishlist from the Factory Floor.

We explore the relationship between PCB design and fabrication from the fabricator’s perspective. We’ll discuss what manufacturing wish designers would understand or would understood, why early collaboration matters, and how better communication between design and fabrication can improve yield, reduce cost, avoid delays, and ultimately produce better boards. Because successful PCB design does not end when the layout is complete.

That’s when the conversations with manufacturing should have already been well underway. So with that said, I’m very excited to welcome John Johnson, Director of Quality and Advanced Technology with American Standards circuits, or American Standard Circuits, also known as ASC. Thanks for coming onto the podcast, John.

John Johnson (01:46.892)

Hey, glad to be here. Good to talk to you again, Steph.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (01:50.885)

As always, John, you and I get into very deep conversations when we’re at different trade shows and conferences that we’re both usually, you know, most of the time we’re usually speaking at. But, you know, with that said, I wanna give the audience a bit of your background and your role at American Standard Circuits.

John Johnson (02:09.666)

Well, my role here, of course, is the title’s director of quality and advanced technology. The advanced technology side of things is you know, that’s my love. I ended up in a role of director of quality, because of a series of misfortunes, but at least I was here when that happened and I was able to step in and help the company out. But I’ve been in the business now this September for forty eight years.

And it’s been a hell of a career, yeah. started out in manufacture of laminates and pre-pregs. I was working on some of the earlier multifunctional tetrafunctional resin systems. And since then I’ve been in the board manufacturing side of things since actually around 1981 is when I got into the board manufacturing. Was in materials before. master’s in organic chemistry, which kind of helped.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (02:41.052)

Wow.

John Johnson (03:09.56)

me get into the the whole whole thing here. But yeah, it’s I’ve gone all the way through R&D, chemist to quality engineer to just senior process engineer working in R and D of different boards and

ended up being a tech sales guy for quite a few years and and moved on to a printing circuit board company in the Milwaukee area and I was director of sales and then eventually ended up owning that with a group of friends of mine for about twenty years. So it was pretty exciting times and learned a lot about technology and a lot about business and so it’s it was good. left there, went to work on

Manufacture of high tech circuit boards, manufacturing of fine ultra fine lines down in a arena of twenty five micron lines in space and

Did that for a few years and ended up here at ASC. tried to retire a couple of times and the CEO here an A Vargist called me up and he said, What you can’t do that. Come on. Come on down, let’s talk. So here I am. I’ve been here for four years now. And the advanced technology side of things is really exciting here. you know, at some point in time, I hope to be building circuit.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:14.95)

Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:22.406)

Yeah.

John Johnson (04:37.776)

boards with embedded components and and that type of technology, IC substrates and we’re headed in that direction now so it’s kinda neat. So that’s that’s my background.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:41.07)

yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:48.166)

Yeah, that’s that’s great.

Yeah, I I would tell you you definitely ha have an extensive background, a lot of history. You’ve seen the gauntlet, you know. So with that said, I want to get your perspective, you know, on this wish list. So let’s start with, you know, wish number one, which is basically call us before you finalize the design. So, you know, let’s get into it. You know, if you could wave a magic wand and change one behavior across the entire design community, what would that be?

John Johnson (05:15.48)

Well, i that that is the biggest wish, is and that’s to get the

designer involved early and often in that design process because you know there are so many things with materials and and you know choice of those materials in terms of what do we use for line width specifications all those things if we can play earlier in in the process we can save you a lot of money we can s we can avoid problems you know that I’ve seen boards that come to

us after they’ve been through a design process and the customer says, my God, mean I can’t get this in four weeks? I can’t get this in six weeks? It’s ten weeks? Well we could have saved that, you know. So that’s that’s the thing. in in the world as it is today, it it really is even more important because

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (06:03.078)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (06:15.278)

I’m sure that the listeners here will understand that the supply chain right now is just crazy. It is hard to get materials. There’s long long lead times and you know, as a printed circuit board manufacturer we can help guide you in terms of what materials are readily available and others that maybe are more of a challenge. Processing that can get you what you need, you know, from an RF standpoint if you’re into RF or or what have you, you know, thermal management.

things like that. So, you know, when we look at this whole situation we have now, it’s really a a bit of a landmine to kind of walk through to be able to get those materials and keep your lead time manageable. Some of the things that we run across a lot of times is that the design is not really well thought out.

with the complexity that we have today. You know, micro BGAs and you know, pitches that are approaching now point three millimeter. That is just crazy to try to design into. And we have all kinds of sub assemblies. We have stacked microvias, we have V in pad plated over filled and plated over. you know, all these things

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (07:19.192)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (07:38.637)

just really compound the the difficulty of building those boards. And in when you look at some of the designs, you see that people have tried to take the vias and start out from the surface of the board and go down, down, down, down. And that when they get to the bottom there’s nothing. They’re not using both sides of the of the design. they’re trying to do back drill.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (08:00.87)

Mm.

John Johnson (08:05.646)

create scenarios where it might have been easier just to put in a few micro vias. So it’s we can help through those situations and kind of keep that lead time down to a manageable area. You gotta remember that we’re the partner. You know we’re not just the vendor. And the closer that we work together, you know, the longer the relationship will be, the better the quality will be, and the faster you get your boards.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (08:11.291)

Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (08:34.128)

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you wholeheartedly with that. And that’s one thing I learned, you know, with with a proper mentorship early in my career is that, you know, you can’t treat your fabricator as an external supplier. They they have to be considered an internal stakeholder from the very beginning. So we’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll talk more into that. But let’s let’s move on to wish number two, which is basically stop designing to the top of our capability list, which is

I I see that all the time, you know. So here’s something that’s counterintuitive to what you mentioned, you know, designers who actually look up manufacturers’ capabilities and then design the most advanced spec on the list, you know, why is that a problem?

John Johnson (09:12.942)

Well, it you know, it’s kind of a a double edged sword here because if you’re looking for a manufacturer that can build, you know, difficult products, well, they’re not gonna put out a capability list that’s gonna say, Well, gee, I can do five mil lines in spaces. Well no, of course not. They’re gonna tell you the the

Tightest that they can build, and then they may give you an advanced segment of that list and say, Well, we can build these in advanced scenarios. the trouble is, is if you go right to the advanced list and you go down to the finest feature, what you’ll find is that board will cost the most, and combined with other facets that you you want to use, you know, a person can build a fine line, but when you combine a fine line with, you know, multiple.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (09:56.048)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (10:05.232)

Multiple filled microbias or via and pad plated over. All of those things tend to be additive and not to make a play on words, but they really can add complexity upon complexity. So it’s really important to understand what you need for your design to work. And

not just go for a design and says, wow, I got the best technology, finest technology. you know, when you wanna eat lobster, eat lobster. But when you wanna have something that’s gonna be affordable, maybe a hamburger will work. You know, it’s you know, it’s just you gotta look at it that way and your budget on those boards.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (10:52.005)

Yeah.

John Johnson (10:57.432)

really sometimes can’t bear all of the technology that you’d like to put in there. Go with what you need.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (11:06.832)

Yeah, I agree. I think working with your fabricator is key because, you know, most of the time we don’t know what we don’t know and or we make poor our not the best decisions and we we don’t have that that fabrication intelligence, you know, at the point of design because, you know, for one reason or another, you know, but the bottom line is, you know, many will technic will typically neglect

that that fabrication input or that fabrication influence to help you or help us designers make the right decision. You know, especially you’re talking, you know, this ultra HDI stuff, which you do a lot of speaking on.

John Johnson (11:42.7)

Yeah.

Well yeah, and and it’s it’s kinda interesting there. So i in the last few weeks we manufactured our first ten micron trace.

So ten microns, it’s under a half a mil wide. And that’s that’s our our development path. I mean we want to get down to running ten micron line space routinely by the end of the year. but you know if you look at our capability list, yeah, I think we say twelve and a half right now. Well, if you only need fifty micron, you know, you don’t want to go and say, hey

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (11:58.265)

Mm, mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (12:20.87)

Wow.

John Johnson (12:25.666)

Well I heard you could do 10 micron. Let’s try that. So I like it. It helps my R&D bill. But really you wanna be careful with that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (12:33.87)

Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (12:40.462)

I agree. I think the the biggest thing that that we have to think of as as engineers or designers is mitigating risk and and you know producbility has to be there. you know, you’ve got to produce something, especially if you you know, mass production, it’s gotta be producible at at a you know low cost, high yields. And you can’t do that without the close collaboration with your fabricator.

John Johnson (13:01.998)

Yeah, you know, and we talked early on about materials, just you know, where we can help. There are so many unique materials out there that help improve reliability. There’s new materials for some advanced products that can actually get, you know, fifty cycles or hundred cycles through D-coupon testing, microvia reliability testing. That’s unheard of.

So, you know, we can help guide you through those material sets and get you a part that’s gonna be complex, but you don’t have to worry about it working for a long time in a field.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (13:44.837)

Yeah, no, I I agree. I agree. So let’s let’s move on to wish number three, which is, you know, respect what solder mask actually does. You know, you mentioned, you know, solder mask and and the different like materials and different structures in in the board, you know, as something that that trips up experienced engineers, you know, and even I mentioned it where, you know, they don’t know what they don’t know, you know. So what is the wish list item here?

John Johnson (14:11.938)

Well, you really have to pay attention to what you’re looking at with solder masks, especially when you get into ultra high density circuitry. You know, you think about running finer and finer lines. And let’s say let’s just say you have a seventy-five micron line, a three mil line space, and you’ve got that three mils away from your pad.

Well, if you use a mask defining pad, never have to worry about shorting to that adjacent circuit. Now picture if it’s a one mil trace, one mil away.

then it’s it’s very very easy for that paste just kinda jump over and short things out. So you want to make sure your pad is covered at the very edge by by the solder mask. The other thing is when we build a board, the solder mask is the last thing that’s put on. So we’ve gone through all of the processing. And a lot of people just sometimes don’t think about what a board is made of. It’s plastic.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (15:00.828)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (15:16.344)

You know, can you imagine taking a piece of plastic and putting it in a press and heating it up and cooling it down and scrubbing it with s with scrubbers and and getting all that done and all the circuitry’s defined and now you’re at the back end of the process and you’re putting solder mask on and expecting it to register to all those pads, to all those tight spaces. So, you know, if you if you look at more of a focus on

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (15:42.299)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (15:46.241)

Mass defined rather than non-solder mass defined features, you’re better off. One of the biggest things we see is people who are you know new to the design side of things where they’ll mix copper-defined or what we call non-solder mass-defined pads with solder mass-defined pads. you know, a lot of times you have a ground plane that forms part of your component area, and then you have traces.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (16:15.718)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (16:16.204)

coming in where have pads, and that’s very common for people to fall into that trap. When you do that, now all of a sudden you’re registering all over, and those pads that are gonna be copper to find may be shifted off. So it’s a lot easier to have problems with the with the component soldering in those scenarios. So you know when you have that, let’s focus on getting mass-defined pads.

looking I guess, you know, at the ultra high density side of things too, we’ve actually built products with mass clearances as small as two and a half mils, a downer on a range of sixty micron. Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (17:00.339)

Wow, that’s tiny.

John Johnson (17:03.466)

So when you’re looking at that and thinking about your your folks that are doing assembly, a lot of times you have to be looking at how thick your mask is. Everybody’s quick to say, well, I want lots of solder masks on top of my traces. I want one mil. Well

Maybe one mil is too thick to be able to put paste effectively down in those in those small pad areas to get a good release, you know, and then well you know you have to know a lot about pace. So it’s you really have to think about how you do that. Typically when you get finer and finer in terms of the pad diameters, you need to get down to thinner mass coatings. You know, not a not a mil.

something down in a range of maybe twenty micron, eight tenths of a mil or fifteen micron. On in some cases with really dense designs, we’ve been working with photoimageable dielectrics for solder masks. You know, there’s Taiyo’s got a product for that and they’re really neat. I mean they’re really something that you can use to to get a very thin coating and and get that that

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (18:07.685)

Hmm.

John Johnson (18:18.068)

small diameter feature defined.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (18:23.43)

Yeah, you know, with these with these fine features, you know, we’re really, you know, starting to talk more in our conversation here regarding Ultra HDI. So this, you know, he hits me with, you know, thinking about wish list number four, which is understanding the true cost of complexity. So beyond, you know, trace width in in line space, you know, what are the hidden design choices that quietly blow up cost and lead time? You know, the ones that you see on the factory floor and that you just wince your eye at and you just cringe.

John Johnson (18:51.33)

Well our biggest challenge I think in design is where components are driving us to.

And you have you know components now that you know no longer are eight point eight millimeter, they’re 0.5, 0.4, 0.3, and it gets harder and harder to try to use a three mil trace, a 75 micron trace routed between pads. So people are still trying to do that, and to do that you have to go into a lot of sequential laminations and stack microvias techniques.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (19:01.179)

Mm-hmm.

John Johnson (19:30.106)

Like that. And whenever you go into a stacked microvia, you you need to take that microvia and copper fill it. If you just put a resin fill into it and put a copper pad over the over the top, I would say that’s less reliable. And you know, a bigger risk.

in the long term. So the way we’re building these boards with stacked micro views is they’re all copper filled. If you get past a couple of stacks, y you need to start worrying about that.

The cost is one of the things that when you have a filled copper filled microvia, it takes longer to manufacture it. Every sub assembly you have adds a couple of weeks to the to the overall build. Every time you have a a drilling step where you have to drill microbias, you have to copper fill them.

And then laminate again. That’s adding one to two weeks of of cycle time. So you can have boards that you know, you’ve got multiple sub assemblies or thirty layers. Hey, I got it all routed out. Wow, great. But you’re gonna find your lead time is you know, upwards of twenty weeks and and the cost is through the rough. So if you use techniques where you can run finer lines, you know, fifty micron lines or or even you know

twenty five micron. It may seem like it’s really a fine set of circuitry to put down, but you can get your layer count down. You know, a thirty layer board might be something that’s only fifteen, sixteen, or even lower. where you might have not have to use stack microvias, you can use staggered. And that’s not gonna be a reliability problem and they don’t have to be filled. So there’s lots of you know different aspects there.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (21:17.252)

Yeah.

John Johnson (21:25.318)

when you look at the you know, going to technologies like back drilling as well, that can be a really easy way to, you know, avoid microvias stacks.

However, you gotta bear in mind that every time you have to do a control depth drill and they’re at different different levels, the complexity goes up, the time goes up, and cost goes up. So you gotta have a balance and again that’s kinda like where we were talking on the first step. If you sit down and talk with us about your design, we can help guide you through some of these these traps that, you know, are just waiting out there to catch you. So

When you when you’re building I was gonna say when you’re building controlled impedance,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:11.792)

I agree, I agree. And I think it

John Johnson (22:21.932)

I’ve seen designs that, you know, people have have triple tolerance does. They have the overall thickness defined as a as a tight tolerance and then each dielectric has a what plies a pre preg to use and what what that dielectric thickness needs to be on every layer. And of course, you know

If you don’t meet that and the microsection says, geez, instead of four mils, now you got four and a half mils or three and a half mils. You know, now it’s a problem. if you stack it all up together and use all of the the copper layers and all of the dielectrics

you find that instead of you know seventy mils that you wanted, you got eighty mils or ninety mils. So you cause problems by by tolerancing every individual dielectric. And I think in those situations you gotta leave some areas between power and grounds that are somewhat open to adjusting the whole package thickness.

And it’s it’s a lot of this stuff is old habits are hard to break. And you hear, you know, a lot of your design folks that have been around a while say, Well, it doesn’t work that you you have to do it this way. You know, and sometimes it’s not not true. You we don’t have to do it that way. a lot of people say

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (23:46.076)

Yeah.

John Johnson (23:57.421)

Well, you know, one mil lines are they’re you know, that that’s a lot of risk, it’s new. But if you take out your cell phone, there’s a lot of s fine lines in that. And well people will say, well, it’s just a cell phone, we just we throw it away, yeah, we throw it in the lake. we drop it, things like that. But really, if you look if you look at your cell phone, it goes through a lot of tough use and it works day in, day out.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:15.91)

Hm.

John Johnson (24:26.572)

So, you know, it’s reliability is

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:27.672)

Exactly, exactly. Yes. When you talk about the evolution of complex systems, I mean a cell phone is a perfect example of, you know, ingenuity, engineering, you know, whether it’s electrical, mechanical, fabrication, assembly, the the yeah, it it’s really pushing complexity. So with that said, let’s move on to wish list number five, you know, item number five that I would say is like send us a clean

John Johnson (24:45.922)

Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:53.928)

design a clean, consistent data package, you know. Here, you know, let’s talk about, you know, what lands in your inbox. You know, what does manufacturing friendly package really look like? You know, or and, you know, what does a nightmare look like?

John Johnson (25:10.958)

Well, what would be great to have is the data file is labeled with the part number.

and the and the rev so we know that what we have is that really a preferred format ODB++, I mean that’s that’s generally helps to get a clean setup you know you get all the the correct labeling through of the layers and so on and so forth gerbers are fine we can work with the gerbers every day but

In that we find that a lot of times you have a stack up drawing that you have on your print that says, Okay, here’s the top layer, and then here’s inner layer one and then here’s mid layer three and then this is a power four and all that. They have their own unique names that that mean something to you. But in the reality, in a data package they may be labeled something else. So they need to have consistent labeling inside and out. I mean

compared to the print and that. I mean that is probably the one area that you can cause yourself problems, cause the board manufacturer problems in getting it just consistent. Top layer, bottom layer. Just let’s start with what it is. It’s layer one. Layer one’s the top.

You know, layer N as the bottom, let’s say twelve or whatever you have. And that way it’s clean, it’s clear. So, you know, those are I think important. The other problem we see a lot of times is that you know, we might get a two-layer board that has all the print notes on it for a multi-layer. you might get a multi-layer board that has print print notes for for a a different technology and

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (27:03.14)

Okay.

So true. Yep.

John Johnson (27:09.964)

where you have these boilerplates you gotta be able to pick out those notes that don’t apply.

and and understand. because it’s if you’re asking for something on a simple commercial board and you want class three or defense type type requirements, you’re gonna pay through the nose. So it those notes sometimes can be problematic. in some cases they might not easily be met either. So

That’s I think that’s one of the most important things to keep a keep an eye on those notes.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (27:55.459)

Awesome. You know, I, one of my biggest pet peeves is pay attention to the details and just because you finished the design and you’re all like finally got that monkey off your back, it’s now a hundred percent clean, clear, you’re good. Now you gotta create the fab drawing and you hand that off to somebody else or you you s you don’t pay attention much to the details and like you said, you’re using border plates, you’re copying pasting, you know, these notes,

John Johnson (28:22.883)

Right.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (28:25.188)

And they you didn’t take the time to look, does it match your actual design intent of what you wanted or what you designed? And like you said, you have a two-layer board that you designed and you’re using notes from like an eight-layer board that is something more complex with blind and buried vias. And yeah, I’ve seen that a lot. There’s nothing worse than getting the technical query back and that your job is on hold because your fab notes don’t match your actual design data.

John Johnson (28:46.902)

And

John Johnson (28:56.162)

Yeah, th I guess okay.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (28:56.624)

So with that, let’s move on to, you know, wish number six. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, one last thing on there.

John Johnson (29:01.654)

No, I just gonna say is i i if you don’t know how to spec something, you don’t know how to call it on a print. That’s why we’re here. You gotta talk to your your manufacturer. ‘Cause they’ll help you spec it out and you won’t have a problem. Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (29:11.48)

Exactly. Well stated, well said. I couldn’t I couldn’t echo that more. I could amplify that more. So let’s move on to wish number six. You know, this is where you, you know, tell us the why behind your critical specs. You know, here, you know, this is this one might be the most philosophical item on the wish list, you know. you called it the the power of the why. You know, what do you mean by that?

John Johnson (29:37.837)

Well so if we know why, we’ve been around. We have a lot of talent in an organization. most board manufacturers have people that have seen a lot of designs over their career. And if they know why, then they can help you get to that final result that you wanna wanna have. Whether it be thermal management

You know, questions on rigid flex, things like that. If you’re looking for a certain RF characteristic, you know, well, how tight does it need to be? What are you trying to achieve? things like that. I mean it do you need that four mil line for that RF design to be four point exactly?

Or can you have the normal IP C specs where it might be four and a half or or or you know, three and a half?

Well, if you’re gonna find out from an RF designer that he wants it at four point no variance, you know, but realistically speaking we can do that today because we can use some of the UHDI type technologies to get tighter line widths even on w you know, wider circuits. So if you if you just talk to us and you know tell us what you’re trying to achieve, and even from a mechanical standpoint, you know, where you you’re trying

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (30:45.819)

Hmm.

John Johnson (31:07.376)

to get a a board to fit in a tight space, how do we best achieve that? How do we separate it out of an array? You know, what’s the best strategy there? Some materials are very brittle, polyamids especially. rigid polyamids, you know, if you drill those, they’re gonna fracture.

Very hard to keep that from happening. But there’s better materials. Some that don’t fracture as well as is as easy as others. But there’s also materials that you know if you know what you’re doing, you can actually have your plunge points away from the edge of the board and work your way in. So when you design your arrays, you need to think about that. Something as simple as a road path can really cause a lot of problems. And it it’s again getting us involved and telling

is what you’re looking for is just it’s magic. It really is magic because forty eight years I’ve seen seen a lot of stuff. So and it’s yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (32:10.096)

Yeah. I bet, I bet. yeah. I I I tell you, it’s it’s amazing when you think about, you know, decisions that are made, they toss it over the wall and then they’re complaining why it’s taking so long or why why th the job is on hold and the complexity’s through the roof and they’ve sent you the impossible and they’re asking you, you know, to be Batman or Superman to save the day.

John Johnson (32:26.592)

eight. Yeah, it’s

John Johnson (32:34.402)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes to fix those things takes forever. Because okay, well, this isn’t a buildable design. And now you get it back and you say, what do I gotta do to fix this? Well, you gotta do this and that and now you lose a month or two or three. So, you know, it’s it’s

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (32:37.915)

Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (32:55.576)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, most yeah, most projects, yeah, that’s that that’s catastrophic right there. That’s from my perspective, that’s a failure in engineering from the beginning. So with that, let’s move on to wish number seven. This is where, you know, understand that design competes for the floor time. When you think about, you know, what are you actually buying for when you send your design, you know, over to manufacturing? You’re actually paying for that slot.

John Johnson (33:01.836)

Yeah, exactly.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (33:23.086)

in the production, you know, flow to get your time your project time on the floor. So here’s where s something designers really think about, you know, because they they have their they’re so focused on the design itself, they don’t think about the allocation time and when how long it’s gonna take to get through the cam engineering and then to get it out onto the floor. Whereas from your perspective you do. So what are what actually happens to the job once it hits the floor? You know, walk us through that reality.

John Johnson (33:51.545)

Well, getting it to the floor sometimes is the biggest challenge. in this in this given marketplace right now, we’re getting a lot of products in for

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (33:58.237)

Exactly.

John Johnson (34:07.982)

Kind from a defense related aspect, you know. You’ve got a lot of replenishment of things that have been burned up over the last several years actually. you’ve got a lot of high tech technology out there, quantum computers, you’ve got the big data centers and things like that that are driving driving demand in a lot of different ways. so when you have that, your engineering group

at at a board fab facility can have seventy or a hundred jobs in front of them. And when your job comes and it is poorly designed, it’s gonna sit there and wait in some cases. If it’s a simple design, we can turn it through the group usually within a few hours. But if it’s if it’s got technology issues

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (34:44.976)

Yeah.

John Johnson (35:05.238)

it’s gonna take a while to get it straightened out. And so that may sit for a little bit. when we have you know defense work coming in, a lot of times that gets top priority because of of ratings on it. materials that you chosen, for example. If you’re using a material that is hard to get right now, it just ain’t gonna happen. You know, it’s it’s

of course it gives us time to tool it you know but if you’re waiting thirteen weeks for material, well what the heck. so a lot of times we can help with that, you know, when we talk about that. I think I mentioned that a few times in the in this talk, but it’s you know, you have to be prepared for that. And if you haven’t haven’t talked to us, you won’t know until the very end and

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (35:37.648)

Yeah.

John Johnson (36:01.016)

A lot of the materials we have today come from Asia, you know, Japan, Taiwan, China. and so getting them here is a challenge. And China consumes a lot of material in its o in its own right. So having the materials here is is critical. So if you want to get it to market fast, it

It needs to be designed right. It needs to have the right materials. And the only way you’re gonna really know is to work with us. I mean it’s it we can shorten that for you so much. Also, we work with you on the design, we’re invested. We spent time working with you. You know, we now have a relationship and you know, silly as it may sound.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:49.169)

Yes.

I agree.

John Johnson (36:55.938)

People tend to help their friends sooner than they’ll help their enemies. So so yeah. So so from that that perspective I guess that’s it just don’t forget about us because it’s we really we wanna help. And that’s that’s why we’re here. We’ve got a lot of expertise.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (37:02.426)

Very well stated. You’re exactly right. Yep.

John Johnson (37:23.406)

It’s a shame to to not talk to someone and we talk to a lot of the folks who are who are working on their designs, so I see the results of those that have worked with us versus someone that just comes and throws a design on our desk and says, Hey, I need this in four weeks.

as you hear the laughter in the background, you know, ’cause it’s you know, thirty two layers and and whatnot. So

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (37:48.112)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (37:54.491)

Yeah. You know, I’ll tell you, you know, relationship with your fabricators and communication from the very beginning is so important. I I can’t stress that enough or I can’t echo it that enough of what you’re saying and and what you have said, you know, in in many of your speeches and and presentations and webinars that you’ve given.

in the industry. But I want to hit you with this last this last thing, you know, the one sentence wish list summary. You know, John, if if every PCB designer listening today took just one thing away from this conversation, what would you want it to be?

John Johnson (38:30.476)

Well, I think it’s what I’ve been mentioning kind of all the way through. Call us, email us, text me. Anything we can do to help. that’s that’s the biggest thing. But understand this is a different world we live in today. This is from a year ago, the whole world is upside down.

And if you don’t understand that materials are an extremely short supply, that choosing the right material can save you weeks, if not months, in terms of delivery.

You know, that’s that’s the important thing because you got a design you have to have to make happen for your company. And if it if it’s got material that we can’t get for three months, four months, and there’s there’s materials out there that have that long of a lead time right now, you know, there’s alternatives that might be easier to use. So it that’s that’s probably the biggest key. I mean you gotta remember that

You know, board manufacturers have seen all of these things before. I’ve seen business cycles like this and I know what what can be done in a lot of cases. We have inventories of material in in stock. So if we can use those some of those materials you get immediate immediately on the factory floor. So it’s it’s that’s some of the keys I guess is

yeah, you you look at these problems.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (40:11.78)

Yeah, I I I would tell you, you know, when I think of, you know, the materials and the supply, you know, designed for resilience. And you can’t do that without communication with, you know, fabrication with your suppliers, which, you know, then, you know, leads you to, you know, supply chain resilience. You have to have that intelligence at the point of design. And this is where fabrication helps us engineers make better decisions. And especially when it comes to the material for the stack up.

the technology, which via technology we’re gonna implement and and like you said, the components that are driving us into, you know, Ultra HDI, because, you know, some EE chose a a BGA with a pin pitch or a micro BGA with a pin pitch below point five millimeters. It’s we have no choice, you know, and what are the costs of those decisions in our, you know, high reliability, you you know, you gotta you gotta think of producer and reliability. It’s you think of that designer’s triangle for, you know,

what we need to achieve regarding solvability, you know, performance in manufacturing, high yield, low cost, that’s the key. So with that said, John, you know, it’s about all we have time for. Do you have something else you want to add?

John Johnson (41:18.636)

Yeah, it’s it’s well

John Johnson (41:23.926)

Well, and just that whole thing with the component shrinking continually is what’s driven our industry since I started. I used to build ten ten mil lines and spaces and now I’m building one. And it’s going lower. So but y you know Yes, yeah. But that’s you know what we’re seeing today with point three millimeter, I’ll guarantee ya it’s gonna get smaller. It always does. So

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:35.164)

Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:39.066)

Yeah. Yeah, those those days are way behind us.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:51.93)

yeah. I mean I it’s inevitable. I mean w it things are getting smaller and smaller, packages are getting smaller, you know, design teams are small, budgets are small, even the the deadlines are getting shorter and and compressed and you know we’re we’re having to do a lot more with less. So this is this is an ongoing challenge, you know. Well, John, that that’s about all we’re gonna have time for today.

Anything else or anything last thing you want to add to this to the audience?

John Johnson (42:23.278)

Well no, just just thanks Steph. I appreciate you taking some time so we can sit and talk about this. I really enjoy sharing you know the things that we go through and and really appreciate you reaching out and and having the time to sit together and and we’ll see you soon I hope. Yep.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (42:42.428)

John, it’s always my pleasure to have, you know, good, insightful conversations with you, indeed. So I want to thank you, John, for sharing your valuable insights and you know, your viewpoints on the relationship between design and fabrication from a fabricator’s perspective. You know, and to our audience, as always, continue to follow me, the Printed Circuit Podcast, and then tune in for more trends, challenges, and opportunities across the Printed Circuit engineering industry.