-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueLevel Up Your Design Skills
This month, our contributors discuss the PCB design classes available at IPC APEX EXPO 2024. As they explain, these courses cover everything from the basics of design through avoiding over-constraining high-speed boards, and so much more!
Opportunities and Challenges
In this issue, our expert contributors discuss the many opportunities and challenges in the PCB design community, and what can be done to grow the numbers of PCB designers—and design instructors.
Embedded Design Techniques
Our expert contributors provide the knowledge this month that designers need to be aware of to make intelligent, educated decisions about embedded design. Many design and manufacturing hurdles can trip up designers who are new to this technology.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
Producing Diverse Designs in Concert With Manufacturing
June 16, 2022 | Scott Miller, FreedomCAD ServicesEstimated reading time: 2 minutes
There is a new acronym bubbling up in the design world: DWM, which stands for “design with manufacturing.” Why is this different than design for manufacturing, or DFM? With DWM, the emphasis is on integration between the design team and the manufacturers during the design process. DWM is much more than that.
As an engineering service company, we provide design services to companies that require additional capacity to meet time-to-market objectives or technical expertise that may be beyond the experience or core competency of the company we are supporting.
Whatever the reason, we are tasked with producing designs that meet various technical requirements, yet are cost-effective and manufacturable. We provide this service to hundreds of customers who have varying degrees of processes, tools, and manufacturing partners. Given this diversity, we have recognized the importance of designing with manufacturing to achieve the product development goals of manufacturability and technical excellence.
Our business revolves around printed circuit board design services. We are not an OEM and we don’t develop products; therefore we start with customer-supplied data. The depth of the data varies depending upon the customer and the project, but we are receiving inputs from the customer to start the process. This is when the most important part of the process starts: communication. It’s important to understand the technical and tactical requirements. Besides the typical technical product development questions, there are several questions that we will also flush out early in the process:
- What are the product specifications that must be met?
- Are there geographic or ITAR restrictions?
- What are the projected prototype and production volumes?
- Do you have an approved vendor list (AVL), incumbent board fabricators, and/or contract manufacturers?
- Does the product require RoHS compliance?
- Do you have any single source components or custom components on your bill of materials (BOM)?
- What is your project’s target completion date?
Addressing these questions helps identify all the DWM stakeholders so that we can begin communications to assure that we are in sync. The goal is to validate the decisions early in the design process rather than later, or during fabrication or assembly when problems are much more expensive to resolve. It is important to match the technical requirements with manufacturers whose process capabilities are well aligned with the technical requirements.
Communication: Saving Money, Resources
For instance, receiving guidance from your PCB fabricator on laminate material options, costs, and availability issues is very beneficial. Establishing a board stackup that meets the technical requirements and is manufacturable is a prerequisite for successful high-performance or high-volume designs.
Identifying coupon requirements, testing, panelization, thieving, and assembly rail requirements helps to streamline the PCB fabrication process and promote efficient assembly of the printed circuit board. Designing with blind and buried vias can increase the fab processing time but it may enable a PCB to be designed in fewer layers, which can more than offset the increased processing time. This could be very significant for high-volume products. Addressing these requirements upfront enables the design to move smoothly through the fab and assembly processes.
To read this entire article, which appeared in the June 2022 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.
Suggested Items
iNEMI Packaging Tech Topic Series: Role of EDA in Advanced Semiconductor Packaging
04/26/2024 | iNEMIAdvanced semiconductor packaging with heterogenous integration has made on-package integration of multiple chips a crucial part of finding alternatives to transistor scaling. Historically, EDA tools for front-end and back-end design have evolved separately; however, design complexity and the increased number of die-to-die or die-to-substrate interconnections has led to the need for EDA tools that can support integration of overall design planning, implementation, and system analysis in a single cockpit.
Cadence, TSMC Collaborate on Wide-Ranging Innovations to Transform System and Semiconductor Design
04/25/2024 | Cadence Design SystemsCadence Design Systems, Inc. and TSMC have extended their longstanding collaboration by announcing a broad range of innovative technology advancements to accelerate design, including developments ranging from 3D-IC and advanced process nodes to design IP and photonics.
Ansys, TSMC Enable a Multiphysics Platform for Optics and Photonics, Addressing Needs of AI, HPC Silicon Systems
04/25/2024 | PRNewswireAnsys announced a collaboration with TSMC on multiphysics software for TSMC's Compact Universal Photonic Engines (COUPE). COUPE is a cutting-edge Silicon Photonics (SiPh) integration system and Co-Packaged Optics platform that mitigates coupling loss while significantly accelerating chip-to-chip and machine-to-machine communication.
Siemens’ Breakthrough Veloce CS Transforms Emulation and Prototyping with Three Novel Products
04/24/2024 | Siemens Digital Industries SoftwareSiemens Digital Industries Software launched the Veloce™ CS hardware-assisted verification and validation system. In a first for the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry, Veloce CS incorporates hardware emulation, enterprise prototyping and software prototyping and is built on two highly advanced integrated circuits (ICs) – Siemens’ new, purpose-built Crystal accelerator chip for emulation and the AMD Versal™ Premium VP1902 FPGA adaptive SoC (System-on-a-chip) for enterprise and software prototyping.
Listen Up! The Intricacies of PCB Drilling Detailed in New Podcast Episode
04/25/2024 | I-Connect007In episode 5 of the podcast series, On the Line With: Designing for Reality, Nolan Johnson and Matt Stevenson continue down the manufacturing process, this time focusing on the post-lamination drilling process for PCBs. Matt and Nolan delve into the intricacies of the PCB drilling process, highlighting the importance of hole quality, drill parameters, and design optimization to ensure smooth manufacturing. The conversation covers topics such as drill bit sizes, aspect ratios, vias, challenges in drilling, and ways to enhance efficiency in the drilling department.