-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueOpportunities 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.
Manufacturing Know-how
For this issue, we asked our expert contributors to share their thoughts on the absolute “must-know” aspects of fab, assembly and test that all designers should understand. In the end, we’re all in this together.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
DownStream Discusses Rigid-flex and DFM Trends
May 2, 2023 | Kelly Dack, CID+, EPTACEstimated reading time: 3 minutes
I recently sat down with Joe Clark, founder, and Ray Fugitt, technical marketing manager, of DownStream Technologies to discuss trends in tool design and manufacturing, including rigid-flex design and refreshed graphical user interfaces (GUI).
Kelly Dack: Gentlemen, thanks for speaking with me. Let's talk about design for manufacturability (DFM) trends and how your tools play into these.
Joe Clark: The biggest trend that we're seeing now, and the one we're highlighting in our products, is the proliferation of rigid-flex design. It presents challenges, from documentation of multiple stackups and zones to DFM analysis. Many of our customers are asking how they use these tools to solve problems that they’re dealing with now.
Dack: Ray, tell us how this plays into DFM from the standpoint of both the designer and the manufacturer.
Ray Fugitt: Thanks. My background is in rigid, so rigid-flex has been a learning process for me. Our last two releases are dedicated to flex and rigid-flex designs. We work with some large OEMs that do rigid-flex every day. We basically borrowed the rules and challenges that they’re seeing and incorporated them into our DFM tool.
Dack: When designers are setting up DFM rules and constraints in design tools or analysis software, they often ask, “What constraints do we enter? How do we find the design and manufacturing constraints for setting the tool?” So, do they come from the board supplier or are there general specifications?
Fugitt: Funny, I thought they’d ask whether the constraints come from the design rules or the fabricator. It's not an either/or situation. Basically, with our tool, you can choose to set and run it against your own internal design rules or your fabricator’s capabilities. We actually include a real-world example of design for assembly (DFA) from an American board shop, and we include that in our software. It's a starting point and then you work from there.
Dack: Very good. And let's talk about what else you are working on now.
Fugitt: Sure. BluePrint is our documentation tool. If you think about all the documentation that goes along with doing a PCB design, our existing competition for this tool is actually all the workarounds that people have devised over the years. There's no other tool out there that does what this does. We automate the creation of PCB documentation. You bring in the design, and a lot of your documentation is done right there. Then, you just work with the rest of it.
CAM350 and DFMStream are our analysis tools. As you probably know, CAM350 has a had a long history in the PCB fabrication sector. It's grown throughout the years and has transitioned to also become a very robust and powerful analysis tool, although it still does fabrication very well. But it mainly does things like DFM, design compares, netlist compares, and other things to address common problems earlier in design chain.
We recently held a user group meeting, and it was well attended. We talked about some of its newer features, such as its more modern interface. This new GUI came around a few years ago, and we continue to evolve it. We put in a new graphic engine to make it redraw quicker. We addressed some of the more aggravating things that happen when you're using a tool like this. We've done as much as we can to make this tool a lot more powerful.
Dack: Ray, you’ve been posting a lot of helpful online videos.
Fugitt: Yes. I'm a YouTube personality. I have almost 500,000 hits on YouTube.
Dack: You are indeed! You're a social media influencer. Not quite like Elon Musk, but you influenced me, and in a good way.
Fugitt: Glad I could help.
Dack: Very good. It’s been great speaking with you gentlemen.
Clark: Thanks, Kelly. It’s always a pleasure.
Suggested Items
SMTA’s Conducts First UHDI Symposium
03/29/2024 | Marcy LaRont, PCB007 MagazineSMTA’s first UHDI Symposium in Peoria, Arizona, on Tuesday, March 26 featured a standout full-day technical program with 11 separate presentations on what will be required for our companies to move to ultra HDI manufacturing. The event was the brainchild of Tara Dunn, SMTA director of training and education. It included a compelling and collaborative presentation by David Haboud of Altium, John Johnson of American Standards Circuits, and Chrys Shea of Shea Engineering, who had spent the past several weeks creating and building an appropriate SMT test board vehicle for UHDI, something that was passed around for all conference goers to see and touch.
PCBflow Helps Designers Choose Best Manufacturer for the Job
03/28/2024 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 MagazineI recently spoke with a few technologists who have first-hand experience with PCBflow: Susan Kayesar, technical product manager with Siemens; Evgeny Makhline, CTO of Nistec, a CEM based in Israel; and Peter Tranitz, senior director of technology solutions and leader of the IPC Design Initiative. They explain how PCBflow functions, from the designer’s and manufacturer’s viewpoint, and how this database helps break down the wall between these stakeholders.
Elementary, Mr. Watson: Ensuring Design Integrity
03/28/2024 | John Watson -- Column: Elementary, Mr. WatsonBack in February, many of us watched the "Big Game." It reminded me of the saying, “It's not how you start that is important, but rather how you finish." It is perfectly okay when you are talking about sports, you get off to a bad first half and need to recover in the second half. However, when it comes to PCB design, this is not a good practice. If things start badly, they usually don't recover. They continue down that same path, costing more money and losing design time.
Arrow Electronics Launches Intelligent Vision Ecosystem
03/27/2024 | BUSINESS WIREArrow Electronics, Inc. is utilizing the onsemi Imager Access System (IAS) module standard for developing intelligent vision solutions for use in robotics, machine vision, commercial cameras and other uses.
Dymax Will Exhibit Light-Cure Solutions for Today’s Electronics at IPC APEX 2024
03/26/2024 | DymaxDymax, a leading manufacturer of rapid and light-curing materials and equipment, will exhibit at the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 in Anaheim, CA, April 9-11.