OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

Bert Simonovich is founder of Lamsim Enterprises and an expert in innovative signal integrity and backplane solutions. He holds two patents and author of several publications. Anyone involved with the design and fabrication of high-speed circuit cards and backplanes or people who needs to estimate PCB transmission lines losses will find value in the paper Bert shared at DesignCon 2018, “A Causal Conductor Roughness Model and Its Effect on Transmission Line Characteristics”.  

Listen in to Join Judy Warner and Bert discuss copper roughness and the paper he presented at DesignCon 2018.

Copper roughness is located between the laminate and the copper

• From a manufacturing perspective, the rougher the copper the better
• But for high speed, the rougher the copper the higher the loss
• If you don’t model it correctly you cannot simulate it accurately
• The Huray model dilemma - where do you get the parameters to use for the model?
• Last year’s paper was about correcting the dielectric constant due to roughness
• New model is dubbed the Cannonball-Huray model
• The effort is collaborative, building on each others’ research i.e. Rogers, Polar
• As speed goes up, material properties are more important i.e. Fiber weave effect
• Accurate modeling is very important especially with new standards and tighter margins

 

Links and Resources:

Bert’s Whitepapers

Bert’s Articles on Signal Integrity Journal

Bert Simonovich’s Linkedin

Bert’s Twitter

Lamsim Enterprises, Inc.

 

Hi everyone this is Judy with the OnTrack podcast welcome back. If you are new to our podcast make sure to subscribe on your favorite RSS feed you can follow me on LinkedIn please.

Please. I love having friends on LinkedIn or at Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and as far as Altium goes you can follow us on LinkedIn Twitter or Facebook.

So today I am at Design Con 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and I'm delighted to have my dear friend Bert Simonovich who hails from Canada and so we're gonna chat with Bert today about the paper he submitted and all the things he's involved in. I also want to share with you about our fun history in Hobart and how we got to know each other. So Bert, welcome to our podcast and we only get to see each other maybe once or twice a year but I'm always so happy to see you.

Likewise, likewise Judy.

I'm glad you showed up this year and I'm glad I could get you. Last year I couldn't get you because you were so busy with your papers and everything; you were desperate, you were booked to the gunnels last year so I'm glad we got to run into each other.

So, to give you a little bit of background about Bert... well let me start from when Bert and I met. So what was it 2006 six or 2010?

Yeah 2010, something like that.

Yeah, so Bert was sort of in a transition period in his career and we met on LinkedIn and then we actually met at the show at Design Con and we connected through social media and we're old enough you know, and respectable enough in our careers that we didn't feel like that was creepy or anything. So we connected and we met upstairs; the top of the escalators here at Design Con, and we got acquainted and just networked and boy oh boy we didn't know the number of ways that our past would continue to cross over the years so, we hit it off immediately and Burt knew an awful lot about backplane and tell me again, you worked for a huge company up in Canada?

Okay so yeah we live in Ottawa area and I started my career at Bell Northern Research which was the research and development arm of Northern Telecom or eventually North Dell in Bell Canada.

There you go,

so it's essentially the same as like the AT&T; down here - researching, development and then that later got to fold it into the Nortel umbrella and I was there my entire career. It was 32 years until 2009 when they filed for bankruptcy and then my career ended…

Abruptly.

And that was kind of a shock. Then I was fortunate that I was able to you know - we weren't in bad shape financially - so it didn't hit us like it hit others. So I've considered myself fortunate, but what I missed was the day-to-day and and not knowing what the future was because at that time there was the downturn economy so it's hard for everybody and certainly harder for older ones and we were able to get out and fortunately got our pensions early and that kind of kept us going.

Yeah so that's right about the time I met you, not long after that right, and so you're like: mmm what am I gonna do now? I have all this knowledge and expertise how am I gonna apply it and so on your own dime you flew down here. We met and I was hoping that we were just networking to see how we could help one another professionally and whatnot, since that time - boy oh boy.

IMS came up from the UK to Montreal and we met again there.

That's right we met again there. We met at IMS so then, all of a sudden, our lives started weaving because I was in the RF and microwave space from the bare board side, and then I was doing the guest blogging for Microwave Journal and then you got to know all the folks - or you knew those folks in that space and then you got to know the Microwave Journal folks who have since launched the Signal Integrity Journal and now you're on that editorial review or review board for that magazine?

That's right.

And now, I think you just told me, this is your first year now that you're in the Technical Review Committee?

Technical Program Committee Yeah.

Right for Design Con so you actually reviewed the papers then that were being subpoenaed by some papers?

Yes.

Did they divvy them up?

Yes they basically divvy it up so there's quite a few reviewers for it to get the diversity and not just one person, several people review the same paper as well.

Right good. So, not only is he reviewing papers he's also submitting papers. So I want to say  congratulations that you are a finalist for best paper.

Oh thanks Judy.

Well I don't know that’s third time in a row now?

Actually five.

Five! You've been nominated that many times or you've submitted, but you've been nominated that many times. I see, so you are like a rockstar! So, tell us about the paper that you submitted this year.

Okay. This paper is actually a follow-up from last year's paper that I presented and last year after I presented it, there was a great discussion afterwards. It was the end of the day and people - there were no more papers after - and people that were interested stayed and we had a good little wrap of things and were discussing some of my results. And although I was close there was some doubt as to actually what it was, why there was still differences and my co-author Vladimir he had an idea that it's possibly due to causality of the metal.

Okay.

And Vladimir works for a mentor and so he had this idea and I had data and my technique and we decided to collaborate and see how well it would work. So he incorporated his algorithms into the tool and we checked it out and that brought the data exactly right on.

Wow! So this paper is kind of a wrap or closing the loop at the end of last year's paper basically?

That's correct, it's kind of a follow-up in a way and it kind of answers the question that we were suspecting. - the people who were discussing as a group were suspecting - so that was very satisfying when I had that. So we said, well we've got to publish this now so we'll do that.

So it was a copper roughness issue?

Well it's part of modeling called copper roughness, to model copper roughness properly and get the right model afterwards so you can do the simulations.

Isn’t that hard? I mean it seems like copper roughness, which is the roughness - for anyone that's not clear on this of our listeners - copper roughness is between the laminate and the copper. Not on the topside of them it's on the bottom side where it's being bonded to the laminate but it's not always the same?

No the thing is with roughness from a PCB manufacturing perspective, the rougher the better.

Right because there's adhesion.

Right peel strength. Nowadays, for high speed past 10 gigabit, now everything starts to matter and now people are talking 25 gigabit - 56 gigabit all the stuff lost, now becomes a factor. So it turns out the rougher the copper the higher the loss, so how do you model that? If you don't model that correctly you can't simulate it in advance.

Exactly.

So the bottling techniques in accuracy - so there's been different models out there one that's been very popular is the Hury model that was presented back in 2010 because I remember going to that presentation. Basically it was dubbed the ‘snowball model’ because when you look at the roughness profile under an electron scanning microscope, it looks like a stack of snowballs type of thing.

Okay.

Uh-huh and that's where it got coined the snowball model but it's the Hury model and it's very accurately  shown that you get very good results measured to simulation. The problem was where do you get the parameters to feed that model? Back then to get it, if you tuned the parameters you could get an excellent fit to the loss but that doesn't help for tools so how do I get that? Unless you're building a board or measuring the board to get the parameters so you can use those again if you're going to build that same geometry in a new design. So that's very time-consuming - pretty accurate - but not practical for smaller companies. If you need a good answer now, rather than a good answer later as Eric Bogatin always says, that never helps you. So, one of my early contract positions, because I started going in consultancy after Nortel. One of my clients they wanted to do some analysis on dielectrics but they also wanted to include their roughness and I knew nothing about roughness at that time. So I started to do my own research into this so that I could try and do the work, and found that it was all over the place in a way.

Anyway, I completed the analysis not even based on what I knew at the time and it was okay, but that seed sort of stuck. So I started in it and once you get an interest in something then try to go further and further. So it's been a pet project of mine so I decided to think about the Hury model and say: well, is there a way to get these parameters based on datasheet value only? If I know the roughness from a datasheet the, height of the roughness, can I get the radius though? So I thought about it and you know, I thought about: okay, this is the stack of spheres. If I stack them up can I determine the radius of the sphere from that stack? So you know it's basic geometry of things and eventually you can get that number if you know this height. So I thought - just out of curiosity - I'm gonna try it and when I did, I got reasonably good results, almost right off the bat. I'm not perfect, but I can tweak things a little bit more and I'm saying okay… That's how it kind of began so it's been over a few years, off and on. I did a paper earlier in 2015, when I first presented some of it, and that was quite successful and every year it's been kind of incremental and testing it against other data and then eventually other software came out like simBR and I started having success with the model there and that was great and so it kind of went. So lately, after that, then I started thinking about I never get the the actual delay property. So in order to model things, you need proper loss and then also the the delay property or the phase. So then I thought well, perhaps, how does the roughness come into it? Because I noticed the rough with the copper I get different phases for the same material. Anyway so I worked out some some things and that's what last year's paper was about, to correct the the dielectric constant due to roughness...

It was really last year's paper.

Uh-huh and so that that worked out very well and when I correct that, I get very good results with it so that's it in a nutshell how I got from there to here.

Wow. So I know you've worked also with Polar instruments. Tell us about how that came about?

Yes so last year Polar had introduced the Hurray model into their tool and I hadn't really met Martin but in his newsletters I always got it and he announced that they were going to come out with the remodel and a Polar tool so I emailed Martin and said; look let me check it out to see how well it works. So they gave me a trial thing just to check it out and I tested it out against my data and there was just a couple of hiccups, but we sorted them out and now the tool - it's a great tool - we can get the parameters now basically from data sheet to fill in. So we've dubbed the model really like a ‘cannonball’ Hury model because it's a combination of both.

Well Martin spoke, I think I shared this with you earlier that in October Martin Godean from Polar presented a talk at Altium Life in Munich and I was chairing the room he was in and he pulls up this stack of cannonballs - you and I hadn't talked about this - then he starts citing all this work by Bert Simonovich. I nearly fell out of chair, like my friend Bert? So I really love that Bert, you've like been such a collaborative force in this industry about these models and you know that you reached out to talk to Polar and really made it better. Not so much in a self-serving way but it's good for the industry really, it's good for designers right?

I think so.

And so I really appreciate that generosity of spirit that you have and it's what I liked about you when I first met you and here we are all these years later who knew.

That's right.

So, what's next Bert?  Tell us first of all, where can our listeners find your papers because I'm sure they'll want to get their hands on those?

Yes so I published papers that I have on my website at my company is http://lamsimenterprises.com.

Okay.

Well I'm sensing we'll try to put that in text somewhere I relate to this podcast so folks can find that and then they can find your consulting services there as well but then find all your papers there. Did Design Con aggregate the papers that come out of the show?

Oh yeah they have the proceedings.

But only the attendees get their proceedings right? So they can come to your website is the  bottom line, right?

Right, so anyways so for my papers, I have my papers that I published on my website and it's not just Design Con I’ve also done EDI Con papers and that's part of the signal integrity journal. There's an offshoot of that - is EDI Con - and I attended that the last two years, they were the first two. So there's Boston that was great time. Actually you went to the first one?

Yeah I went to the first one I can't believe how our lives have just crossed so many times. We just met each other here and went hi.

And you met and you met my wife.

Yeah I met  your wife on that trip.

Bert and I got to go to Fenway Park and have a private party at night and overlooking the fields and they brought out... what are those? I'm such a sports nut.

The trophies from the World Series.

- thank you the World Series trophies. They brought those out so we could you know take photo ops with and we had great food and we got to take over Fenway for a few hours and I met Bert's wife who's just a doll and we had a great time. So who knew when we met how our paths would cross?

But I think Design Con in general is about is networking, meeting new people, learning new things spreading the seed of papers. Like I was mentioning even last year's paper - Rogers took that and then confirmed the data or the theory part of it and then they presented results this year.

It’s such a great collaborative effort and I don't know I find it very refreshing because you know, like well I have a secret and if you give me a lot of money it might tell it to you. This is much more open handed and collaborative. I liked what you said earlier today - which was somebody will present something and then an offshoot will take off and then it'll take off and then someone will build on that and bring it back as something else. It's really the industry together - collaborating.

That's also for mine like 2010 with the snowball model, who knew? That room was packed to the rafters and out - that presentation from Paul Hury and Eric Bogaton’s and he presented that year and I was just dumbfounded and I'm going, well I don't understand it but that's cool, and that who knew that that would be the seed for my work, my research work.

And and then went into Polar and Rogers and it's just like an idea that sprung legs.

And that's just my example. One example of many you just look around - like Eric likes to say - come drink from the fire hose, that's the Design Con there’s just so much stuff and it's there and it's just a great place for that kind of thing.

It is a great show. So, a couple closing items. Number one what would you say for circuit board designers, are some of the kind of greatest challenges they're facing today? Looking forward into emerging technology is there any specific - one or two things maybe - that are sort of plaguing them at this point? Or things maybe they need to onboard and that they are not taking right now?

Just in general as the speeds are going up the actual material properties are really becoming a factor. A big thing is fiber - we've talked a lot about that - fiber weave effect and the industry is looking how to mitigate that effect. A lot of nice papers over the last few years, talking about that and again there's a lot of things on the roughness, getting good modeling because it's important now. And now with everything like the new Pam-4 standards, 56 gigabit. The margins are tighter, so fabricating boards is more demanding.

Yeah it ain't what it used to be I can tell you. I started in the board fabrication industry in 1984. Oh my gosh that seems like such easy stuff compared to today. I was just speaking with John Belushi from ASC and I said it used to be you just got your board, your fab drawing you had your sort of mechanical, here's the size of the footprint, this is the size of the trace plus or minus this, and off to the races you go. Now it's like a board fabricator has to think about everything they're doing and how that is going to impact. You can go to a board shop, make a board and be well within IPC standards and its’ still not performing to the designers intent.

I think it's not just the board shop, I think sort of the industry as well, you have to specify what you want properly in your fabrication notes.

What fabrication notes. What I'm saying is documentation, I think is an issue.

Yes and and the thing I'm seeing is if you want consistent results you have to nail down your design. Basically nail it down and not let the fabricator substitute material for different weaves. For instance if you have a stack up that you first designed it's got to be included verbatim on the fabrication notes. So you must use this material, this weave.You can’t substitute, and you can't play around with all the line widths and space to do things different. By specifying things on the notes that restricts what they can do you should end up getting what you want otherwise you may not.

And you had told me earlier in your consultancy business that you will talk about modeling certainly, but then you also give them the added benefits of giving them some guidelines of how to spec in these.

Yeah so typically a lot of my business is design reviewing boards before fabrication. After they do the design like Altium Board Designer would lay it out, so now there's a design review at the end so some of the clients they'd like to get some review over that visual review and I do that sort of thing for them. But as part of that, I review the stack up even from the board shop because the stack up people are human and could make an error. Typo or a lot of times they're just templates and they don't cut and paste properly or something, and it may not be correct. I haven't found anything that wasn't correct but I do that anyways, just check it, double check that the impedance is correct in things. But on top of that I also say that I'm going to review their fabrication notes to ensure there's consistency there and usually I find that a lot of these are smaller companies or startups. They're not aware of what's needed or they have one set of fab notes and they have the same design all over. They just use it over and over but that could add confusion in the shop.

Yeah absolutely.

At the end of the day part of the design review it's also part of a bit of educating as well to some clients so they realize some of the importance and they appreciate that as well.

Yeah and it is so sorely needed and people don't, like you said especially smaller companies, they don't always have the resources to go out and spend endless hours in a board shop getting educated or whatever the issue is. Or educated about signal integrity or whatever it is, so I think what you're offering in your business and in that niche is really valuable so that's great.

Well my friend I'm gonna let you get back out on the show floor. I'm sure you have a lot to do today I'm sure you're a busy guy so yeah I so appreciate you spending a little time with me and I'm so glad we got to connect I know you're getting so busy - such a big shot these days - it's been a delight thank you.

Actually, the reason I knew you were here, I saw something on LinkedIn and saw you were responding to somebody and I go: wait a minute is Judy here? So then I LinkedIn messaged you last night and I said, are you here? and yeah so let’s connect today.

See there's a lesson to everybody, LinkedIn really is useful. Gosh you and I've met a lot of friends through LinkedIn. I'm so glad to see my friends. I don't get to see you enough so I'm glad to see you whenever I get to see you, I'm not gonna complain. So best to you, congratulations on your nomination again.

Thank you Judy and the same to you.

And have a great show  and I look forward to catching up with you next time.

This has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast please remember to subscribe on your favorite RSS feed and we look forward to talking with you next time and always remember to stay OnTrack.

What is design? Have you been inside a board house? Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Kelly Dack, CID+, for a lively conversation about PCB design and becoming educated in the field. From CID and CID+ to visits to your fab house, learn how to learn for PCB design and where some of these resources are available today.

 

Show Highlights:

• Design has to do with a breadth of knowledge. The design tool is only as good as the breadth of knowledge of the designer.
• Eric Bogatin’s PCB bootcamp-style at the University of Colorado provides exposure to the manufacturing
• Dreaming a product and then embedding the process steps within the layout
• You can control so many things in Altium Designer - setup constraints, DRC rules, etc.; designers need to know how to manipulate these constraints so it will yield the best results for the stakeholders in the prTocess.
• To design is to be in touch with all the stakeholders.
• Everything in CAD are nominal values / nominal data
• Without recognizing manufacturing tolerances, we’re doomed.
• Certified Interconnect Designer or CID Certification, from IPC, teaches the start to finish manufacturing process
• Eat, sleep and breath PCB design at AltiumLive 2018 - the largest conference in the world focused exclusively on PCB design
• With Altium Designer 18, “I’m finding it easier to communicate with my mechanical cohorts”.
• Dream feature: Snap back and forth from min to max toggle
• Merging the mechanical and the electrical: Mechatronics
• Design in prototype vs .production - what is sustainable in prototype environment might not work / be scalable in the production environment
• A challenge for everyone: go visit a board shop!
• Fun facts: Kelly has a hobby farm and plays harmonica (and guitar!)

 

Links and Resources:

Eric Bogatin’s University of Colorado PCB design program

Certified Interconnect Designer or CID Certification

IPC

AltiumLive 2018 - save the date!

Kelly Dack on Linkedin

 

Hi everyone this is Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast. Welcome back, we are recording today from Design Con 2018 in Santa Clara California. Today I have another amazing guest, Kelly Dack and before we get started I want to make  sure that you subscribe on your favorite RSS feed and also please follow me on LinkedIn or on Twitter at @AltiumJudy and Altium is also on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. So, please give us a follow and we'll continue to put out as much good content for designers and engineers as we can possibly razzle.

So today I am with Kelly Dack who is a PCB designer. Are you CID or CID + ?

CID +

CID+ so he's a hotshot.  So a designer for many years, currently he is with a Northwestern EMS provider and…

How many years have you been in the industry Kelly?

Well too many dimensions, thanks for having me Judy.

I know, I know...

But I thought you're gonna introduce me; look what the cat dragged in.

Yeah no…

- well no but yeah I've been in the industry since 1978 something like that.

Okay well longer than me so yeah, I don't like to say when I started either, but I think I started in ‘84 I know Wow I know I don't want to say how old I am but it just automatically dates me so Kelly so we're here at Design Con and I know you have a completely broad perspective of this industry because you've been on the journalistic side, you've been on the design side, you know about fabrication. Now you're on the MS side, you just mentioned that the design that's being done at your current place - that you have Altium designer so we like you better already. And so tell us, you and I started to talk… I'm just gonna let you roll because I know you have a wealth of things to share. So start out with… ready? What is design?

Wow design... I've been talking about that with the cohort of mine Andy Shaughnessy all morning because we come to a show like this and we're talking design relative to high-speed and things measured in gigahertz.

Right.

Things like this typically the engineering crowd of the degreed crowd but they have to relate also. The stuff has to be translated into the classic or traditional PC board designer. There's been a lot of talk about the two merging, there's been a lot of talk about where's the next generation of the PCB designer coming from.

Oh yeah.

Now that somebody told me yesterday, you know, these guys are all dying out and I chuckled. But you know it's a fact that we're all at least hopefully retiring happily so that this generation of folks that started in the 70s doing board design and earlier, are moving on and there's been a concern about where the gap is going to be filled and a couple years ago I had a chance to have a brief stint in the Seattle area and I found the answer to that question. I worked for a Prototron for a brief period…

Yeah, oh my goodness…

- and part of my job was to reach out to designers in all of the Seattle area and so my job was to go in, drive downtown shake hands with designers and turn them on to the great things that Prototron does. Well these these people were not old designers - these people were young, hip. People that had just graduated at a university, had picked up the design tools and because they're quick studies and they're smart they learned it in a matter of weeks. At least that's what they make it seem like, yeah they're quick studies and they were laying down tracks right and left and my job was to go help them from the standpoint of how they can make their designs flow through our shop a lot easier.

Right.

So it was a little customer liaison, engineering liaison, so I was very surprised to find out that the designers are out there now.

They're out there. By the way Kelly I've talked a lot about this and if you actually read my newsletters that I sent you... just kidding, just needling you a little bit. I've actually found since I've been at Altium the same exact thing you're finding is that one, this next generation, they basically came out of the womb with a smartphone in their hand right? Playing computer games, so they learn so much faster and in the case of Altium and we’re certainly not the only ones out there who are sponsoring engineering teams and universities and so much now right? Engineers are laying out their own boards. It's not a distinct role and so these kids are bright and they're quick, and now I'm seeing globally... I would have never seen it had I not been where I am now. But I see exactly I would echo your exact thoughts is that I see them everywhere they're on Hyperloop teams, they're on SAE you know. Formula teams, they’re on there and engineering groups, there in space teams and and they're learning to lay out boards in college. And in our case we're gifting the software right, so they have a tool; a professional tool. So when they graduate it's easier for them to get a job - so I see it I and I'm so glad to hear you say it, because I feel like the only one that's kind of like, don't be afraid people, it really is gonna be okay

Well check it out now; the product is called Altium Designer and there's a lot of designer based products out there that infer and rightly so. It’s a very powerful design tool. But back to your question; what is design?

Design has to do with a depth of knowledge that's gained not necessarily by a design tool. A design tool is only as good as the knowledge of the designer, the knowledge base of the designer so what I mention (and what was fascinating) - working at a prototype bare board supplier and now - what you didn't mention - but I work at an EMS provider doing assembly work now and there's a similar stream of challenges and the same problems and issues that we would see at the bare board supplier. That needed coaching or mentorship for the designers are happening and echoing through to the assembly suppliers right. So we're seeing problems like copper pull back from the board edge. Who knows how much that needs to be. In other words if if a designer is going to design, they need to consider all the stakeholders of the process who's going to be building this board. What are the processes that are involved in building this board and there's many there are many.

Many, many along the way.

Many yes, and this is, I think many would agree, that's what's maybe - I've never taken one of those university design courses - but I know they go fast and I know sometimes they're measured in weeks not years,

Exactly. Except I will tell you I don't mean to interrupt your thought pattern here but I was overjoyed and I think you'll be glad to hear this too and maybe you already know this that Eric Bogatin is teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder so you know he he and a colleague have written a curriculum that's PCB design with manufacturing and assembly best practices included.

Right.

Right, holy cow, like to me that's like the motherload because it's in context! Like you said of all the stakeholders so, anyways continue on.

I know Eric's really good at boot camp philosophy right? Hit that ground running but you know, know where the ground is, and be able to… I can't imagine he's not, you know, encouraging the folks that go through his programs - I can't imagine he's not encouraging them to go visit.

Yeah.

Boots on the ground. Support supplier, and they send me the supplier so they can see and meet the people who are doing the work. So back to design what is design. Design has to do with having a product - dreaming a product - and then embedding or creating all the process steps within the layout so to speak. Maybe that sounds too simple but from the standpoint of what can go wrong - things can go wrong as a new board designer starts designing. One of the things that the software tools are - the layout tools are doing so well, is they have a lot of movement is - is this a word? Manipulatable constraints set up.

Right.

Constraints, DRC rules and things and being a relatively new user to Altium I am amazed at how many things you can control and Altium - it is just amazing now, from a new user standpoint, that can be a blessing. But that can be a curse because all of these setups are are off-the-shelf setups. There are default settings right? So what a designer - to be called a designer - needs to be able to have the knowledge of doing, is manipulating those constraints so that it will yield the best outcome for all the stakeholders in the process. What do I mean by stakeholder?

Yeah I was gonna ask you that.

So we can't as a designer, a true designer, we can't design in a vacuum. We can't have our own office in our own world and live in a vacuum and think that this product we're creating, this chunk of clay - I'm bad at metaphors - this chunk of clay is going to be beautiful when we're done with it. Because there's nobody else looking at it. What I'm trying to say is design has to do with reaching out and considering who is going to be putting this thing together. It's not the designer typically right? The designer is not the one plating and etching right, we define things like stack ups. We define trace widths and via sizes and placement things right? But what do we base those things on? This is at the core of design. What are we basing these design attributes on? And without getting out and shaking hands with the stakeholders in the industry right, the bare board fabricator for instance - the engineer that may have designed the schematic, the test folks. The people that are going to be having to test this board. The assembler, the people that are going to have to be putting the stenciling the solder paste onto the board and applying the parts. Who else is down the line? The customer the overall..

What about the box builder, or you know maybe interconnecting devices maybe cable harnesses?

Sure,  I'll keep it short - to design is to be in touch with all the needs of those people the stakeholders of the and their processes okay.

I 100% agree with you I've been beating this drum blogging and writing about it for a long time except I feel like people look at me and go... I remember one old-school guy that I've known for a long time - he goes it's so girly because why would you have a relationship with your fabricators?

Girlie what the heck! Like it was just sort of a silly comment but my point was; you can't design in a silo just like you're saying, you can't design in a vacuum if you don't have that design intent. One has to be communicated, and you have to need to know you can design something amazing and are not only Altium. All the EDA tools out there are extremely powerful and they can let you do really stupid stuff from a manufacturer standpoint. So do you get to be the Wizard of Oz and then it's completely unbuildable on the other end you know.

So if you're not in touch -  now I'm gonna ask you a loaded question - I know you Kelly, you've been in lots of board shops and EMS shops and you're very well connected to that stream of stakeholders. How has your CID/CID+ helped equip you for that? Has it, or does it equip you more theoretically and then you gotta go get your boots on the ground?

Wow not a loaded question at all.

Okay I just don't want to get you in trouble at IPC, if you understand.

Not at all. I’ve got to say I went for my CID back in the 90s while I was during my time down in San Diego and it it had been an evolving program and I paid for it myself. I was at that point where there was no convincing a company - a telecom company - that hey there's the certification that will help give me an in-depth knowledge of all the processes and it wasn't happening. So I went and did it on my own dime and that was CID and that was a long, long time ago. A lot of has happened with the program and with technology since then, but I've got to say that the thing that I loved about it was that it described the stakeholders of the process. It defined the start to finish process of how to manufacture a board, how to document a board for manufacturing and for inspection, and even explaining that that the fabrication drawing is not as much of a how-to document as it is an inspection document. We're not telling - with a fabrication drawing - we're not telling the supplier how to do it. They know how to do it with the data right, they have all the data in the world that tells them how to do it.

But there are parameters that right?

There are parameters but the difference is they are nominal parameters. Everything in CAD data that we know of is mostly nominal data right? You lay a linewidth down at seven mil - 7 thousandths of an inch wide. If you think that that line is going to end up 7 thousandths of an inch wide on the board when you're done, you may be in for a surprise. You know it depends on manufacturing tolerance and without recognizing manufacturing tolerances we’re doomed.

Right so let's just say that. You know this gets a little crazy to me is because a lot of engineers have not had the benefit of being inside a board house and because they are used to using a lot of physics phased holes and stuff. They think it’s 7 mils - make it 7 mils - if you don't understand how the printed circuit board is made, the print edge process, what happens inside of an etching bath, it is not possible. Let me tell you engineers - I don't mean to be condescending at all - it's that I really care about this that it cannot be made perfectly seven mills ever.

Yeah.

I mean it's that's why we have tolerances plus or minus this or that but now with these high speed stuff it's like: oh yeah can you give us a 1 mil trace,plus or minus zero and I'm like NO. No no no no...

Yeah well, very very important to understand that and like I said - back to the CID program from IPC. I had gone on, years later I went back and did the advanced. The advanced portion of that course, the CID+ and I gotta say that then I didn't go job jumping very often, but when I did, in this particular case, I was able to list my CID and they seemed to scratch their head a little bit at the interview process but I was able to define or describe just what I've described to you about about some in-depth knowledge of the processes and the people involved. That's when I got their attention so this is what I'm saying: that the CID program helps that in a lot of ways and CID+ all the more, goes into more advanced processes and ideas about circuit boards.

Fast forward to a few years ago, I was invited and Gary Ferrari was  invited - to help instruct on the program. So I get my certification to teach - I did that - and let me tell you that is wonderful. To take a class of 10 or 20 people through the materials that have been evolving, but are now pretty much set in stone, is a real solid curricula for what was a three day class. Three days of intensive review of materials that the students had been studying for months. Now it's a four-day - we've expanded. I was going, there's so much information in there, it's expanded to a four day class and the pressure that you see on some of these students faces as we're getting toward test time - because it's an exam. It's an audited exam, very official. There's a lot of pressure and let me tell you that the pass rate is very, very high now because of the the level of training and the level of study materials. I mean you need to study this material it's not easy. We're condensing a lot of material into a four day class. The expressions on some of these designers - they are designers - but now they have more of an in-depth knowledge of design, what design is. You know it's stakeholders and its processes, and it's materials and things that now we're giving them is a lot more in depth. When they pass that test I have had people jump and hop around and clench their fists and say, yes! They're so happy to have done this and it's really gaining traction, as far as a certification. We talked about University classes and you know maybe those are measured in weeks.

Yeah well, and CID, like you are saying really has to do with the stakeholders you mentioned.

Right.

We're in the university, as you said,  I've heard some professors say, yeah I teach the printed circuit board design but don't be impressed it's three 50-minute classes. One on schematic, one on routing and one whatever...

Yes and let me tell you I was in 3rd grade classes and 4th grade classes where at least we’d jump on a bus and go visit the fire strips right. We talk about the fire station but at least we hold hands and I'll walk up to it or you jump on a bus and go see it. I'd like to challenge all of those University professors right now to to get their students on a bus and go visit a board shop or an EMS supplier I mean brother.

No I feel the same because I think there really is a disconnect there and sometimes, honestly on the board side, there's a disconnect in our understanding of what the designers are and sometimes we’re like - errr we treat them like... Instead of partnering with them and going, what are you trying to accomplish and how can we get together and move you in that direction? So it can go both ways, it's not just one way.

Absolutely I didn't get a chance to attend the Altium event.

Yeah Altium Live, well don’t miss it this year.

Well I have heard so many great things, I mean,  powerful, powerful things from people that attended and the people that were there-

Thank you.

-The notables that were there speaking.

Oh yeah, we had the big guns there yeah.

Yeah but but speaking along those lines I think again you and I are just lockstep on this issue and when I began at Altium they said, ok we're gonna give you a team to pull this event off Judy, but you're gonna run the strategy and you're gonna get the speakers and I'm like, ok. And so I'm like designers need to hear from other designers right? So it's not just theoretical but they also need to hear from fabricators, assemblers. They need to  hear from the whole gamut. So we did a call for papers but we also had people talking about what you need to know when you're designing Flex circuits, because you might all of a sudden have to be doing flex or rigid flex and you didn't have to do them before. Or multi board systems, so you know we worked to kind of sprinkle that in throughout. And then also have sponsors who were there that they could interact with and, boy I knew it would be a good experience but I didn't know how good. Kelly, I can't wait you have to come this year.

Yes, yes sounds very holistic PCB design - holistic - but yeah amazing.

Yeah holistic, sounds very Zen.

And what we tried really hard not to do was just to beat the Altium drum like sell/buy our stuff. Here's our new... of course we're proud of our tools and our new releases. So out of two days we took two 45 minute slots for ourselves and the rest was about them. Resources, plugging them in and I remember Laurence, my colleague, saying oh my gosh these people - it's like they're really inches away you know - as far as functionality goes - but they never talked to each other and I said, exactly right, and so to put them all together and the energy was just absolutely electric. So yeah come, come again and yeah yeah we would love to have you. So that's been truly a highlight of my career honestly, to see that all those light bulbs go out probably how you feel after you teach a CID class you know.

The afterglow.

Yeah the afterglow. Yes we were all singing kumbaya and so - oh good I heard great things - thank you, thank you. It was really it was a blast and it was a giant team effort you know I'm not tooting my own horn at all, I just got to go get the speakers and oh my gosh our team worked really hard to do all the logistics stuff and they did an amazing job.

So I'm dying to interview you and I'm trying not to. I know I'm being interviewed I'm just dying to ask again. Being a new Altium user I know version 18’s out and I don't want to ask you about it because that would be me interviewing you. But as a new user I have to say that I'll confess you know, a lot of this 3D capability that I haven't been exposed to in the past and now, becoming new to it I've got to say it's it's a lot easier than I thought it would be and like I say, Altium is my first tool to have introduced me to that. So that's where the industry is going and I found that it's pretty easy now to communicate with my mechanical cohorts you know.

Yup,  because that’s our goal.

We're back to design - the design flavor of our discussion. It's not only electrical constraints that we're talking about but there are mechanical constraints and we talked about everything being in CAD being in nominal values in CAD so there's a natural dialogue that designers, in order to design, have to have with each other with regards to these nominal settings and these nominal layout features and geometries. So 3D CAD - 3D capability step files and things, have made things a lot easier to visualize and you can check alignments and things. But again I want to look at - I'm still learning how to use the tool in consideration with tolerancing. I can see a very nominal conditions like a mounting boss and nylon mounting bosses centered within a hole on the board. It looks really nice but I know that that hole is perfect in the step file I have to consider, as a designer, what kind of tolerancing - that locational tolerancing - and diameter tolerancing that that hole has. So that's something I have to encourage myself, admonish myself, without trying to admonish others. My purpose here is to inspire others to consider beyond the nominal condition. So I'd love to see the tools of the future as they evolve. Be able to address that somehow and you know, about the best we have in the design world is to design our maybe our part bodies at a maximum material condition or something like that.But wouldn't that be nice if we can if we get to toggle back and forth we could snap back and forth.

Yeah yes - min to max. I was picturing in my mind if you could open and close down that hole and see.

Yeah and i can see our R&D guys right now screaming when they're listening to this.

It’s encouragement you know that might be somewhere that we're going - there's a term that I'm loving right now, that's a buzz term that's been out for a while. I I guess where the industry is bringing together the electrical constraints, the electrical designers, and the mechanical designers which theoretically all are going to become merged into one designer pretty soon. Sooner than we know and as it it's called mechatronics right?

Yup.

And I've heard there's courses being taught in mechatronics and it's just that, to me, is an inspiring place to go. I'm too old to go to school again I know. I feel like I'm in school every day you know, we're learning new software tools and things. Every every day we go to work and we we lay down trax or have to address problems. It's like a new day in school: are we gonna ‘BS’ our way through something or are we really gonna get into what's going on here and learn about it? And you know, that may mean a call to the supplier. How do I handle this? What are your capabilities? And not forgetting that just because we talk to that one supplier that doesn't mean the rest of the suppliers have those capabilities and other things. That's where we're kind of freestyling...

Yeah we are freestyling.

That made me think about pet topic and that is prototype versus production. How do we design and prototype versus how do we design a production just because we can go to a supplier that'll quick turn a board for us in a few days.

Yeah

The biggest mistake - let me go with a case scenario - the biggest mistake I see engineers make, some designers - is they'll get a design made at a quick turn board house and guess what they'll get it back into their shop, they'll give it to a tech have it assembled. You know what, that thing works perfect okay, and it's made with all these special core materials and special weights of copper. It's been printed and etched just fine. It's got purple solder mask just like it's specified and then because it's working perfect they say okay let's go to print and they want to go order a million of them. But that prototype shop’s not going to be able to make a million of them right. So you know, what's going offshore? So, what do you think's gonna happen to that specialized recipe? The designer, the engineer has to cut and paste the actual recipe of the design onto the board?

What's going to happen? Yeah it's gonna be a bloody disaster it's gonna get kicked back.

Yeah it'll probably just get kicked back. So we're talking design, and design involves creating you know. Sometimes hybrid stack-ups, but we have to be so aware of where this project’s pointing.

Is it producible in production? If you're heading towards - this is going into consumer market - you have to be thinking about that at the proto level. You cannot, oh let's just do this you know, get a Ferrari with all these special processes and then think that that's going to go into mass production because that takes... By the way when you talked about Prototron and shops like that. I worked for a shop much like that and there’s guys hanging over that job, kind of hand-carrying it through and making sure that everything goes perfect. That's not sustainable in a production environment. And you know that's not always understood.

That's right it needs to be understood.

Yeah how do we get that done?

Well the awareness needs to be there. I think it gets done but it gets learned the hard way.

Yeah for sure, and this is one that makes me feel, actually a lot of empathy for engineers. I feel like they're having to learn things over and over and over again that it's like reinventing the wheel over and over again instead of there being like some recipe book or some definitive guidelines of course CID+ plus and those things are are hugely enormous Lea valuable yeah but I don't know that there's a there's a straight cut and dried answer for that because it's complex process.

Yeah back to the CID - you know the guidelines - the CID program - points the designer to our specifications and again I'm a big proponent of not only getting designers out to the board shops, EMS shops, but out to the trade shows. I mean if you're a designer, I ask the students in the CID courses. Y'all been to trade shows y'all been to APEX or PCB West, or you know SMT shows and Design Con like we are here right now? If you haven't been out to these shows you might be missing out. This is not only a great place to shake hands and talk to people that are in the business of you know, selling of the products, but it's a network. Just like we're doing right now, it's a networking opportunity and a lot of what you're learning as a designer is going to come from networking

And in a tradeshow, you can do it like at hyperspeed. You can take in so much in two or three days like drinking from the fire hose level - like you can so much!

Yeah yeah, well that's me others that to drink it from the fire hose and then drinking... So you know you can take in so much information in that period of time. So how often do you teach the CID courses?

Ep Tag has been a instructor - supplier of teachers - for many many of the IPC specifications there. They're based back east in New Hampshire, and they have - for the CID program - they have a dozen or so instructors. Again these these instructors were pretty much hand-picked out of the industry to be able to go out and teach these classes. However, you know a lot of them, myself included. We have day jobs right? It'd be nice to be teaching - the teaching is so positive - I would love to do it every day but I would never want to get burned out and the travel involved... because they're offered all around the United States, Canada even down in South America. We have instructors like Mike Creeden.

Mike Creeden he's like a globetrotter.

Yeah he is he's putting lots of miles on doing classes down South way-

Yeah, WAY down South,

We keep it to you know, three to four classes spread out among the instructors. Yeah so keeps it fun, keeps it manageable and and keeps us fresh I guess.

So it's about time to wrap up but I feel like we just got started we could go on and on. But thank you so much for this conversation.

Oh, my pleasure...

-and boy I really see eye to eye with you. I bet you've articulated it's so much better than I could so, thank you so much Kelly. Okay my last question for you - I think I already know the answer - when I ask it. So at the end of the OnTrack podcasts, I've observed that many people who are designers have interesting creative hobbies or things they do. So this part of the podcast, we call ‘designers after hours.’ So I know one talent you have after hours. So tell me what you do for fun with that creative brain of yours after hours?

You know I just recently moved to Spokane so there's not many after hours. After hours gets dark really fast up there, in the wintertime. However in the summertime it's just the opposite. We have lots of daylight up in the Pacific Northwest and I don't know if this is the answer you're looking for, but one of the purposes of the movement up there was to fulfill a bucket list of getting a hobby farm and raising cows,

No way! I wasn’t going for that, but that’s cool.

I  know you weren’t so we did the hobby farm part. We moved to Spokane…

When? Wait time out, what’s a hobby farm?

A hobby farm is where you really don't know what you're doing some folks call it gentleman farmer but that's too nice of a term. I call it a hobby farm and so far we've got the chickens down we had 16 chickens laying eggs and we have 26 acres - and a barn - that we're gonna put cows on. But a sage old guy, one of my neighbors told me: You know Kelly - I asked him about what do you need to do to get cows going - he says, the first thing you need to do is build good fences. So, for two years now I've been trying to build good fences and the only thing I've been doing is tearing them down in the industry by shaking hands. How's that for an ending, yeah tearing down fences, shaking hands with the stakeholders!

That was corny! You’re a stand-up comedian as well. What I was really pointing at - and then I swear we will stop talking - is about your musical outlet?

Oh that, yeah did a lot of really really fun stuff over the last couple decades with the Porch Dogs, remember Pete Waddell and the Porch Dogs?

Oh my goodness, yeah they used to play at shows sometimes by the way.

Every time yeah it was - or it it's even fun to think about. So I'm a hacker, I uh play a little blues harp and a little guitar I'm a guitar hacker but it's another thing where this industry needs an outlet and interestingly enough the designer type is typically right brained.

Right that's what I'm saying.

A lot of them are musicians or like Bill Brooks’ sculpting I don't know... I really love hanging out with designers.

Yeah so to get together -  you know it was a natural occurrence to just start playing music and jamming it. So Pete Waddell was a great mentor for me way back.

So, for our listeners, Peter Waddell is the publisher at UP Media, so not only an industry guru but founded the Porch Dogs.

Yeah, yeah, and so we played and played and I met so many great people through that and we still carry on. At trade shows somebody will bring their guitar, somebody will bring a harp and that's all we need.

That's all we need - fun! Okay Kelly thanks so much for joining me, I could talk to you all day, it's so great to connect and you only get to connect at trade shows.

It’s my pleasure Judy.

But now I want to come to your hobby for…

Where are your boots?

I have them I suppose. Well that's it for this edition of OnTrack Podcast. Thank you so much for joining and we'll see you next time.

 

What material do I use? Many PCB designers ask this question. This is an episode about RF and Microwave PCB Design as well as Design for Manufacturing or DFM and it will help you to understand material choices and where to get answers about high speed laminates. Join John Bushie, Director of Technology at American Standard Circuits and Altium's Judy Warner in a discussion about High Speed laminates and the exciting world of RF/Microwave PCBs.

 

Show Highlights:

• John and Anaya's new book on iConnect007 about RF/Microwave PCBs
• You can design something that meets IPC standards and still have problems.
• What kind of material do you need? That depends.
• There's what you simulate, and then there's physics. Physics trumps theory.
• PCB101, a manufacturing educational experience pioneered at ASC

 

Links and Resources:

• American Standard Circuits website
• The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to Fundamentals of RF/Microwave PCBs
• The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to Flex and Rigid-Flex Fundamentals
• John Bushie on Linkedin

Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast, welcome back. Today we have a really great guest for you. I'm really looking forward to sharing my guests with you and please, if you would follow me on LinkedIn or on my Twitter which is @AltiumJudy and if you would like to follow Altium you can go to our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profiles.

So let's get started. Today I have the great pleasure of being with John Bushie who is the Director of Technology for American Standard Circuits which is outside of Chicago area and ASE specializes in both RF microwave circuits and also flexible circus but today I want to talk to John about a new micro Ebook that they have published through iConnect007 and this book is near and dear to me.

Some years ago I wrote a guest blog on a microwave journal because so many RF and microwave engineers and just engineers in general are being tasked with designing their own boards. And particularly in the RF and microwave space a lot of these designers, these guys are designing boards and haven't had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in a fab shop.

Yeah, and they really just don't get a chance to be exposed to as much as we do being a fabricator. Since a lot of the people at our organization tend to be a little bit grayer in appearance we all have a lot of experience and the reality is is we can share this with them. One of our most important jobs is being able to educate them, and that's really how I think of myself, educating other people sharing the knowledge that I've gained over the years and just trying to help them out with their designs because ultimately we just both want to be successful.

Yeah absolutely and as you know, I spent 25 years or so in the fabrication industry and when I had a stint in the RF and microwave industry and it was like culture shock, John, like it just felt like a whole different animal, it was like drinking from the fire,

Were you working with the designers at that time?

Yeah so it was like... and I felt completely inept at first when I started there to talk about laminates but all of a sudden we're talking about performance instead of just mechanical dimensioning and making…

- sure we're just used to meeting specifications right?

Right!

- And those have a physical dimension to them and the route is you start getting into this realm of higher frequencies and you start to find out what's really important to these designers.

Yeah, and I started to feel it, the more and more I learned the more kind of stupid I felt and the more I realized; holy cow there are so many ways that a board shop could screw up and there's literally…

There’s literally thousands of different ways we could manufacture the same board and the reality is is we always have to try to manage any of the risks that the design presents and certain aspects of certain designs actually will will present problems, or they'll complicate other features that are important to the RF designer’s ultimate performance goals, and so working around those issues is what is so exciting about it.

It is exciting.

It's really challenging and fun and what was really stunning to me is to really get to the point where I realized; oh my gosh we could be 100% compliant to IPC standards...

-and still have something that doesn't work...

… and make a trash board - that's exactly correct.

Because you know we’re within tolerances so we did a little of that, but you know what, if we over etched and you know that circuit had a little too much under or over etch or whatever that the performance went to heck and and they're like, no this is not what we simulated in and we're like, too bad so sad it's the IPC standards so it's a lot more complicated. So why don't you go ahead and talk about, sort of this is now? This is a book I wish I had enough brains to write so I'm glad you did.

Don't give me too much credit.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about it? Well first why this book?

I just wanted to share the knowledge that I've gained and I've had the opportunity and the great fortune to be able to work at several world-class fabricators. Poly Circuits in my early days helped get Mega Circuits into PTFE materials and now with American Standard circuits. But in the middle there - I was also able to work for an RF circuit board laminate company at Taconic. Well I got to work very intimately with the designers in North America as well as Asia and Europe so it's the ability to be able to interface with what are some of the most brilliant people I've ever met just taught me so much and when you talk about coming into something feeling completely ignorant… well that was me a long time ago and the reality is now I I hope that I can share some of the knowledge that I've gained through all this experience.

So since I know you've been it Taconic you probably told me that before, and just wasn't remembering it. But let's just pause there for a second and just talk about composition of high speed materials.

Sure.

Because that was kind of the first place I started and the realization of you know with Upper 4 you've got some fiberglass resin…

- resin, glass, maybe fillers and there you go and you're off to the races. Now talk about high speed materials, the different compositions what, they are?

What they are and… traditionally high-frequency materials were generally all PTFE based and what that meant in the early days is that there was very few flavors I think everybody knows the term Duroid. great materials fantastic from an electrical performance standpoint. But some of the mechanical properties were perhaps a little lacking and that's really the largest improvement we've seen in materials throughout the years.

It’s the increase in strength and dimensional stability of these materials which makes it easier for us to fabricate because honestly if a material moves around a lot during the physical stresses that we put it through then we have tendencies to have registration issues, or it causes other issues within our manufacturing. The biggest change in the materials nowadays is the change to higher thermal conductivity materials. That's where we see the market going and respect to those types of products as the power levels go up and designs get small. Everybody's got to deal with these heat issues that they've got.

And I'm sure automotive is driving a lot of that.

Well automotive does too... that's an interesting… another realm that we're talking about, is these very high temperature materials and a lot of the underhood automotive application. It's something we just get a little bit of exposure to but it's also a very interesting field.

Yeah just one of the things you mentioned too are... I neglected to mention to our listeners that we are here at Design Con in Santa Clara, so if you hear some voices in the background it's because we're here at a trade show and so just wanted to mention that so ASC is here with a booth and also rolling out hard copies of their book so. So the going back to the laminate side. So, I know from the RF experience I've had that each of these compositions of materials behave differently right?

Mm-hmm.

Like when I think of PTFE distinctly and there's a completely different system, you know?

Distinctly, and when you go from the the thermoplastics to the thermoset materials both have their advantages you know. PTFE is a fantastic material in that it's largely inert. It's inert to the effects of high frequency radiation and it doesn't change and that's what yields the fairly consistent results that you get with PTFE materials.

Now there's the introduction of the lower-cost thermosetting materials that also have pretty good electrical properties and that that can be a huge benefit just in the rigidity. Overall dimensional stability and the fairly low CTE values you know. At the same time, they've been filling PTFE materials for years in order to alter their properties and they've actually done a phenomenal job and bringing the CTE values very close to those of copper, which is the ideal since every board, every layer is clad with some level of coppers.

Right.

Yeah I mean we could devote…

You know I this is an interesting subject and there's a new material that comes out virtually every couple months all right and there's just a lot of good materials out there there it really is which is really what the whole key to this.

Yeah which is really actually good for industry great for designers right?

Which is why when we get asked the first question that everybody asks is what's the right material for my design. That's an impossible question to answer on the face of it but the reality is, as we dig deeper and deeper into these designs, we can kind of get a sense of where their price sensitivity lies, what level of performance they need, and just just seeking to go through the process and understand what their requirements are.

Before we got down that road... if I read - I had the pleasure of reviewing your book before it got published - and don't if I remember correctly. Don't you have a chart there or is it on your website that shows, like side by side, all the differences?

We do, it compares all of the various laminates that we use and actually, I had had a ex-colleague from that company that I used to work for mention that.. hey I left out a few of the most recent materials particularly in Europe. I apologize Manfred, I did not know that there were materials released, but thank you for catching that and I appreciate your insights. Because you know again going back to that subject. I've been phenomenally lucky to have worked with some fantastic minds as well as fantastic people in this.

Which I'm sure is an awesome asset for you at ASC. So okay so give us a quick rundown again. This is a micro book this is not a textbook?

Yeah and it was never intended to be a treatise on the subject it's really to touch on some of the major - I'm gonna call them issues for lack of a better word - because if we don't deal with them at the beginning of the design they can end up taking what is otherwise a fantastic board and make it virtually non manufacturable and this is really about DFM.

It really is.

You know we go into all the subjects - obviously not every subject as it relates to circuit boards - but from material selection, to copper roughness, to choosing the right stack ups and balancing your constructions whenever possible. How does copper thickness play a role in the ability to be able to manufacture? To find fine lines and spaces, edge plating, cavity constructions, thermal management. It touches on that wide variety of subjects and it just kind of gives you an overview of what we deal with. What to be thinking about when you're going through this process and hopefully it'll be an aid.

Yeah well,  I can imagine that this will be a great sort of starting place because I'm sure you get asked these same questions over and over again?

Yes and the reality is, is we want it to start the dialogue right you know - and we want to be able to put something in your hands that can aid you right now. But also help you think about certain aspects so that we can work together right. We've dealt with some designs that deal with basically a composition of every circuit technology known to man in one board but since we've worked so in-depth with this customer for a very long period of time we've ended up balancing out the performance requirements that they need with our ability to be able to manufacture right. Because it doesn't matter whether it's the highest performing smallest assembly in the world, if we can't make it or we get 10% yields, it's it's not going to end up satisfying the customer.

Yeah and that's another thing I remember feeling kind of pounding my head against a wall like you know now that I'm on the EDA side of the market right, there's such good powerful EDA tools out there and, but they won't necessarily flag you and say, no dummy you can't...

Yes indeed you're right, and that's exactly what ends up happening. I mean we've gone through designs where people expect to get a certain level of performance and all the materials are there, the components are there and we find that one aspect was missed and you know, there could be copper roughness. Oh we didn't account for that right. So you know we get, hey I'm getting minus 3db down from what I expect to be getting that's a huge loss it’s almost double.

Yes so there's what you model and then there’s reality.

My friend used to say, there's what you simulate and then there's physics.

Exactly then there's, yeah physics gets in the way right? And then John Toussaint who actually works for you guys, his favorite line used to, be physics trumps theory.

Right very true.

Right? So you know there's just limitations to what we can manufacture so well this is a really, really great again as I said I wish I had the ability to be the one that wrote this but I'm so delighted. I think it's truly a great service not only to your customers but just to the industry to get this information out because it's sorely needed and to my ability no one has really put this out you know...

No I'll be very honest if an a hadn't worked so hard on this project it never would have been realized either so thank you for pushing on this project and driving it forward I do think it will be helpful to great many people and who knows, maybe there'll be some addition to this in the future.

Yeah that would be great and I know you guys have written one actually which maybe is another Podcast series we can talk about…

The rigid flax which is that is becoming more and more.

We're actually seeing the two integrated in some instances. Yeah when I was referring to that one design that's exactly what we're talking about. Yeah IMS flex RF FR4, multilayer blind and buried vias and flex later. Right and the middle core I'm sorry I left that out.

Oh good lord... but manufacturable - piece of cake! Can’t you give me. you know $10 off that board John?

Sure exactly we're gonna deal on price, but you know, you do what you can there and you know you've got to try to make it. You've got to try to make it successfully and usually we try to make it for a cost.

Of course like people, not everyone really understands. I wish I could take every designer and engineer and they would be like forced to go through board shops like five times.

You're right. I mean we even created a tool for that called PCB 101 just to kind of give you a good overview. Once you start breaking it down and you think of the circuit board processing as each path is in itself a process right. Then you start to add up all the processes that the board is exposed to as it goes to the manufacturing operation. When we get to some of these complex designs it might be going through 150 - 200 different operations.

Yeah, exactly right.

And all of them have potential risks so absolutely...

Yeah people don't really… you know, we've come to sort of take for granted printed circuit board manufacturing. I think we're all impressed with semiconductors and their performance and bla bla bla - boards are… they're dumb and they’re just boards and they just lay there or whatever.. except unless that that board is made right none of those parts work.

And with high-speed digital ou have controlled impedance with RF its dielectric constant line width and loss. So I mean you've got one or the other.

Yeah and now with the added dimension of thermal management, since people are becoming a much more... which is fantastic because it can offer performance levels that weren't even theoretically possible just you know five ten fifteen years ago you know.

So let's talk about where people can find the book first which I think is on the iConnect007 website correct?

That's correct.

And and then where can people find more information about ASC John?

They can go  to www.asc-i.com.

Okay let me check that one more time - www dot ASC (that’s American Standard Circuits) dash-i dot com - okay very good.

So is there anything else that I may have not covered or asked you relative to this awesome book you just put out?

No it's just all I do, is just encourage people to give it a read, say that it's downloadable for free.

Yes it doesn’t get less expensive right?

It doesn't get less expensive.

So you basically just put in your name and your email and download it and it’s a PDF right? So it's a digital ebook.

I'm gonna look over just to get a little bit of agreement, that is in PDF form is that correct?

Yes it’s in PDF form.

Excellent okay PDF form and, here at Design Con you guys have brought a limited number of hard copies to give away so I'm sure those will be appreciated and and I'm sure once you start getting readers you'll probably end up printing out more of those but, well thanks so much for your time okay.

So now for the fun stuff I'm going to ask you two fun questions. First what is your favorite techie gadget that you own?

Wow that's difficult…

Like that you can't live without...

Well I mean everybody's gonna say their smartphone nowadays but besides that, yeah I'll be honest, no I always go back to home entertainment. I'm sorry okay.

Well hey that is totally okay. Do you have like a pimped-out home entertainment?

I have a pimped-out setup at home.

Okay let's hear it let's hear the specs!

It's got over a horsepower of wattage, it’s considerable it's got 13 speakers. It's a little excessive - nuts. People say I’m nuts when they go into my house but that's alright.

Is it like a home theater.. little home... wait how big is your screen?

It's only 60 inches I'm trying trying to talk five feet I'm trying to talk the wife into the 80 inch OLED but for some reason that thirteen thousand dollar price tag is a little steep. So we're gonna wait for the price point to go down.

My second question is… I know you're not a printed circuit board designer but a lot of us techie people have kind of interesting creative hobbies and things.

I'll be honest I'm the exception to that. No I shouldn't say that actually... actually I've been a bit of a computer nerd always have been, uh used to spend way too much time on computers. I think I set my first network up at home to be able to online game with, or at least network game with buddies back in 93.

So you're dating yourself?

Yes I am.

I was there.

Right but I know you can't stop getting older Judy, so...

That's right.

Okay I decided I'm gonna start counting backwards on my birthdays, that's how I'm solving that.

Okay so anything else or shall we wrap up here? Is there anything else you wanted to share that I might have left out John?

I think we pretty much covered everything Judy, appreciate the opportunity.

Oh and is there anything of note that you guys, other than booths and talking to a whole bunch of people for a couple days. Is there anything else that you guys are bringing besides your book to this show that may be of interest to or listeners?

I don't have any specifics that come to mind. I mean the reality is this is what we're working on right now. We're bringing this effort forward and hopefully, like I said, people will find value in that but the nice thing is there's our rigid flex expert Dave Lackey and myself so when we come here we try to bring some value to the people that might stop by

Okay so while I have you recorded on it, will you promise to say... send Dave Lackey back to talk to us about rigid flex?

Well we will round them up and send them in here okay?

Great tie them up okay!

Great well John thank you so much and thank you again for taking the time and effort to put this book out. I think it's going to be of great value to the industry for certain. Your customers and I really appreciate that laminate chart you put together - I wish I had that a long time ago.

Exactly.

Well thank you very much and have a great show.

Thank you again this has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast please remember to subscribe and add us to your favorite RSS feeds and we look forward to talking to you next time and always stay OnTrack. 

More than ever, people are doing Flex and Rigid Flex for the very first time as industries drive for smaller, more user-friendly devices. Join Altium's Judy Warner and OmniPCB CEO, Tara Dunn for a conversation on industry trends and cost drivers.

 

Show Highlights:

• What is driving growth in the market? Space, weight, packaging.
• Flex is everywhere especially handhelds and medical devices, uptick in flex and rigid flex PCB across every industry.
• Three main cost drivers for Flex and Rigid Flex: Materials selection, Panel utilization and Technology.
• And a fourth consideration - understanding your fabricator capabilities and making sure you’re matching your design to their capabilities.
• Most common materials: copper and polymide.

 

Links and Resources:

• OmniPCB Company website
• Tara Dunn’s AltiumLive presentation
• Geekapalooza
• PCB Advisor site
• Flex Talk
• FlexFactor by NextFlex
• Jabil’s Blue Sky facility in San Jose

Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack podcast. Welcome back, if this is your first time we're glad to have you. Before we get going today I've got a great guest for you, but before we get going I wanted to remind you to please subscribe to this podcast, and you can follow us on iTunes, on your favorite RSS feed, or wherever, whatever app you like to use for your podcasts.

 

Today I have with me Tara, oh before I get going on Tara I wanted to also say, please follow me on LinkedIn and also on Twitter, I'm at Altium Judy, and Altium you can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Okay, Tara, hi my friend, so good to see you, welcome to La Jolla, California.

 

Thank you.

So, Tara was a recent, is a dear, dear friend of mine in the industry. There's not many of us women that have actually been in the printed circuit board business and understand how circuit boards are made, but we do indeed know how that's done, and Tara owns OmniPCB. She's based in the Minneapolis area, and she is a real flex expert, and we've been friends for, how long has it been now?

I don't know, what six or seven, eight years? Probably something like that. Anyways, Tara and I met at a trade show and instantly started introducing each other to our friends and colleagues and next thing you know, we just created this energy, and we both have written columns for iConnect 007. Tara has an event in Minnesota called Geekapalooza.

Which Judy helped bring out to California. California, so I brought it out here to Irvine, and then we brought it together to Boston, so we've had lots of professional adventures together, so it's my joy to have you and for us to

learn more about your expertise in flex. So, how are you liking La Jolla?

I know you're here for a few weeks, I bet you're glad to get out of the snow.

Oh yeah, it's no hardship to leave Minnesota winter this time of year.

I'm loving the sun and the beach, so like- What was the temperature when you left?

Minus five, something like that, and slippery roads and cars were going into ditches, we're driving to the airport I'm like "just please make it there so I don't miss my flight"-

Oh my gosh. -and I landed here, it was sunny and beautiful.

Right? I know.

I know, that's why we like it here. It's expensive to live here, but we love it.

So, welcome to the La Jolla office, anyways. So we want to talk today about your deep knowledge on flex circuits, which are becoming more and more commonplace, right?

You and I started out in our careers really focusing on Rigid FR-4, very standard boards, but it's really evolved now. Oh yeah, flex is a significantly growing portion of the market.

And what do you think's driving that?

Space, weight, packaging. You know, it's small it can be smaller, lighter, folded, it's really perfect for all of those electronics, the handheld electronics, medical devices.

Right. So what would you say, give us an overview, you just said medical devices, what other things are you seeing an uptick in the flex market?

You know, really across the board. Across all industries.

Really?

Absolutely. You know, we've got companies that have been working with flex that are developing maybe more complex flex or rigid flex and, you know, easily once a week somebody's contacting me brand new, just trying to figure out how to work with flex and how to design flex and what's different, what do I need to know. So a lot of new applications cropping up are people that are just trying it for the first time.

Well, that's why we invited Tara to be our flex expert at this year's Altium Live, and we'll share the link below but there's a really great presentation that Tara gave at Altium Live, and we have the video and her slide deck, so we'll share that at the bottom here so you can check into that later.

So, let's talk a little bit about that presentation. That was speaking a lot about cost drivers. So, for the designers and engineers listening, what are some of the just overview, basic overview, of what cost drivers are for flex and rigid flex?

Okay, so we often talk about three primary cost drivers, materials selection, panel utilization, and technology. I kind of like to throw, a little bit tongue-in-cheek but not really, a fourth one in there, which is understanding your fabricators capabilities and making sure that you're matching their capabilities with your design. Yeah. That's not just true in flex, by the way.

True, it's across the industry. It's across the board.

Yes. [laughter]

So, start with materials. How does that affect cost? Okay, so there are just so many materials you can choose from with flex, so, but just for this quick discussion let's focus on the most common which is copper and polyamide.

So, even focusing just on that segment, your fabricators are going to purchase laminates. They come in generally three different types which would be, two of them are adhesive-based, one with a standard acrylic adhesive, one with a flame retardant version of that adhesive, and then adhesive-less materials.

So, all of those types come in a range. Typically your copper thickness is going to be a quarter, or a half ounce to two ounces. It doesn't mean you can't get a flex circuit greater than two ounces, it just means that your fabricator has to create the material themselves.

Right.

And polyamide thicknesses are generally between half mil and six mil.

When you said your fabricator has to create that, does that mean they actually take the material and plate it up in their tanks, or you're buying a specialized material from the materials supplier?

Right, you would buy the polyamide, the adhesive and the copper and the thicknesses that you need.

So, like I said, huge range of options that you have when selecting materials for flex. So cost drivers, keeping that in mind, you know, why would you choose one over another or how does that progression go?

Typically, the adhesive-based options are going to be a little bit less expensive.

Okay. Okay, and they are typically used in single- sided, double- sided, maybe three or four layer flex is where you'll see those applications.

As you go into higher layer count, or rigid flex, the adhesive-less material becomes necessary. Highly recommended for rigid flex.

There's a z-axis mismatch between the FR-4 material and that acrylic adhesive, so you don't want to introduce the acrylic adhesive into the FR-4 stack-up.

So that's why, you know, your fabricators are always going to recommend adhesive-less materials.

All right, that makes sense. Mhmm. So, it's kind of like cost versus function-

Right.

-at certain point-

Right.

-that you need to keep in mind.

Right. So, other than materials, I know, what are other things that help drive the cost? I mean I think that's what people are afraid of, right? They think "oh flex is too expensive, I can't go that way" but they really need to go that way, route, for functionality, and I think really what you taught us at AltiumLive was it's not that cut-and-dry, right? If you evaluate all these different things then it may not be as expensive as you think.

Exactly, and as you decide to move to flex, you know, working with your fabricator on the materials side specifically can really help drive out cost.

Is it looking at just the raw material? You know, you're generally going to be FR, flame-retardant, material, LF adhesive, and adhesive-less, but if your fabricator is building a lot of rigid flex they're gonna stock more adhesive-less materials, and your adhesive-less material is gonna be probably less expensive-

Because they're buying more of it, they have it in stock you don't have to worry about minimum.

Make that match, and so finding someone that does a lot of flex and rigid flex is going to help you right off the bat. Exactly, and understanding the material sets that they're using, and you know a great way to do that is to ask their field applications engineering group to help you with a stack-up.

'Cause if you're not directing them in a certain direction they will default to the material that they're using most commonly.

So it's a really good way to make sure you're fitting that gap. Right. So what are some of the other cost drivers?

You know, we look at different types of coverlay. Coverlay kind of follows a progression.

So like, explain what coverlay is. So, with flexible circuits there's two types of coverlay.

There's a flexible solder mask, which is very similar to our board type solder mask other than formulated to be flexible but applied the same way.

It's a good option for circuits that might be single sided, double sided or less than two ounces of copper. Okay.

Tends to be a little bit less expensive. I see.

It does have a limitation in flexibility. It is flexible, but if you're having a highly dynamically flexing application it's probably not your best choice.

Right. But another advantage is it does allow you to form those nice 90-degree angles on your surface mount pads.

Of course. But when you need to, when you're concerned about reliability for flex life, the polyamide cover length, so it would be the polyamide that's the same as your base material and a layer of adhesive.

That would be the next option that you would want to go to. The limitations on that tend to be, you know, because you're drilling or routing that coverlay, you're gonna have a round or an oval opening.

Oh, okay. So as your circuits get more and more dense, it gets more and more difficult. We jokingly call it the Swiss cheese effect-

Right, you drill it and you take off the back route entry and there's not enough material there to even hold it together. You know, it looks great on the screen when it's this big but when the part's little. So your fabricator will watch out for that if you're doing a design. We all do try to minimize that impact.

The circuit board designer may be asked to gang open or, you know, make a larger opening over several pads to kind of alleviate that problem. And then continuing on that cost spectrum if you need the polyimide coverlay and you need that individual pad coverage, laser-cut coverlay would be the next option.

Okay. So that allows you to get the nice 90 degree angles for the surface mount pad, much tighter registration.

I would think from a cost standpoint too, in this case like laser cut, again a fabricator that doesn't do a lot of production of these kind of circuits may not have that equipment, may have to send it out, which drives the price up.

Exactly, exactly.

So, you know, I could see, that would be another benefit to making sure you're finding a fabricator that's really good at this technology.

Exactly.

Okay. Are there other areas or did we did exhaust that one?

I think on the materials, yeah I think that those are the two primary things to look at, is the base material and the coverlay.

Okay.

So, it's always easy to kind of relate to that if we can hear a case study or an example that you've had, you know in your career, is there a couple stories you could tell us?

Sure, sure. So, there is a medical application, for example, and trying to reduce the material cost it was designed as a three layer rigid flex and flex being on the outer layer in that case.

Oh on the outer layer, okay.

Because of the three layers, okay?

So, but then in this case that required the flex to be button plated to maintain the flexibility and it required the circuit to have to be sent out to laser-cut for the coverlay to maintain the surface mount pads. So those two together required it to be done on a smaller manufacturing panel for the tighter registration.

So, very expensive circuit and very difficult to manufacture. After a review with a fabricator, they decided to go to a four layer rigid flex, more standard construction. So the material costs are higher but it eliminated the need for the laser cut of the coverlay, it eliminated the need for the button plating and it was processed more standard. So although the material costs were higher the overall cost of that flex circuit dropped dramatically. So it's not always about look at the material cost and run, right, it really is about collaboration, which you and I both over the course of our careers have sang that song, you know, in a variety of circuits right? It's not, but I can see how in the case of flex and rigid flex it's even more important, right, because there's all these variables.

Exactly, and that tends, flex and rigid flex tends to be a product that people are a little less sure of themselves when they're designing, have a lot more questions, so my advice is always to identify a few fabricators that you think will be good partners and then involve your fabricators early in the design. You know, because they're doing flex and rigid flex all day.

Right.

They've learned a lot of lessons so we all might as well take advantage of those lessons. Yes, absolutely, and that reminds me, another plug for Miss Tara is that she writes a column for the PCB 007 magazine monthly?

Yes. Monthly, specifically about flex- Yep, it's called Flex Talk.

Flex Talk, there you go.

So there's another resource that, and she usually covers a lot of these in that magazine and I always, I always look forward to reading your columns. So another case study?

Okay. A second case study I can think of is a military application.

The product was, I would say having probably 90% failure in the field after assembly. So, very very expensive after a fully populated board and what happened was it's a rigid flex and it was being bent and it was cracking.

So back to the drawing board, what can we learn from that?

Turns out, simply re-did the stack up and went from adhesive based materials to adhesive-less materials.

Oh wow.

So it eliminated only three mils thickness in the overall stack up but it was a thickness, and the bend radius was causing that cracking. So by making that one simple change in that stack up, you know they've had 300 assemblies completed now with no cracking at all.

And there's the expertise, right? Like who would know that three mils could fix that problem. I would have never guessed that in-

Yeah, it seems insignificant, especially when we're used to looking at thick rigid boards 3 doesn't seem like anything at all. It doesn't seem like anything at all.

That's so cool.

Well, thank you. Those are great stories.

You know, since you and I started in this industry, there were, I'm kind of shifting subjects now, a little bit and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about women in our industry. So, there are far more women in this industry now than there used to be. There still isn't that many of us who actually are on the front lines of sales and marketing that kind of thing. How did, I know I didn't end up in this industry on purpose. I love it and I love the industry, so how did you find your way, and I don't think I've ever asked you this?

I'm here completely by accident. See? We didn't do this on purpose.

No, my first job out of college was in the accounting department of a flexible circuit manufacturer. Okay, what was your major?

Economics and industrial relations. Well, there you go.

I didn't know what a flex circuit was when I started there. Right.

Because of that, they required me to work out on their manufacturing floor and learn how to build a circuit, so I was out on that manufacturing floor for a few months.

No way, I did the same thing but- Really?

Yes, yes I-

I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but the first circuit boards shop I worked at, and they had this whole language, these terms and things I'd never heard, you know what is SMOBC and I'm like, I don't know, solder mask over bare copper, and so I asked a production manager

I'm going to come in on Saturdays and he's like, I'll put you in every department.

That was like the best education ever, wouldn't you agree?

I agree and I totally didn't appreciate it at the time.

Yeah.

But looking back I would have never learned the process as well, because I was running equipment and, I'm really terrible at registering coverlay. I've learned this. It's not something I should do. I don't have that hand-eye coordination, but it was it was a good thing to learn.

Yeah, absolutely. That's so funny, I never knew that about you.

So, what do you think we can do to sort of encourage, I mean we're doing a lot to encourage women in STEM and encourage them to become exposed to these types of careers. What do you think would be a good way, or how are some ways that you've seen, oh I know one thing you're going to tell me about right!

Okay the Flex Factor program, Flex Factor, put on by NextFlex, so centered around flexible hybrid electronics, they have a program that reaches out to high school kids and it's an entrepreneurship program that ties in advanced manufacturing.

So they go to Jabil, they get to see all the cool things, it's a month-long program.

And this is in the middle of Silicon Valley?

Yes.

So fun.

And I believe it's expanding beyond that.

Wow.

I was lucky enough to be on the judging panel at the end of one of their last ones.

So much fun, but what it does is -  it takes students who may or may not be interested in a technical field, they might be interested in marketing or entrepreneurship, and it is a month program.

First week they kind of get the charter and you have to develop, it's about product development, what kind of need do you see around Health and Human Services and what how could you solve it using a product that's using advanced manufacturing?

Uh-huh.

And then they get to go into the fancy Jabil building and see all the really cool things that they do there. They tie that into the next step, is entrepreneurship at a community college, and the students are actually given credit, college credit for this program, and then the fourth and final week they need to pitch kind of shark tank style to a panel and go through the whole product development process, profit and loss, and I mean it's just it's an amazing program, and it's so fun to watch kids you know who, I talked to one girl

Jordan and she had really no interest in manufacturing or advanced manufacturing until, she wasn't exposed to it until this program, and now she's got a lot of ideas.

Which is so great! I don't know how kids otherwise would get exposed to manufacturing, and when you go into a facility like Jabil or TTM or some of these big facilities, you know I think kids think manufacturing is like a dark, dank building with, you know, I don't know, something awful and you go in and there's robotics and chip shooters and all this amazing high-tech equipment and these clean rooms and you have to wear the whole bunny suit and the glasses and you go in and you're like wow this was not what I was expecting and that's so great. I forgot that you told me about that program and the whole shark tank, which makes it so- oh it was so much fun.

-so what did the students pitch? Or like what are a couple things that the students pitched?

You know there was all kinds of different things. They tended to kind of centre around babies or athletes.

What?

Well, different injuries that you might have as a student-athlete and how to rehab those injuries.

Oh, okay.

Or baby monitoring devices.

Oh that kind of, okay.

Yeah.

So, what was the winner? Was there, is there a clear winner, do you remember?

I don't remember who won for the panel I was on because they didn't announce it the day that I was there.

All right. And so you're continuing now, right? To be involved with this initiative, and is this gonna be each year, or how often do they offer it?

They do it throughout, throughout the year. I think they just had another round that went through so, and I might mix up the numbers slightly, but I think that the first program that they did which would have been the fall of 2016. I think they had eight students participate and its teams of four. So now they are up to thousands of students participating in this program. It's just growing and growing so fast.

We're going to make sure that we put that website, so you have to make sure and share that, the URL, so people that are listening can look into that. Such an exciting program and I, you know, here at Altium we're doing so much with the universities and stuff and I love to see it happening, and it's so fun when you see the light bulbs go on and, you know, we love our industry and we want to keep it vitalized.

Yes, yes. I think this is a great tool for generating some excitement. I know, I love it.

I want a program for people our age to go back and do that.

Right? Wouldn't that be fun?

Yeah. What would we call it?

I don't know, we'll have to think about that later.

So okay, here's a really wonky question I think I already know the answer but I'm asking anyway. Are you a nerd or a geek?

Geek.

I asked the woman who runs Geekapalooza, that was a really easy answer.

I know, okay but why do you think a geek? Why is it not Nerdapalooza?

Like, why do you think you're a geek and not a nerd?

That is an excellent question.

Other than geek sounds better than nerd. See, I know, well- It's the general excitement over something that other people-

Right, like geeking out over something right? Geek Squad.

It's become cooler.

I think geeks are cooler than nerds still, like just generally. I think that's the consensus. And my other wonky question is, on a scale from one to ten how weird are you? Well, pretty high up there, yeah.

So like, what are some wonky things that make you weird?

You know, I -

Well first of all you're in this industry.

First of all it's the industry right? I laugh because I'll go out to have lunch, a work lunch, and sometimes I think if anybody is listening to our conversations, we're talking about impedance control and stack-ups and EMI and I'm like, what are they talking about over lunch?

I know I posted a video of me talking about fusion bonding on my personal Facebook page, and it blew up and people are like who are you? What are those words? They had no idea that I spoke this whole other tech language. And if you're out of the industry, you know, most of my friends, you know, my parents, my family, they don't know what I really do.

I know, I know. We're gonna put your podcast, this podcast.

We're gonna put this podcast on your- Can you cut that part out?

No we'll put it on this and see what they think of you on a podcast talking about coverlay. They'll be like what? And my final question would be, well, one thing I know about Tara Dunn is that you love the beach even though you live in the snowiest place in the country.

I live in a landlocked state.

Yeah, there's that. But I noticed that a lot of technical people have really interesting hobbies, so what kind of things you like to do with your family or places you like to vacation or things you like to do in you're very few off hours that you have Tara because you don't have a lot of off hours.

I don't, but with the job that I have it allows me to travel quite a bit because I can work pretty much remotely from anywhere and make that easy. So, yeah we love to travel.

Specifically the beach. It's one of my favorites or in the winter anywhere warm. Desert area, everything's great, and I don't know what happened this year but suddenly I've become a music buff.

Oh. I haven't been to a live concert in a few years and all of a sudden I think I have six or seven things booked so..

That's so funny.

I don't know why. It's because your son went to college and you have a little more free time. That could be it.

I don't know, I'm picking up new things now that my kids are out to college so that's probably the reason why.

Well Tara, thanks.

It's always a blast to hang out with you, and it's so fun to have you in California.

Thanks for having me here. Usually we're on the phone on conference calls and we actually get to see each other in person, it's fun.

So again we'll share lots of informative links for, that Tara has shared on this podcast and some that she didn't have time to talk about, we'll share them below so you can tap into all the interesting resources that Tara has, and I want to thank you again for what, for listening and or watching the OnTrack podcasts today. Please remember to subscribe at your favorite podcast app. Until then, always remember to stay on track. 

 

Jeremy Blum is working at Shaper, reinventing hand held power tools starting with the revolutionary CNC router, Shaper Origin. Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Jeremy for a conversation on making tools for making things.

Show Highlights:

• Shaper is a human in the loop company
• CNC, or computer numerical control varies in implementation. Large CNCs can be Desktop size to warehouse size.
• Shaper Origin created to be an affordable, portable handheld tool and the way The Shaper Origin works, computer vision based and real time motor control.
• Precisely calibrated and sophisticated industrial robot that we are selling as a consumer device
• “We’re both making tools to help other people make things”

 

Links and Resources:

• Exploring Arduino: Tools and Techniques for Engineering Wizardry
• Jeremyblum.com
• Jeremy Blum’s Youtube Channel
• Shaper and The Shaper Origin
• How to take a chessboard with Shaper Origin
• Shaper Projects - Forum
• Shaper Instagram

Hi everyone welcome back to Altium’s OnTrack Podcast. This is Judy Warner and today we have a special guest that I'm eager for you to meet but before we get going I'd like to make sure that you subscribe to our podcast and favorite us on your favorite RSS feed. You can follow me personally on LinkedIn which I would love or on Twitter @AltiumJudy and Altium is also on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

So today we have a young rockstar of engineering with us, named Jeremy Blum, and I'm gonna read a little bit so forgive me while my eyes leave the screen for a moment. On his website it says this my passion -  using engineering to improve people's lives and giving people the tools they need to do the same.

Jeremy is currently the head of Electrical Engineering at Shaper where they're using computer vision to reinvent the way people use handheld power tools. Prior to joining Shaper he was a lead electrical architect for confidential products at GoogleX including Google glass. He has his master's and bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. He did a lot of amazing things at Cornell and he has an insatiable passion for building things: prosthetic hands, fiber optic LED lighting systems, 3d printers and scanners and on and on.

Some of his work has been featured not only in international conferences in peer-reviewed journal but in also popular media outlets such as the Discovery Channel, Wall Street Journal, and Popular Science magazine. He was also named Forbes magazine 30 under 30 as recognition for his work that has helped America make things and get stuff done.

He also holds several patents and he loves to teach. He has a YouTube channel with lots of video tutorials and his latest, well I guess I don't know if it's your latest, but he's writing a book called Exploring Arduino. He spends most of his time investing his talents and time at Shaper. So, Jeremy welcome that was a mouthful so thanks, really.

Yeah.

So you're awfully young to have such a pedigree so I want to ask you first after watching a few of your YouTube things since they go way back I noticed a couple t-shirts you had worn and those that said you were a geek but my first kind of tongue-in-cheek question is are you a geek or are you a nerd?

I think geek is the cool term now I think so I go with geek I think right, if you consider a nerd to be the person who is really into reading into like super in-depth topics and getting really in the weeds and stuff. I'm kind of guilty of all the above.

I would concur with that and I think geek is... that geek is like a cool term now. It used to be the uncool term like now you know nerd seems like this but nerds are like Sheldon Cooper like physics, chemistry, right?

Look smart guy, so tell us a little bit what your earliest memories were of sort of making and building things I mean most people like you remember some pretty vivid memories of taking apart home appliances are putting stuff together.

Mm-hmm, yeah so you know it makes a very perfect circle of my life if you will and that some might release memories building things are woodworking and no I work at a company making woodworking tools but the some of the early memories I have are my dad and his dad are fairly experienced woodworkers so it was spending a lot of time in the garage at home building stuff with him. I went to summer camp where they gave you all these outdoor activities and think you can do water skiing and hiking and all this stuff but I ended up spending as much time as they would allow me to in the woodworking bunk which is this little basically an 8 foot by 8 foot room with a couple of tools that, you know, I feel like it wouldn't let kids do this nowadays. But at least when I was 12, they let us use jig saws and band saws like that and I feel the liability issue is different. It's changed in the last decade or two, but when I was ten or twelve that's what I was doing, I was building furniture that was admittedly not great, but I think pretty good for like 11 years old right? And so those are some of my earliest memories.

Before that it’s the same thing you'll hear from most engineers, which is Legos and connects and things along those lines, taking apart stuff in my parents house and family’s. After I did that a couple of times I knew better about keeping track of what screws go where. It's like we put it back together but I've been taking things apart and building stuff for as long as I can remember. It started more on the mechanical side of things in this transition towards the electrical and electromechanical and robotic side of things.

As I've gotten older I saw a comment you wrote on your personal website that said you felt that engineering was sort of along the same lines as artistry. What did you mean by that exactly?

I think people use art to express themselves and to leave some kind of impact on the world around them. Convey an idea, convey a concept and I don't really think it’s any different than that. It's a lot more based in equations and math and physics, but at the end of the day, you're still kind of taking some input, some desire that you have and trying to generate an output that'll have some kind of impact on people, right?

So yeah whether you're building a spaceship or a car or some little doodad or trinket, the goal, at the end of the day, is you want to be able to give it to someone or show up someone, and have some kind of impact on them and affect the way they think. In some way similar to art in my opinion, it's funny that they've kind of come out with this new acronym. Right, there was STEM you know, and now it's STEAM right, because they've added art. I think the thinking is starting to change. I was raised by an artist and so I've always had that bug, but I like, you know, you and I were just geeking out about the Falcon Heavy launching. Like oh,  I'm just as happy you know - I'm thrilled as much sort of, being in the work I am with technology as I am with art, so I think there really is a connection there.

So you are good, that's a really good job of bridging the divide STEM was, so it felt like this other thing and you were like an artist or you're in a STEM field.

Yeah that's not the case, there's so much overlap. I work with designers and everything every day and right, I couldn't do my job without them.

Well I can tell you that for me, I'm a little bit more of a creative person. I write a lot and express myself through writing and speaking communication, but I was horrible at math but I loved making things and I took things apart.

But just because I didn't have that aptitude for math, or it wasn't encouraged and it made me feel like I was in no-man's land, so for me personally I'm with you. I like that it's sort of crossing over because I'm like, oh you know I am sort of in this you know? I'm like why have I spent the last 30 years you know, in circuit boards and you know, how did I get here? But I think it is that connection and that curiosity, right so  you will get up to talking about Shaper which is really what I wanted to talk to you mostly about today but I wanted to also mention that when you were very young you started this YouTube channel and you've recorded an awful lot of educational videos and really helpful stuff for makers hackers and different people have sort of used that as a jumping-off place and inspiration. So what inspired you to do that in the first place?

In the first place, well... so, I think the very first video I published was me building the computer and it was my first experience building a computer. I didn't really know what I was doing and I just thought I was really cool and I wanted to make a video of it and my friends and I were already hobbyist videographers. We really liked making short movies you know, like kids make short movies - action movies, things like that.

But we had already developed that into a business and we got pretty good at it. When I was 12 or 13, a friend of mine and I, from high school, started our first business which was doing video production and it was pretty successful for like weddings and birthday parties. Video montages, things like that. Now you can like press one button on your Macbook and it'll do it for you, but we lived in this golden age where people hadn't figured that out yet so we could do it as 12-year-olds and charge money for it.

And by the way, the 12 year olds were the sharpest people in the room. I mean, I still ask my 20-something kids, like my phone's not working you know, you guys really had an affinity and like there's, like you said; there's more than one but we're like, yeah. But it was really the rise of Technology and you were kind of right in the middle of that I suppose?

Yeah the timing was really good, YouTube had kind of just come into existence when I was building that first computer and we had experience making videos. But they were mostly you know, pictures of other people for their weddings and things like that and so we wanted to do something we were passionate about. So, a friend and I, we were going to build this computer. Anyway, they filmed it, we set it to music, people seemed really into it and then started asking us lots of questions like, oh, how did you pick this, how did you do that, and it just kind of grew from there and people seemed to really like it and appreciative and positive. You hear about all the terrible things that people say on YouTube comments right, but it was all positive. People were appreciating it and so it snowballs from there.

That's so nice - there's your creativity again right? The crossover of your creativity and your your scientific self. So, do you still keep that website up or are you pretty much tied up with the startup work?

I've been pretty damn busy with Shaper you know if I could I'd love to. The reality is it turns my YouTube stuff from the one-man show. I do all the writing, a lot of those videos involve me developing projects and all the documentation around the open source stuff you know. If a 10 or 15-minute video takes me, you know, many dozens or or more hours to produce, because I'm such a perfectionist. Like if I was less of a perfectionist and I could make just kind of slightly crappier, but still informative videos, I would do it. But I have trouble putting a thing that doesn't have high production value so I'd love to make more videos and I hope to get back to doing more. But I will admit the frequency of my postings has dropped off considerably especially in the last two and a half years or so that it that I've been in shape works.

I've been so focused here. Yeah okay, well it looks like you still have like a hundred and sixty thousand subscribers and a whole bunch so it looks like people are still engaging with your stuff even if you're not keeping up with it so yeah, kudos to you. So you did your Bachelor's and Master's at Cornell and what was your first job when you got out of school.

I had a bunch of cows, I was in school and I was also working on my own stuff overlapping with with a lot of that. My first real job, real full-time job I guess, was at Google after I finished my Master's degree but before that I had had a startup that I was working on for a while that ended up. Peter hangout, and before that I worked at MakerBot the 3D printing company for a few years. First as an intern and then I consulted for them remotely while I was in school working on their electrical stuff. But my first full-time job was that Google X.

Yeah, so... um, what kind of things did you work on at Google that you wouldn't have to kill us to tell us?

It's pretty out there now so I can talk about most of it now not all of it, but most of it, the majority of my time there was spent working on the electrical engineering and system architecture for what became Google Glass Enterprise Edition. So there was the first version of Google Glass that came out to consumers and I won't spend the time going into all the social implications of that product and things that were done poorly or things that were done well. My focus was on what became the Enterprise Edition of the products, just totally new hardware and is used by a variety of very large companies and medical practices around the country now as an augmented reality platform for basically helping with productivity. So that's a piece of hardware that's basically an upgraded version of Google Glass one most people saw, right um... all new processor and everything inside, everything's new and different but that's used by big companies like I think Boeing uses it on their assembly line to do cable assemblies. Things that they used to look at a manual for, they now see heads-up and they get feedback as they're doing it and they like cut their time in half. There's a bunch of startups building software on top of the enterprise version of Glass now for medical applications, so doctors use it in their patient interactions to pull up medical records and things like that in real time and make them more efficient and more productive. There's a bunch of other applications as well that's those kinds of applications are the things that originally got me excited about going into work on that project.

Don't get me wrong I have several pairs of glasses. I don't really wear them anymore but there was a period right, where I wore them almost every day and use them for all the mundane things. They showed in the original marketing videos like sending text messages and getting, turn-by-turn navigation and stuff and they were cool for that but the application that they ended up developing for the Enterprise Edition that I think were an augmented reality platform really shines so I'm from the department that worked on that.

That sounds like a pretty exciting project and company, a workforce you know. pretty much fresh out of a Master's program so that's exciting. So how did you go from Google to Shaper? And then let's start talking about Shaper because I've seen some of the videos and I want to run out. I want one when I go build some stuff. So tell us about that transition and then start filling our listeners in about this incredible new handheld CNC you guys have developed.

Yeah happily. So when I was at Google, one of my tasks in addition to kind of leading the system architecture for some of the products we were working on, but in addition to those responsibilities one of the other things I did there was kind of always be scouting for external technologies that might be relevant partners for things that were doing things in the computer vision space, things like that. So I go to a lot of conferences for this and me and my colleague from Google, Joe. Joe is now the CEO at Shaper. Me and Joe went to this conference called Solid-con in San Francisco where we met Alec, who is one of the two co-founders of what is now Shaper, at the time it was still called something else and so into this conference and Joe and I walked out, and everything in there was like eh, but man... did you see that one booth that auto correcting hand tool thing? That thing was so cool and so one thing leads to another. Joe ends up leaving Google and going to what is now Shaper to become the CEO to join Alec and align co-founders and shortly after Joe left I also left to come over to Shaper to lead up the electrical engineering efforts here and to basically be responsible for taking a prototyped product that was not manufacturable at all, and making it into a manufacturable piece of hardware that we can mass produce and sell to people at a reasonable price. It would perform well and be reliable and all the things that you want a power tool to do right?

So let me now explain what Shaper is. So Schaffer is a handheld robotics company. We like to call ourselves a human in the loop robotics company and our first product shape or Origin just started shipping to customers about three or four months ago.

Uh-huh and the Shaper Origin is a handheld CNC. For listeners who aren't familiar with CNC or computer numerical control; CNC machines are what you can imagine a company like IKEA might use to mass-produce furniture. They can range anywhere from desktop size for several thousand dollars, to the size of a warehouse basically, you know, going up to millions of dollars. The way a CNC machine works is, you say, I want to cut X design, you throw in some sheet material.

Normally you pre-program all the paths that a cutting bit is going to take and it moves around and cuts out this material, so CNC machining is basically the opposite of 3D printing; 3d printing as an end of manufacturing technology. CNC machining is a subtractive technology - you start with the material, you cut stuff away until you have a solid item that you want in the right shape. So what shape or Origin is; it takes that concept and basically shrinks it down to a portable handheld power tool. So we're trying to bridge the gap between capabilities what you can do with hand tools and the capabilities of what you can do with, you know, multi-tens of thousands of dollar CNC machines, kind of in the middle, that gives a lot of versatile capability. So the way Origin works is, it's computer vision based. We use computer vision and real-time motor control to basically scan your workpiece.

We have this stuff called Shaper tape, you put down on whatever it is you're going to cut. It can be a piece of sheet material, like you can cut on a CNC machine, or it can be an already fully-built table and you want to make a particular feature, and if you want to put a mother-of-pearl inlay in it or something.

Okay you scan and you put your clamp down or whatever that cut is,  you scan it in and the tool now knows, based on tracking vision off of those partners, exactly where it is in 3D space. You load in a design file - the tool is connected to Wi-Fi or this USB port, so you can make your design totally CAD agnostic. You can make it any 2D or 3D CAD program you want.

Yeah so like AutoCAD, like what kind of tools?

Anything in the 3D realm. The most common tool that our users use is fusion 360 okay, but in the 2D world the most common is Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. Really anything that can generate an SVG or vector file format and so you can do some color coding of that design in advance to instruct it to how you wanna put it, or you can do it all on the tool but basically the gist is, you make your design advanced, get it to the tool, it flies magically over your Wi-Fi.

You put the design in your account online, it just appears on the triple click of the design. You move the tool around your workpiece like a cursor, click to lock the design as its workpiece and now that design is like virtually locked to wherever you chose on your workpiece. At this point it's like a video game, the screen is a capacitive five inch, capacitive multi-touch screen. You move the tool around the workpiece - the tool is basically auto correct for your hands. So there's a corrective region on the tool, there's motors that compensate for the movements in real time so do you do the rough cuts and the machine does the precision.

Oh, see when I was watching it you know you could see the image on the screen like you were following a pattern, say you were cutting out a rectangle and I was trying to get my head around, yeah wonder if you slipped? To me what the human was the problem in that equation so after you do the rough cut how do you literally handle it?

Okay it all happens in real-time, automatically.

 

Oh, okay, I see.

Let's say you want to cut a perfect square you cut mostly a perfect square but you're human so you're moving back and forth you you're making micro adjustments as you go your shaking back and forth whatever, it doesn't matter any movement that you do that's contrary to the design you've placed on the tool virtually is compensated for in real-time. So if you want to cut a perfectly straight line you're moving the zigzag you get a perfectly straight line because the tool is moving opposite to your zigzag direction in real time that's internal, so what you end up with is the cut that looks like it came off of a $10,000 or $100,000 CNC machine that might take up an entire room and so it opens up a tremendous amount of possibility. With CNC machines you work with sheet goods. With our tool you can work on any existing work surface you have, you can inlay designs into your existing wooden toys you can go to your kitchen countertop installation and cut out the opening for your sink without any jigs or fixtures. You're really thinking about it at all in advance and most of these things you can even do without ever involving a computer in the process because we have on tool design capabilities as well so you can design things directly on the tool, lock them to your workpiece and then automatically cut.

Yeah.

So what kind of materials, like what stuff - obviously wood, say plastics what kind of other types of materials can it work on?

Yes so at the heart of our engine is a 720 watt trim router motor and so you can really cut anything that you would cut with that. We do hardwood, softwood, plastics composites, soft metals like aluminum and brass. We've done our fair share jewellery - dog tags, things like that with our tool. We’ve done composite Corian countertop material, soapstone; really anything that you can imagine cutting with a traditional router you can you can cut with our tool. We're not changing the physics of cutting we're just making it a lot easier and guaranteeing you get a high quality cut with a handheld tool instantly regardless of experience level.

Which is so great like I've always thought it would be so great to work with wood but I know the learning curve I'd go through would totally discourage me, but when I saw that - there is, I think it was a recent video that came out basically creating an outdoor chess-board on what looked like a tree stump right? The kind you'd find in the park, I think that's what it was anyways. and cutting out each square and then laying it with the darker wood and it was stunning. And I was watching the screen and just this interactive thing I was like: I think I could do that with a little training.

Yeah, you totally could, so no computer was ever involved in doing it, they literally got a slab of wood, said they want to make a chessboard with the tool because it knows exactly where it is in the scale of everything. You can lock and grid to whatever you're gonna do, so lots of grid to it you know. Say I want a one by one inch square grid, andI want to cut out every other square to put an inlay in for my chessboard and and you're done.

And the the learning curve on it and you know - you don't have to take my word for it. If you go to the Shaper Tools Instagram or anything like that or, if you search Shaper-made on Instagram there’s  just a lot of people getting them and unboxing them and you can watch this pretty funny progression. Someone just posted a video on Instagram yesterday and they're like, oh my god I got Shaper Origin and in 30 seconds they'd be like, oh my god I'm opening the box. 30 seconds later, like I'm doing my first cut with shape or again 30 seconds later, I already figured it out, this thing is so easy like I cant’ believe how easy it was for me to figure out how to do this! And that's that's part of what we're trying to accomplish.

Well I love that, I can't wait to see I'm sure you guys are excited to see too because I'm sure your imaginations have run wild with what you can do with it but once you start shipping it and getting it in people's hands what they're going to come up with is gonna be phenomenal.

Right, oh yeah absolutely, and we've been beta testing various versions of the prototype of this product for going on two years now - more than two years I think, so we have a lot of data about how people use and abuse this tool and we've tried to design all of those workflows and eventualities into it. But people continue to surprise us every day and it's great they love it, it's so fun.

Well you know, like I was just saying, for me personally it’s, oh that sounds fun but all that work ugh, the barrier would be the learning curve. The other barrier is good lumber tools are a bit expensive so you don't want to screw them up right? So I would think that to sort of have this sort of foolproof once you've learned it to feel really confident going to buy a piece of really beautiful wood you know. I think that would take away that sort of barrier to entry for people to try that, pretty confident.

Yeah, I mean to give you context I think one of my co-workers is is doing a test today where he's over at some guy's house doing straight-up inlays into like a wooden floor.

Right, so that's brave.

Yeah, there’s just room for mistakes there yeah,  and and this is not the first time we’ve done that. In fact there's a there's a bunch of patches on the floor in our office here. We're in a pretty old building in the Mission District and in San Francisco and the the wooden floors here have seen better days. We ripped out the carpet when we moved into this office and some wooden floors were not in good shape. And you know we found all the halls we did live inlays for them and patched them up and that's great.

That's so cool, so you just said you just started shipping,  how long ago?

So the first units started shipping out in October.

October okay, so what's the feedback you're getting from these early shipments?

I mean it's great people are getting them in using them and doing all kinds of amazing projects and they're posting them online and we have a forum on our website with a lot of people posting projects but also lots of people post on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and I've been sharing what they're doing and it's been a very exciting, nerve-wracking and exciting, experience to see people getting this tool in their hands finally, that we've been working on really hard for several years the and the anticipation. We started doing pre-orders for the tool at the end of 2016 so a lot of these people have been waiting for well over a year to receive this this product that they put their faith in. We told them we're gonna make this, here's the pedigree of a team we know what we're doing, we know how to make stuff but still, as with any pre-order, we didn't use Kickstarter or anything similar to that you know. It's an amount of risk and you don’t want people not receiving it. You want them getting it and saying, WOW the build quality is excellent and this thing works exactly the way you said it would, and it's intuitive. It's very heartening to see that.

That's so great, so what is next to your shipping Origin? I'm sure you have some things in your back pocket perhaps, you know future dreams for your next iterations or other types of tools? Don't tell your secrets I'm not asking your secrets - no IP spoiling.

We've got for the future - the key focus right now, is we're still catching up to pre-orders right, so we've been ramping up our manufacturing capability and just are now kind of getting up to full speed, you know. The maximum output that we can expect from our factory it's still gonna be a little while before we finished filling those pre-orders, especially since more and more orders come in every day and so we have to keep keep adding more and more to what we're going to be manufacturing since that's the key focus right now. Yeah it’s making sure that it goes smoothly and where we're generating a high quality product that meets a lot of very exacting quality standards. I mean we really are building a precisely calibrated and sophisticated, basically industrial robot that we are selling as a consumer electronic device. And so making sure that everyone that comes off the line is identical and works the same way and we know exactly how it's going to behave and it's gonna work with the accuracy and precision that we've promised. This is a big focus right now, yeah that's what we’re focused on and there will be more things in the future for us too.

Now one reason we became acquainted with you Jeremy, as we know with every startup you have to wear multiple hats and it sounds like you're wearing multiple hats but one of the hats you've been wearing is as an electrical engineer. Electrical engineers and PCB designers who will be the bulk of our listeners here. So can you give us a little insight to your electrical design and I know that you've been using Altium and I know you've used some other tools in your lifetime but I know you're using Altium now. So tell us a little bit about what's under the hood and what it took to to get Origin running from an electrical and electronics standpoint?

Absolutely, I mean I'll leave some of the exact details but yeah we use Altium for all the design of the rigid and flex PCBs inside the product of which there are many like I mentioned, since it is effectively an industrial robot. The electromechanical requirements of the tool and where the physical electronics are for different things is complicated. So, it's a large multi board system; there's the camera that’s used for doing the workpiece, there's the capacitive multi-touch display, there's the application processor and the microcontroller that's responsible for all the motor controls, there's the boards that are out controlling the correction motors and the z-axis motor that that moves the actual cutting bit up and down.

There's a sensor in the base that's that's used to do Z touch draw so that the bit knows where it is in space so there's a lot of boards in there. Boards and flexes, all designed with Altium. One of the things - and as you mentioned - that I've used many CAD packages in the past, basically any major one that you can think of, and one of the first things that I was tasked with when I came to join Shaper is there was no real electrical or formal electrical design before I was here. There were prototypes and one-off boards that were used to simulate and test certain aspects of the design, but the whole architecture has been new over the last two or three years since I've been here to make the product manufacturable.

So the first thing I was tasked with was I had to decide, okay, in the past that mostly been dictated to for one reason or another like here's the CAD package you have to use and I'll say something that was difficult for me at Google as I was working in Altium for some of our work, and then for reasons that I won't go into, it had to use a competitor product to Altium’s and I did not enjoy the experience. So, it was a pretty easy choice when I came here but one of the driving factors of that was we're a very lean team here, as you said I'm responsible for a lot more than just the electrical engineering and the PCB design and so the 3D capabilities of Altium have been super important. We have really tight tolerances inside of this product we have to meet a lot of requirements because it's a lot. And we want things put together perfectly to make sure that it's performing the way we expect it to.

So a lot of that ends up playing back down to the PCBs and understanding exactly how much space things are going to take up and exactly where every component is, and how big it is, and which things are touching off to thermal pads or which things are gonna have a certain amount of clearance.

There's AC power; where that comes in from the raw, we have to meet certain clearance requirements and make sure those distance are, not just in 2D but in 3D, also correct and acceptable to ship this product. So the 3D capabilities of Altium have been incredible. You saw actually, with the new release of Altium 18 I just started playing with the multi board assembly feature which is already been very useful for some of our rigid and flex assemblies that go together and seeing how those fit together has been super useful and a really important part of my job and makes it faster to go from an idea to something that fits. We can build into the mechanical CAD model of the tool and know that everything is going to assemble together the way that we expect it to and designed to do.

Well, looking at Shape or Origin it does have a really, for all the capability that it has you know, it really doesn't appear to be terribly larger than a typical hand router like you’re saying it has so much more capability so there's got to be a lot crammed inside and including that display in the sensors and all of this so it kind of reminds me actually, coming from the board industry, is like drones where you have to fold everything up and fit it mechanically - weight, power, that's the mantra you know. In military - weight and power - to keep things in that really tight but super functional footprint and be able to stand the thermal stresses of being in a small package and the vibration and all these other things so I'm sure was not an easy design?

Yeah we were a startup, we're a  lean small team of engineers here doing this so we've built a lot of our own testing equipment and fixtures to stress test this machine so it's working in a dusty environment and we want to know. is this machine gonna be tests proof okay. So we used Shaper Origin to build a dust chamber for itself stuck an air compressor to it… there's videos of this online. Plastic talcum powder and sawdust for you know, running it for days straight with all the motors cycling. We're going to do that to analyze different configurations of our z-axis assembly and how the PCBs are sealed and things like that to protect them. We've done all that; same thing goes for our spindle motor and building systems to test the functionality and lifetime of that. All things that we've developed in-house to make sure that the design works the way we expect it to and is gonna stand the test of time and be a reliable tool that you can use in your shop for many years.

Well it sounds like wonderfully brutal work you've done in the last couple of years. Really rigorous engineering standpoint. Now are you manufacturing it but you know, short term and long term - I don't mean to say that in a loaded way - but are you manufacturing it now locally and in-house or are you contracting out? I mean how will you handle the manufacturing challenges over time?

Well Origin today, like basically any product that you buy, to say the whole product is quote-unquote ‘made anywhere’ is sort of deceptive because parts come from all over the world.

This is true.

In one country in the motor comes from Germany, extrusions and plastic parts come from another country,  the final assembly currently happens in the United States. I won't go into more detail than that but yeah you know that's the final you'll see on most products now if you really dig into it, it's made everywhere!

They really are, it's a really good answer and it really is a global economy and that's never more true than electronics because we source our parts from all over. So yeah, that and when you're in the startup scrappy mode especially right? You have to be able to get it to market affordably and reliably and do all these things. Well thank you so much Jeremy I I have really enjoyed this conversation especially the part about the electronics and we love supporting startups here and and I hope soon we’ll come up and shoot a video at your plant and be able to show our audience some of the neat things you've been able to do with our tool, to make your tool and and we love that we support companies like Shaper and engineers and designers like you. It's what wakes us up in the morning so thank you so much for telling the story.

Yeah, my pleasure. You know, Shaper and Altium have a lot in common - we're both making tools help other people make things.

Exactly that's what we that's what we do we wake up in the morning and that story of Altium started from it's very beginnings from a couple of university students that were teaching and you know, they thought the young hungry startup minded population should have tools and at that time they weren't available. There were many computers and large expensive engineering stations and they weren't available, and so our two scrappy founders said, to heck with that we need tools. And so they started making them on a PC and haven't looked back since. So that spirit still kind of lives in our building and I think, that's what people kind of still relate to that to. So that spirit we do share that in common.

So, my last last question is - and I hate to ask this of you because you work so much I'm sure you don't have any spare time - but I have noticed because of the overlap of Arts and Technology a lot of people I know that our design engineers usually have really incredible hobbies like woodworking or painting or music or you know, some kind of really interesting hobby life and so I always like to ask at the end of this program. I call it design after-hours and so I want to ask you what you do after hours but I'm worried you don't have any hours after hours.

I do still try to try to make time to work on personal projects and I have the great fortune of working in a fully-featured wood shop so that is definitely some of what I do. A lot of things in my apartment are made in the wood shop here mostly using Shape Origin, so various pieces of furniture in my apartment and game boards, Chinese checkers set and organizers for my kitchen. Simple things like that - just fun projects and when I'm not doing that stuff, for me my hobbies are the same I'm very fortunate that I really like things I work on so my hobbies aren't the same things I work on but when I'm not working on the electronics for Shape Origin. I do other software and electronics projects, I document them on my website and on github and in other places.  The thing that's been really interesting for me has been home automation and this has kind of been an ongoing project for me for the last couple years, building a natural language voice controlled home automation system. Something along the lines of how Amazon echo works. The first version that I built - just to get the record straight - was working long before Amazon Alexa came out. I will cede and say that the current products manufactured by Amazon and Google are way better than anything I've made. But still a fun learning process and it is a system I use in my house everyday. It's a natural language voice control system that I have hooked into my lights and my music and I had hooked into the shades of my old apartment but not anymore, and I have it pinned to my phone. My number one most used feature is…  because it's still like kind of weird to talk to an imaginary computer thing to ask it to do stuff and so I still don't feel super great about that but I do do it because it's an interesting engineering problem too. It was interesting to learn how to write those natural language processing software and I've been doing a bunch of that. My most used feature is still just like at night when I'm ready to go to bed and I have my phone, I just like give it a shake and it turns off all my lights.

Oh!

So simple.

But I want one I haven't got, I have two Echos in my house and still I'm not using them for half the stuff that they could do but they are super fun. Well again thank you Jeremy it's been great to have you and so great to learn about Shaper. Give us your website real quick and then we'll share some links below with our audience.

Yeah if you want to learn more about Shaper go to https://shapertools.com/ or just Google shape Origin on Google and there's tons of YouTube videos, lots to see what the tool is capable of and if you want to know more about what I'm doing I’m at jeremyblum.com.

Very good. Jeremy thanks so much, you're really fun to watch and we'll keep keep our eyes on you and keep our eyes on Shaper and we look forward to talking to you soon.

Thank you this has been Judy Warner with the Ontrack Podcast. Thank you for joining us for our talk with Jeremy Blum. Please remember to subscribe and we'll see you next time and remember to always stay OnTrack.

Charles Pfeil and Judy take a look back on the days of manual design, before exploring today’s very different eCAD competitive landscape and the tools that take designers to the next level. Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Charles Pfeil for a conversation on PCB design, autorouters and the future of software design tools.

 

Show Highlights:

• Introducing the iconic and award-winning Charles Pfeil
• Tape ups and touch ups with red pen precision
• Artistry not OCD, PCB design for form and function
• Charles on joining Altium and Activeroute
• “You know we’re paid by the hour, right?!”
• Where are we going to be in 10 years?

 

Links and Resources:

• Charles Pfeil and Happy Holden at AltiumLive
• A lifetime designing PCBs: Surprising acquisition brings stability
• A lifetime designing PCBs: Focus on functional specs
• A lifetime deisgning PCBs: early design adventures
• Job Shopper to Service Bureau
• Changing Roles
• Switching to eCAD
• From Design to Software
• Merging Design and Fabrication
• An Excellent History of CAD
• Improving Autorouting and Design Software
• See all of Charles Pfeil’s articles on EDN here

Hey everybody, Judy Warner here, Director of Community Engagement for Altium. Welcome to the OnTrack Podcast. If this is your first

time listening, we're glad to have you. If you're returning, we're happy to have you back.

The OnTrack podcast is produced every week, so please add the OnTrack podcast to your favorite RSS feeds or iTunes. You can also follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter @AltiumJudy, and be sure to follow Altium on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

So let's get into the show. Well, I have a treat for you today. I have a guest, Charles Pfeil, who is, he won't say it but I will, he's iconic in the industry and we're gonna talk a little bit about the history of routing.

So, I want to tell you a little bit about Charles, forgive me for reading here for a moment.

Charles has been in the PCB industry for over 50 years as a designer and owner of a service bureau and has worked in marketing and engineering management at Racal Redac, ASI, Cadence, PADS, VeriBest, and Mentor Graphics, so pretty much everybody, and now Altium. He was inducted into the PCB Design Hall of Fame through UP Media in 2013 for his contribution to PCB design software.

Charles has been working at Altium since 2015 as a Senior Product Manager. So, welcome Charles, we always have a blast when we talk together, so thanks for doing this adventurous podcast with me.

You're welcome, glad to be here.

So, you are on the other side of the country from me right now.

I'm here in La Jolla as you know and I get to see you sometimes once a month, and you and I have had some interesting conversations here in the office, kind of a shared belief that we're sort of losing some of the history, right? Of our industry, particularly design, sort of where we've come from and where we're going, and I really value people like you, Happy Holden, Lee Ritchie, these people in the industry really that carry this whole history inside of them, so I'm always happy to have a chance to sort of glean some of that from you and you've told me some great stories, so thank you again for doing this.

So, how I met Charles was when I was a journalist from iConnect 007 and I interviewed him to learn about ActiveRoute, which was a new product for Altium at the time, and just sort of casually at the end of the conversation I mentioned to Charles "So, what's your history?" not knowing who Charles was and then, out he comes with the history of PCB design.

So yeah. I felt like a knucklehead, but it ended up being a good article, so you were a good sport.

So let's start talking about where at least you and I remember things which is tape-up. So, tell us about your earliest memories of doing tape-ups and what that was like and sort of what some of the problems were.

Okay, well my first job, I worked inspecting Rubyliths, and at that time the way that people routed boards was to essentially cut away the things that they didn't want, so what was left was the routing.

So there's a process in which they used an exacto knife and my job was to look for scratches on the Rubylith and patch them up, and I would have to say from that to what we do today is a tremendous change, and it went through an evolution where for manual design that the methods changed, the materials changed, and also the complexity of the design changed, and the same thing has happened once we started working with computers to design, right?

The materials change in the sense of the board materials. The methods change in that there's constantly an evolution of how much the software is able to do to help the designer, but just a note on the manual design and where this term 'artwork' came from. That, the interconnect would be done by drawing it, right?

Usually with red and blue pencils and most of the designs are two layers, and you would try and interconnect them and, you know, erase a line if it doesn't work out, but generally, you know, the type of components back then were DIP high C's if you had any at all, and it was, it was fairly simple and you could draw with red and blue pencils what you wanted and then you would either use black tape or red and blue tape in order to create an artwork that would be used in fabrication in order to get the design made.

Well, there were many different styles when you get to the artwork side. Some people like to use the black tape and create curves and arcs on everything, and some would not care about concentric arts, others, like me, would be very OCD and want to make every single corner perfect and make it look like some kind of art. It's not really art, but it's just the implication is that the person who's doing it is really caring about how it looks.

Absolutely, which by the way, one question I want ask you I know the answer to but I think the listeners will appreciate, what were you touching up that Rubylith with? Just a red pen.

Yeah, a red pen. I would just, because I had a magnifying glass to find the scratches 'cause with an exacto knife they would be really small, you know nicks.

Right.

And, so I'd go through looking at it with a magnifying glass and then use a red pen to fill it in so that there's no place with the light to shine through, because the way they were doing it back then, if enough light shined through then there'd be a hole in the mask for etching the board. Yep. Which could, what would that-

Well, you'd have a- -well, it could have an open, well you'll have an open if the scratch went all the way across, right.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anyways, continue on. I just-

Yeah. It's okay.

-it's just a funny thing, like, when I think of how much precision we have now, to think of us touching up artwork with red pens just cracks me up.

Yeah, yeah, and when using black tape I think it was common to start out with arcs and you'd do that by kind of using the knife to create a little cinch in the corner, but eventually arcs became the less productive method, let's put it that way, and so you would start making 45-degree corners by just cutting maybe three quarters of the tape and folding it over to create a corner, and so then the art was to make sure that everything was right on the grid, and when you did a 45 it'd be perfectly 45, and it got kind of excessive, but when computers came.

Yeah.

That's where it changed, and I do have an experience in that area when my service bureau switched to computer design as opposed to manual design.

So you were right in that transition then, you went on your service bureau right from Rubylith black tape right into computer-aided design.

Yeah, from tape-ups in 1978, from tape-ups to computer design, and that was a Racal-Redec system, and I lost all my customers because the only customers who wanted the computer design were people who already had it themselves. Most people who didn't have computer systems, they didn't trust it. We would give them plotted artwork and they couldn't edit it, so as a service bureau, I had to go out and find customers who not only used computers but Racal-Redec computers.

So was Racal-Redec's price point, was there a barrier to entry there, kind of for that kind of system for OEMs?

Sure. So, I bought two used systems, you know with a basic vector graphics monitor, PDP1134 with the software. I bought two used systems for, I think, my memory is not great on this, but I think it was around $125,000.

Holy cow, that's a lot.

It was a lot. For used.

It was an investment and it paid off over time. I did increase my price per IC by a factor of 10.

Wow.

-which helps, you know, because you gotta pay for the apartment, but that's what happened in the industry.

So, routing in a computer system was different because with the computer of course you're effectively laying down the edge as you route as opposed to going through a stage and sketching the, you know, red and blue pencils

Right.

-but, so interactive routing was really, click-click click-click at every corner, okay? And if you wanted to make a change then you would either delete those and reroute it or some more sophisticated systems allows you to move the track around, and it was either that or autorouting and at that time autorouting, well it hasn't changed much but autorouting was primarily just an X&Y; exercise and adding a lot of vias. In a sense it was similar to the way that I see routing. I see routing doesn't care about vias and they just, whenever you got to make a change in direction you just pop a via and go, and with printed circuit board autorouters that's what they would do. They didn't care about how many vias you added and really vias, the only problem with vias back then was the cost of drilling them.

Right. At that time there was, wasn't.

Yeah, it was nominal.

It, yeah, well the cost was still there, but in terms of vias affecting the high-speed behavior-

Right, uh-huh. -there weren't high-speed designs. There were companies of course who were doing that, but vias didn't become a cost for signaling performance.

Right. So, people still didn't like vias. They could see with their mind that, "Hey I could route that without vias" so they would rather just go ahead and route it without vias, and so even though autorouters, every company tried to come out with the ultimate autorouter, and it could never match what the designer was thinking or what the designer really wanted as a final result, and I'd say generally that's been the problem with autorouting.

Too many vias, not really ending up with a route path that the designer had in his mind, and also the most common thing I hear is that it would take more time to clean it up than it would to just route it manually. Now I remember back in my early fabrication days knowing designers that would autoroute a portion, say 60% of the board they would autoroute, and then they'd do all the rest by hand.

Was that because of what you're talking about or was that just the speed to design at the time?

That would be a method. There's so many different ways of approaching it, but a method would be to route the critical signals first manually, and then just give it to the autorouter to finish everything else, because that would save time.

Now, autorouters evolved. The early autorouters really didn't care about anything but is there an open channel and is there space for a via, right? Then it evolved over time where there is a recognition that, well what can we do to try and eliminate vias, and I say eliminate because they would route with vias and then they'd have a pass to remove vias if they can, right? So, but it really wasn't fundamentally in the algorithm of the router to try and route without vias. Now, a number of autorouters gave the designer control, like CCT with a DO file where you could, you could put costs on the router to try and minimize vias, but it was difficult.

You really had to be an expert and I went to a number of companies where they had one person who was the router specialist and the designers would place the board and then send it to the router specialist who would do the automatic routing and that person would know how to set it up and it would be pretty good, but when it came back there still had to be a quite a bit of editing.

Who was, who created the best sort of autorouter of that time, and what kind of time frame are we talking about now, as we're moving forward?

Yeah, I would say, well it depends on who you talk to, okay, because-

Everybody has their favorites, right?

-everybody has their favorite.

So I would say though, obviously the Cooper Chan Technology, CCT. Their autorouter was the favorite, especially among Mentor, Cadence, PADS. Those companies all had interfaces to it and relied upon to do their autorouting, but once CCT was bought by Cadence for a measly four hundred and thirty or four hundred and fifty million dollars- Whoa. -whoa. All the other companies, Mentor, Very Best, and also PADS felt "whoops we can't go down this road" because, as usually happens in a competitive environment, those who have a relationship with one of their competitors, it's possible that that relationship could diminish over time.

Right of course, and we have to remind listeners right now that at that time PADS was not part of Mentor. Correct.

Correct. Neither was Very Best.

Very Best, right, so it was a whole different environment. So Very Best, they had autorouting capability and it was different. It was, it had some different data structures and different algorithms and actually that was one of the primary reasons why Mentor bought Very Best, was for that autorouting capability. Oh, okay interesting. See, I love, I mean, people that are around our ages know this but so many now that are, I don't know maybe 40 and under don't. You know that how, this used to be a, there used to be more than three or four players in this space, right?

Sure, sure. And we kind of all, ate each other up until we have what we have today. I would say the 90's and early 2000's there were so many mergers and acquisitions.

Yeah. Unbelievable-Unbelievable. -and you know, I went from Intergraph to PADS to Very Best to Mentor, right? And then now I'm at Altium, and looking at the evolution and the tools over that time the autorouter was a key thing, but realistically designers still preferred to route it just by themselves and manually, right?

It's true. It's, it really has a lot to do with what the designer thinks about when they're placing the board.

They know that a certain bus needs to go in a certain direction on a certain layer, and to set up those kind of controls and cost adjustments for an autorouter is a lot of work and it requires a lot of knowledge about the core capabilities. So, I think routing in general after, yeah after CCT was bought started turning in a different direction where rather than just autorouting, let's see what we can do to give the designer the kind of control with interactive routing that they want, and increase their performance.

What can we do to increase the performance?

Right, and is, tell me again now is this around the time that you joined Mentor's team?

Yeah, I joined Mentor in 1998.

Okay, so late 90's.

Yeah, it was-

And you helped, and you helped architect that vision right?

Yeah, I was part of it. I mean-

Part of it right, it's a team.

-it's always a lot of people involved, and I was involved in it, and I always tried to put my designer perspective into it, right? And I think that's my contribution, is not only being able to work with the development people but to be able to communicate the knowledge and expectation of a designer so that the software that we develop is something that a designer would appreciate.

Right, you had a designer-

Not that.you had a designer brain so you knew, which by the way, as you, as you alluded to in the beginning, is an artistic brain, really. It's, there's a lot of creativity there and an appreciation for not only function but also aesthetics and to put things in really neat, tight patterns, or.

Well, yeah-

Yeah, you call it OCD but there's that.

-there is that.

You know, this is a topic that has come up quite a bit in the last 10 years and I like to say the following, that yeah there's that artistic side but ultimately I believe it's about efficiency. And in the context of CAD design, efficiency means that the routing is as direct as required, of course if you're doing some kind of, you know, tuning on it it's not going to be direct, you're adding lights to it, but you want it to be as direct as possible. You want to manage many more things than we had to manage, you know back in the 60's and 70's, right?

Right, absolutely.

Now you have to manage high-speed requirements, so you don't necessarily want to have everything tightly packed in parallel. I remember I was demonstrating some ActiveRoute capabilities to a high-speed product manager, probably a little over a year ago.

And there was a bug in the routing where it was, it was kind of messy, you know and the high-speed engineer says, "Oh that's great!" Right? Because it would totally eliminate cross-talk, you know? Exactly.

Yeah, so there has to be the balance and that fundamentally, that is the job of the designer.

How do you figure out the compromises, right, to achieve the right balance where you fulfill manufacturing, you fulfill high-speed requirements, and ultimately the design works, right?

And if it comes out looking where everything is nice and neat, that's a bonus because the next person who has to make edits on it - it'll be much easier, right? Right.

And yeah, frankly most of time or many times if it's not a high-speed net, those geometries don't matter so much, but if it doesn't take any extra time to make it nice and neat what's the problem with it?

Yeah, I get what you're saying, yeah.

There's sort of some elegance about the design, and like you said, many boards go into respins and you're not always doing that on your own work, so that totally makes sense.

So, you joined Altium what two years ago about, approximately?

Yeah, in May of 2016, excuse me, 2015. 2015, and so you've been working on ActiveRoute here, so what, you know, you've always throughout your whole career been pushing for trying to make things better, what are you trying to accomplish sort of on the work you're working on now, on the ActiveRoute?

Yeah, so it is one of a number of things that I have worked on, but I would say most of my time has been spent on ActiveRoute, and the intent of ActiveRoute is to give the designer another tool in their interactive tool set, okay? It's not for everything, but the intent is that when you have a group of signals that you want to route together, whether it be, you know, a bus or just individual nets that start and end in approximately the same place, I want to give the designer the ability to just, through a couple simple clicks, have those routes the way that he's thinking, okay? And what is the designer thinking? That's the key. But I would say that, you know, it, with most boards is pretty clear. You see the connections, that's where they start and end, and I'm looking for a tool that can allow that designer to just select those connections and have it route on the layers that he wants them on, ability to spread them out, ability to pack them together. These little techniques are there as options so that ultimately it looks like he would do manually. It's not a replacement for interactive routing, it's instead an accelerator.

Oh, okay. By the way, along the lines of accelerator, I was talking to somebody, I have to share this story with you, I was talking to a designer and he was telling me that he was sitting in your session at AltiumLive where I think you were showing ActiveRoute, and he said someone in the room said, "You know we're paid by the hour, right?" because it was making it more efficient, so I think that's a compliment to you Charles, to the work you're doing.

There is that trade-off, but that's been there forever, that designers fear being replaced by the computer, right?

Right, so that's gonna be my next question, just, so get ready about, to talk to me about AI and designers being replaced.

Okay, well, we can go there now.

Okay, you ready?

Yeah, I'm ready.

So, I know there is this fear or I've heard there's fears of designers being replaced by AI or computers and all that. So, what say you, Charles Pfeil?

Well, I say that it's going to be a while, all right? If you can imagine all the energy and all the time and talent that has been focused on auto routing over the years since, you know you have companies like ASI in the 60's, late 60's had automatic routing for IBM, okay on mainframes-

Oh I didn't know that.

- and, you know, programming it with punch cards. So, from there until now the ability to get autorouting to succeed has failed all right?

And this is just-

Or has it gotten us there since the 1960's, right?

We're still not, you know. It's not there, and generally designers have rejected it and it's not because they're afraid they're going to lose their job.

And, besides that, like I say usually, you don't sell these tools directly to the designer, you sell it to their manager, and if they can get the job done faster they're all for it okay?

Right, right.

But the problem is that it hasn't been adequate, the autorouting capability. It's a tough, tough problem. Every design is different, right? It's different.

And- And it's very, and because of that it's such a complex brain task, really.

Right, and there are standard circuits, of course you know, standard interfaces and memory circuits that need to be routed the same way, but then the placement's different, the board size is bigger or smaller or a different aspect ratio or it's flex or, you know, could be a lot of different variables.

There's many, many more variables right now, too. So, to fully automate that is going to take a completely different perspective for design I believe, and it's going to take a huge investment, and the interesting thing is okay in ten years, let’s suppose somebody started on-

You know, are you reading my mind? My next question was gonna be where are we gonna be in ten years Charles? So-

Yeah, exactly. Let's suppose somebody started a project to use AI and that's in the, in the context of doing machine learning and analyzing databases and building decision trees, and even if you got that working over five of those ten years, a lot of the things will change. They'll evolve and this is one reason why software vendors can't keep up with the technology.

There's always something new, always something new and on our list of enhancements to work on, it's always the latest technology, right?

And there's only so much we can do so we have to pick and choose which technology we're gonna focus on with each release.

Well, and, I was just talking to Ben Jordan here about this.

Well, until I came here, since I came from the board and assembly side, I had no real appreciation for the time and discipline it takes for development and for coding that software.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of discipline to put in all these new features and we're so, sort of instant gratification, we're just like "oh, well, put it in your next release." Not so easy.

Yeah, it's just a fact of life, and our customers, they want these things and we want to give them to them, but it has to be an evolution.

So if a company decides okay we're going to use AI to automate the design process, sure they could analyze all the different types of designs and understand them and how to use them, but then when they start with a new design, how could an AI decide on its own what the board size should be? What the stack up should be? Whether or not to use micro vias? What are the critical signals? I guess it would have to be able to read a data sheet, that is hard enough for humans to read.

That aren't always accurate, may I add.

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, most of the time they are, but. I'm not saying it's not possible, it certainly is possible. But, it's going to be a long time.

Yeah.

And maybe, who knows, maybe MCM's will come back and we won't have printed circuit boards. There's always that possibility. Yeah, yeah.

We just don't know, and the, even, you know, printing circuit boards - where is that technology going to be in 10 years?

Exactly, yeah. 3D printing and there's, gosh, so much that they're grappling with, so who knows?

Yeah, and the core problem is that a company is not going to design a product, let me rephrase that, a innovative company is not going to design a product that uses all these standards and circuit technology of the past. They have to have something new and different.

Right. This is why Intel stays in business, and all the other chip manufacturers, because you know they need higher performance, they need more capabilities, and so it's a complete redesign except for like I say standard interface is a memory, that's not a redesign, until the next standard comes out, but those tend to last a couple years and then, you know, you look at memory DDR 2, 3 & 4 they just change over the years.

And the interesting thing about, I wanted to comment here, about memory in terms of the PCB designer, the DDR2 circuit was the most difficult to route because of the T branching. Then the DDR3 came with the fly-by signal technology, that was much easier for the designer to work with as long as you have some kind of electrical signals, and DDR4 is really just a minor evolution, significant in terms of performance over the DDR3, so who knows where that's going next. Will the next phase be like the change between DDR2 and 3? I don't know. They have the specs for DDR5 and I'm just unfamiliar with them. But, so technology will continue to change.

Maybe AI will be able to support a segment at a time, and I know that there's people in the industry who are talking about this and wanting to do something with it, but I'm unaware of a officially funded project to do it at this time.

I'm with you there, and I would think you would hear about it from your connections, I don't know. Maybe, we don't know. And would a company you know like Cadence or Altium or Mentor fund a project that they know is going 2 to 3 years and maybe, maybe not work?

It's a risk. A potential risk, so. Yeah, so I would say to all the designers who are concerned about losing their job, don't worry.

But what will be extremely important is that they make sure that they continue to be educated and understand the latest technology and what requirements those bring to the design process. Then you have your value. Yep.

And you won't lose your job.

And I would say to that, that almost through the OnTrack newsletter and now podcast I hear that message over and over and over again from leaders saying, "the key to my success was I continued to learn and evolve" and so it's been great to talk with you Charles I always learn so much from you.

I wanted to ask you one last question. I have this part of the podcast I like to call "Designer After Hours".

I've just noticed a lot of designers have a creative bent and usually have some interesting hobby, so what are maybe one or two of your favorite hobbies?

Well, I could list three, all right?

Okay.

One is playing golf. I love to play golf. Second would be, photography, taking pictures, mostly landscape pictures.You can see behind me a couple landscapes, but I like to say that I prefer landscapes because they don't move very much. I've tried to do a few weddings and it was a total disaster, so I'm just not that, but and then third I do write a lot and I've, you know, written poetry and I really enjoyed doing that, so those are the three things.

Speaking of writing, I wanted to let our listeners know that Charles has written, which I'm delighted about my passion for history being preserved, how many parts are we now up to, ten? How many are we gonna finish at?

Well, actually 8 of them have been published in EDN magazine.

EDN Magazine, right, so there's a whole series of Charles' experience over all these years and goes into depth, so if you want to learn more please go to EDN.com and probably just search by Charles Pfeil and you'll find that. How many are you gonna, I know eight have been published, so how many- It'll be, eight have been published, I think it'll be twelve or thirteen in the end.

Twelve total, okay. Okay, well thanks again Charles, we've gotta run, but I could, I'm never tired of talking to you. You're a dear and thank you so much for your contribution to the industry, and it's always great to talk to you.

Well, that's all we have for today. Please remember to subscribe to the OnTrack podcast and follow us on social media, and remember to always stay OnTrack.

Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Ben Jordan for a conversation on Multiboard PCB design.

 

Show Highlights:

• Many different product areas are being impacted by developments in Electronics, opening new frontiers - beauty products, wearables
• Electronics are replacing things that traditionally were not electronics
• Electronics product development are increasingly driven by engineers, but other makers are inspiring growth in the market - i.e. sofas, smart homes
• Design and product driven electronics, PCB designers are being pushed to partion boards into multiboard systems
• Everybody faces this multiboard challenge
• Immediate visual feedback in 3D design / 3D modeling definitely helps
• Major recurring challenge in industry: aligning connectors and aligning components that have some kind of outward expression on the actual product; MCAD and PCB assembly alignment. Multiboard design editor allows you to do this.
• Altium trivia and the origin of making tools for makers
• Ben's brother and his first soldering tool

Links and Resources:

• Multiboard in Altium Designer 18

 

Hey everybody, Judy Warner here. Welcome to the OnTrack podcast.

I'm the Director of Community Engagement here at Altium and this is our very first podcast.

You're very brave to listen and we're happy to have you. If you're new to OnTrack altogether be sure to sign up for our OnTrack newsletter which is online at resources.altium.com, or watch our OnTrack instructional video series which you can find on YouTube, and our goal with OnTrack is our tagline is to inspire, educate, and connect, and by bringing you together, the PCB design community, we hope to do that.

So, please add this podcast to your favorite RSS feed or on iTunes and you can also follow me personally, please oh please, on LinkedIn or at Twitter at Altium, at Altium Judy and follow Altium on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Now, let's get into the fun stuff. So, today I thought we would talk about a subject that seems to be prevalent today in PCB design conversation, and that is about multi-board design. Many designs are going, as things become more complex, as we all know the automotive market, and so many others, because of size, weight, and power, they're being smaller, we're having to do rigid flex design, we're folding things upon themselves, we're fiting things into very tight spaces so you may have just been laying out single board designs not long ago and then you find yourself entering this sort of complex world that comes with it, comes with it a lot of, you know, new and challenging new aspects of things you need to think about in the overall design. So, a few of those things that I've learned about from my guest Ben Jordan is partitioning, connection management, and signal and power integrity. So I brought in Ben Jordan, who is our resident multi-board expert, and my friend and colleague, and partner in crime.

Thanks for having me.

So Ben, talk about what you see sort of currently going on in the EDA market as a whole, what's going on at Altium, and what kind of challenges specifically you see designers facing and sort of how they overcome them.

Yeah, well, if you look at the PCB design and electronics board level electronics design sort of industry over history over the last, I don't know, even four decades, the march has always been in it. I can't see it changing any time really soon, to make things smaller, cheaper, more reliable,
better for production runs, and more compact, and that's really taken an uptick. It's, to me, if I could graph complexity versus board area, I'm sure it would look something like a hockey stick.
You know, up-

Mmhm.

-up and to the right, and that really has always been that way, it's just that with exponential things like this, we see it, the further to the right you go the more acute it becomes, the issue of trying to fit more in less space, and this is partly brought on by higher levels of integration in the

semiconductor side, sometimes it's alleviated by that as our guest at AltiumLive recently in Munich, Lee Richie, aptly pointed out that-

 

Mmhm.

PCB designs can in some cases get simpler and simpler because more integration on the actual microprocessor is happening,but at the same time we're dealing with greater densities, greater pin out densities, but something that we have noticed in our industry is, is that there are many companies that were not electronics companies or that on the outside their products may not be considered primarily an electronic device, but- I just saw this in a magazine, like a whole article about electronics and beauty products, like, what?

Right, exactly.

 

Or like, a device you can put on  your thumbnail so you know if you're gonna get sunburned, and it's an electronic device, t's, it's everywhere. Like you said, it's very prevalent.
Yeah, like, wearables is actually a classic sort of prescient example of that, where we, we no longer have mechanical watches. A mechanical watch is considered a luxury item these days and is very expensive if it is a genuine mechanical watch.

 

Mmhm.

Just like having a horse has become a luxury item after the automobile replaced the entire horse industry, and we see the same thing happen in many different sort of product realms, and so wearables is a good example of that.

 

I wear a Fitbit, I love this thing, it's cool.


Me too, yours is cooler than mine now. A lot of my friends have Apple Watches as well and, so electronics is replacing things that traditionally weren't and these companies are primarily driven by product design and function, not by the engineering team having a good idea. So electronics companies in the past, and there's still many of them that do do this, see themselves as an electronics company and the product development is driven by engineering and inventors who are electrical engineers or equivalent, but then there's this whole growth in the market that happens through furniture makers, ar makers, you name it.

 

That's another weird thing I saw.


You name it, and they're becoming- -about the sofa, there's like a whole device
set being embedded into a sofa, I'm like what?


And smart homes, just think of all the control going on.

 

Yeah, yeah yeah.


So, so these, but a lot of these are design slash mechanically driven product manufacturers or designers and so the electronics has to fit within that and as a result PCB designers more and more are being forced to partition the design into a multi-board system. So how do you think we're doing as an EDA industry and addressing that and giving them tools that are, you know, easy to onboard and get up to speed quickly, right?

 

They can't spend six months learning how to do really excellent multi-board design, so- -Exactly, so everybody, that's just it, every, everybody faces this multi-board challenge, but in the past, we're not the first company, we're not the first, Altium is not the first EDA company to provide
a multi-board design solution, but we are the first in that range of the market where anybody can actually afford our, our tools. If they're a professional designer they can afford Altium Designer and it's pretty well known, and our mission has always been to include the technology people need for everyday kind of design, and advanced technology for design and not withhold that just because somebody is not an enterprise customer. I mean the enterprise has different needs around data management and workflow management, but from an actual design and computer-aided design perspective every PCB designer should have multi-board design capabilities because they all face the same problems, and so I think this is the first time
that in the mainstream we've seen anybody address this multi-board design issue with proper connectivity management and 3D modeling of the system to make sure everything's going to fit.

So typically, if you, if you're a PCB designer, and you want multi-board capabilities,
that's going to be, it's going to be a huge cost driver for the software at large, I'm not talking about Altium per-se but if you wanted to acquire that ability inside your EDA software it's expensive than, you're saying.

 

Yeah, up until now it's been very high-end packages that had this capability that we're, we're talking maybe ten times the licensing cost, but.

Wow.

But, I mean there's many different ways of doing it, and most people out there, even myself in my hobby context in my shed, I've done multi-board design systems, and so I realized, and Altium, you know we realized, that it's something everybody needs and we shouldn't withhold it and charge extra for it. It's, it's just, it is a mainstream problem and so the technology should be available to the mainstream. So, that the other way of doing it of course is how people are
doing it up until now if they don't have those tools. You have to create Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets to maintain lists of pins on different connectors, which connector is where on the design. You have to create a hop, a high level or top level, I nearly said hop level. [laughter]

You have to, I know, it's crazy but you have to, you have to do this kind of stuff because if you think about the actual problems associated with it there's, there's, there's a couple of different things. If you're doing a simple stacking design, you can reuse a board shape, for example. The boards will always, not always but maybe they will be the same shape. Think of an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi that has, has shields or capes or whatever they plug into it and they stack up vertically through the connectors and that's, that's a nice elegant way to prototype things, but
to go to production it's a bit tricky, and if you're, if you're developing a multi-board system like that it's fairly straightforward, but most systems are not that straightforward, and the different PCBs within the overall product may be in different locations, different planes of orientation, and can interconnect with board to board connectors or cables and harnesses, and then you get into issues like, how do you, how do you manage the pin outs?

That's a big one.

Connection management is a big issue, with multi-board designs even if you're stacking one board on top of another and you have a header and a socket, a mating socket, most people don't even realize until this, the blue, magic blue smoke is coming out of the first prototype [laughter] that, well actually the female connectors pin out is numbered from looking top down on it, in terms of the library and the footprint in the library you start traditionally pin one is at the top left and you go anti-clockwise, but that means when that connector is on the bottom side of a board plugging into another board beneath it, it's mirrored.

Yeah.

And this very simple thing can wreak havoc on the design process and time-to-market so, so we needed to provide tools to prevent those kinds of problems.


And I'm not a designer. I am, come from the fab and EMS side, so I'm honestly asking these questions, I'm not, but doesn't the ability of our software to do 3D help with that to visually give
you a sense that it's flipping instead of just sort of imagining how it's gonna go together-

It certainly does.

-until it's physically in front of you?

Yeah, it's really important to have that immediate visual feedback in whatever tools you're using, and if what you do is design anything, you need immediate visual feedback to get things right, and having that 3D modeling helps you align things, but the other side of this, the other area which is probably aside from incorrect pin assignments, one of the other areas that we noted in the industry that people struggle the most with is aligning connectors and aligning components that have some kind of outward expression on the actual product.


So, in my, I think of audio gear all the time because I'm into that, right, but, so one example is if I were designing a new amplifier I'm going to have some potentiometers and other controls on the front panel and so I have an enclosure, I have a front panel that has markings, and it has holes, and that's designed in MCAD, but the PCB assembly has to align perfectly to that, and I may actually want to realign components to match external holes and cutouts in the enclosure, and the multi-board design editor actually allows you to do that, allows you to go into a mode where you can actually move individual components and there could be things like potentiometers, or that their main intent is connectors that have to interface with other mating connectors on other boards, and you can actually cause them to snap together so that on the other PCB design you've got absolute confidence that you can make that first prototype and the connector will be in the right place and other components won't interfere with it in 3D space.

Yeah, I've seen some of you designers here in our office doing these, you know, rotating and showing, oh if I fold this over then this component is gonna run into that part or whatever I'm being able to just shift things slightly and it move kind of globally, is it's really fun to watch.

It looks almost like a computer game to me, right?

Yeah.

But it's really great how you can move that and and see it mechanically, you know in that 3D space instead of, remember the old days of prototyping, going whoops, forgot about that, and it was completely built out and there's all these expensive parts and you would salvage what you can but some were just like going in the trash can, and

 

I actually have an interesting bit of Altium history trivia about that.

Alright let's hear trivia, cool.

because we had, we had that exact issue, we, some people who've been around our orbit
for a while will have, will remember that we used to do FPGA design stuff,  and we actually had a hardware design team, and their role was to design development boards for developing FPGA designs in Altium Designer, and those boards were modular so we had the Nanoboard 2 is the one on thinking of, we had this huge motherboard, and on top of that you had a daughter card that plugged right in that had, that could have different FPGAs you could try from different FPGA manufacturers, and we had another three different modules you could plug into different locations on the board and each had different input output options, and so during the design process of this we ran into issues with 3D clearance. There were some actual problems, this is a multi-board system, and back then the only way our hardware team were able to model this was to print the board designs that they did have in outlines out in 2D and cut those out and glue them one-to-one on bits of cardboard, corrugated cardboard.

I would cut it all out of cardboard and glue with hot melt glue or hot snot we'd call it. [laughter]

They'd use hot snot to glue the connectors in the positions where they would be on the final boards and plug them all together like this multi-board mock-up using cardboard, and the actual bulky components would be on it.

That's funny.

And it was so time-consuming and, too tempting sometimes to leave out some parts that should have been on that model but just, due to time constraints were left off, and I remember-

Plus I'm thinking, and then the CEO walks by and thinks you're doing arts and crafts, I mean.

Well, I mean it was necessary, but we actually had some boards that couldn't be plugged in in their first revision and had to be revised with a different bill of materials because there was, there were some power supply inductors that stuck out too far and when the whole assembly was together they, they seriously would not fit.

So, it had, it's like, if only we'd had this then maybe we could have reduced the cost of the product, products, and so on. So there's a lot of, and as I was saying earlier I think it's inevitable that any professional designer will run into these sorts of problems at some point, the tools need to be provided for them.

Well, I had the rare and cool opportunity to speak to Dave Warren one time on a Skype call from Australia, one of our original founders, and I was just trying to get a sense of who the company was and he just reminded me of like, a swashbuckling pirate, like give 'em the tools, you know like, he just he, you can tell he was so passionate about, nobody should pay these, you know, crazy prices for functionality. Whoever wants 'em should have them, by God.

You know, in his Aussie accent like you and he cracked me up but I really, it really came through to me that he was about make sure that anyone who wants these tools can have them. That they're reachable and that, it's a fun story by the way.

That's cool well that has been an undercurrent of the whole history since the founding and, to hear that straight from the horse's mouth is not at all surprising to me.

I remember him sharing a similar story about when we acquired NeuroCAD in-

Oh he told me about that, yeah.

-the late 90's.

So NeuroCAD was the first neural net based, you know routing technology.

Yeah, he told me they were charging 118 grand for that software, and he said "we, so we bought it and we cut the" I'm doing like Scottish accent now, "we cut the bloody horns off it and gave it to the people."

Yeah, they priced it-
So, how much did you sell it for after that?

It was $395 I believe.

$395, after $118 grand.

And the company that developed it sold maybe three or four licenses to a few big companies.

We acquired the technology and start, immediately put the price at like, 395 or, you know, under
$400 and it sold in the first month, it was over a million dollars of sales because it just, people wanted it they just couldn't afford it.

 

Well, we are out of time, but one last thing I want to thank you by the way for sharing all that.

 

Every time I talk I learn something amazing from you, Ben. So, on the fun side, I've always noticed, I've worked with PCB designers over 25 years plus, and something I noticed they all had in common is they have really interesting lives. I like to call it designers after hours. So Ben Jordan, what do you do after hours?

Ooh, ooh that sounds risqué.

Yeah no no, this is a G-rated podcast.

I'm a very G-rated person after hours actually.

I've always been into technology but I'm also from, I'm the youngest of six and from a very musical family so all my brothers and sisters were into music and played instruments and actually the reason I'm into electronics is because of my oldest brother, Les, he was a great guitarist but he was also an electronics technician and used to build his own tube amps and all sorts of cool stuff, so he gave me my first lessons in electronics and my first lessons in guitar right around the time, he bought me my first soldering iron actually for my eighth birthday and taught me how to solder.

I burned myself on that thing many times and I loved every minute.

I'm like, this was learning but it was, I've never looked back and then, and then right around when I turned 12 he bought me myfirst electric guitar and I haven't looked back on that either. I mean, we just, we are influenced by the world around us but sometimes in our lives we have kind of heroes, and he's definitely one of my biggest heroes and showed me this, this is, this was what my life was always going to be about.


Electronics and guitar and, you know, and now I have a family too, so between, between family and work and, I squeeze hobby electronics and guitar in-between those, but it's very full and very fun.

That's great. Well it was great having you and I'm sure we'll have you again 'cause you are a wealth of information on lots of subjects.

 

So, let's just wrap up our first podcast here. Well thanks everyone for listening in on this conversation with myself and Ben Jordan.


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