INFORMATION IS POWER
Board-level design is reaching out to the supply chain, as Chris Edwards discovers
I
t remains a cliché of electronics
that the connection between design
and manufacturing is a brick wall.
But that wall is beginning to break
down as companies try to streamline
production and avoid being stymied by
sudden inventory problems and test
failures. One big area that is changing
is how the design team puts together
the bill of materials (BOM) and making
purchasing-based decisions much
earlier in the process.
“There are a lot of reasons as to
why engineers need supply-chain input
early on,” says Daniel Fernsebner,
product marketing director for PCB
products at Cadence Design Systems.
To the designer, a specific
manufacturer’s part may look to
be an obvious choice based on its
datasheet. But an examination of price
breaks for different volumes and likely
availability may well cause them to
select an alternative. Obsolescence
remains an ongoing problem.
“The particular component that
you are looking to use: its lifecycle
status is good today. But tomorrow
it’s not. Traditionally, we have had to
have purchasing look at what are the
buying trends are. If the buying trend
is heading downward, it’s often a good
indication that it’s not the part you
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want,” explains Fernsebner.
Leigh Gawne, chief software
architect at Altium, says: “Getting
lifecycle status information is one of
the bigger problems in the industry.
The end-of-life notifications often don’t
make it to the right people. We need
a way to get the information where it
needs to get.”
In other cases, supplies can simply
run dry during production because of
sudden inventory shortages with the
manufacturing line unable to select an
alternative because they do not have
the power to make a change even
though, for passives and similar multi-
sourced components, other options
often exist.
Joe Bohman, senior vice president
of lifecycle collaboration software for
Siemens Digital Industries Software,
says there are clear opportunities
to build closer links between
contract manufacturing and design
following the integration of PCB-
design subsidiary Mentor’s tools
with the Teamcenter product-lifecycle
management (PLM) software. He
claims: “Customers want the contract
manufacturers to get right in and make
modifications in a controlled way.”
Under this new process, the
contract manufacturers would, in
PLM parlance, ”red-line” parts of
the design to replace components
with alternatives they believe would
be better or simply let them avoid
production delays. However, there can
be knock-on effects of such course
corrections.
Questions around substitutions
Hemant Shah, product management
group director for PCB tools at
Cadence, points to changes in
reliability that might come with a
substitution.
“Correlating a change back to
design data is an important step:
customers are very interested in that.
A customer may use one supplier’s
part in a batch and order a different
one for the next, assuming the
equivalent part would not impact the
design. But the change could impact
“Getting lifecycle the reliability of that product.
status information “We are seeing customers asking
is one of the to have the real-time ability to bring
bigger problems that information back into a change
xiaoliangge/stock.adobe.com
in the industry. and analyse it.”
We need a EDA vendors have taken the
way to get the first steps to closing the circle with
information manufacturing by building links to
where it needs live supply-chain data into the PCB
to get.” schematics-capture and layout tools.
Leigh Gawne The ActiveBOM facility in Altium
12 November 2019 www.newelectronics.co.uk

365, launched at the beginning of
the year, has a three-tier model for
each component instance. The CAD
component has symbol and footprint.
“All we care about with his is the
design intent,” says Gawne. “There
could be many manufacturer parts
that meets those specifications. The
physical part we call the manufacturer
component. It’s a one-to-many
relationship that allows us within
ActiveBOM to have secondary and
tertiary parts where multisourcing
is possible. You can rank them: it
could be lowest cost or the one that’s
most widely available, or let the EMS
decide which one. The third type is the
supplier component, which represents
the supply chain: where can I go to get
that manufacturer part?”
Cadence is using an approach
it calls BOM validation in the Pulse
platform that it has built into the latest
releases of its PCB tools. This checks
the availability of components the
design team has picked. One issue
with live supply-chain data is that it
changes rapidly, says Fernsebner.
The company is looking to incorporate
ways to model supply-chain patterns.
“Making a better choice off of
predictive analytics is where we’re
going with Pulse.”
Similarly, Altium sees the use of
historical data as being a useful guide
www.newelectronics.co.uk 12 November 2019
BOARD TECHNOLOGY
to availability over the course of a
product’s lifecycle. “That’s not in the
system right now but it’s something
that will come.”
Designers could head off supply
problems through the use of defensive
planning.
“When searching for a part you
could type in a part number or do
a faceted search, based on case
type, tolerance and other factors.
If you end up choosing something
with specific characteristics and only
get one or two results that implies
there aren’t too many of those parts
around,” says Gawne. Subtle changes
to a filter circuit that allows for a
different tolerance band could open
up more possibilities that loosens the
constraints on the supply chain.
The EDA vendors see the
process data that comes back from
manufacturing as becoming a bigger
influence on design. As with supply-
chain intelligence, the issue is one of
information flow. “That kind of thing
is coming back informally through a
phone call or email. But does it make
it back to the designer? We will see an
improvement in that formal feedback,” Below: Altium’s
says Gawne. ActiveBOM facility
Dan Hoz, general manager of 365 provides a
Mentor’s Valor division, says he three-tier model for
sees the potential to take this each component
manufacturing data back to design. instance.
DESIGN &
MANUFACTURING
The design-for-manufacturing (DFM)
analysis that some companies already
use to minimise the impact of things
like solder-paste issues will help, often
by respecting keep-out zones and
overlaps to account for variations.
Hoz, however, sees further
optimisations in the way in which
manufacturing can influence design.
The orientation and neighbourhood
around a component may influence
the failure rate and this information
will appear during inspection and test.
This information is today being used to
tune the assembly processes.
Manufacturing analysis can
highlight components that are more
prone to failure during assembly than
others. Hoz points to the problem he
sees frequently where the way in which
boards move around the shopfloor can
cause problems.
“You have the issue of sensitive
components: there are components
that can only survive for a few hours
outside but we find them sitting on the
line for days.”
Subtle changes to the PCB layout
may be able to reduce that wastage
further. The problem may be the
choice of component or it may be one
that can be addressed by changing the
layout of the board to make it easier
to mount the more sensitive devices
later in the process or by taking the
step of moving to a different facility if
the reason why the boards are getting
held up is due to bottlenecks forming.
Hoz says the use of a digital-twin
approach for storing data about board
designs and production outcomes will
help reduce waste.
”Using the metrics we can go back
to the design and run some course
corrections,” he says, adding that
the software is not ready yet but it is
something the company is working
on. The feedback may, ultimately, go
back to component manufacturers if
it turns out materials choices lead to
unexpected failures after assembly.
After decades of living apart, design
and manufacturing are gradually
getting to know each other better.
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