At 05:47 PM 6/11/01 -02-30, Fabian Hartery wrote:
>I may be in the dark on this, but I am not aware of
>many board houses that have Protel as a working tool versus PCAD. Yes, I
>have generally used Gerber outputs in the meantime and some may argue,
>rightfully, that one should never let a board house have design influence.
>Mr. Lomax may have some valuable insight in this respect.
Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to respond.... :-)
I consider it hazardous to provide board houses with design files. I'm not
entirely opposed to the idea, but there are lots of ways to foul up
photoplots, and I'd rather have the designer take responsibility for design
and the fabricator for fabrication. Whose fault will it be if a design rule
was not properly set and the board is not usable? The fabricator may say,
"You gave me this design file, I just followed what you gave me" and the
designer may say, "But you plotted it. If I had plotted it, I would have
caught this stupid error."
We should be aware, however, that fabricators quite frequently tweak the
gerbers to meet their process considerations. But they all have the tools
to do this with the gerbers. Providing gerbers puts all fabricators on a
level playing field; otherwise one will be limited to fabricators that
accept your design system, in this case, Protel. Restricting the field, on
the average, raises costs and delivery efficiency.
In this line, I'll pass on an anecdote:
About a month ago, I supposedly had a purchase order coming for two resold
Protel packages from a major electronics company. The engineer behind this
order was quite eager, and he had signed up for the Protel training. But
the actual PO never came in. Eventually, the engineer called to ask when he
was going to get his software. I said I'd never gotten the PO. He said that
he would get right back to me and within an hour or so he was back on the
phone with a few choice words for his purchasing department; he said that
they promised him a PO to me in the next day or two.
No PO came. So I called back. This time he apologized up and down and
expressed extreme frustration. Someone higher up in management had decided
that, since they had a fabricator and assembler who used PADS, and they
were accustomed to providing the PADS files to this company, they wanted to
buy PADS and they didn't care that this was going to cost them many
thousands more in software costs, not to mention the inefficiencies in
design. I explained to the engineer that I thought providing CAD files to
fabricators and assemblers was not a great idea, and he agreed. He told me
that he was trying to decide whether or not to attend the Protel training
(scheduled for the next week).
I suggested he go ahead; after all, his company had paid for it and had not
asked him to cancel.... and he might consider that a company which made
decisions like that, ignoring the preferences of the people who actually
use the tools, might not be a good bet for his future; it wouldn't hurt to
hedge his options.
I also offered to talk to his management, but I haven't heard from him
since, so I don't know what he did. Maybe I'll give him a call....
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433
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