After more than 40 years in PCB manufacturing, I've come to appreciate that every PCB begins long before the first sheet of laminate enters a press or the first hole is drilled. A PCB’s journey begins with a request for quotation (RFQ). I’ve been involved with documentation practices since the days of 4:1-scaled and Blue & Red-taped mylars. They all underwent photo-reduction and resizing to 1:1-scale film for manufacturing, and this became our tooling package. With new media and technology involved, this process has undergone many changes, but the focus on tooling can never waver. I have learned that the accuracy of the quotation is directly tied to the quality of the information received. 

A while back, I started thinking about the word ecosystem, a term that's become almost mandatory in discussions about electronics: the PCB ecosystem, the electronics ecosystem, and the design ecosystem. Is it more than an overused metaphor, or what if it really is an ecosystem? That question sent me down the kind of rabbit hole I enjoy. I started imagining electrical engineers, product managers, PCB designers, manufacturing and test engineers, supplier management, quality, and everyone else we work with fitting into the same kind of biological classification system we learned in high school.

At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the U.S. men’s 4x100-meter relay team of Trayvon Bromell, Fred Kerley, Ronnie Baker, and Cravon Gillespie was expected to contend for gold. With some of the fastest sprinters in the world, simply reaching the final seemed almost certain. Instead, the heavily favored team finished sixth in its qualifying heat and failed to advance, missing the final by just two-hundredths of a second. This massive disappointment was not due to a lack of individual speed but to a poorly executed baton exchange between Kerley and Baker, which forced both runners to slow down at the most critical moment.