Lauri Viitas, Guzik Technical Enterprises
Hi my name is Lauri. I am with Guzik Test and Measurement. It is a new division of Guzik Technical Enterprises. Guzik Technical Enterprises has been around for 30 years, designing products for test and measurement market, primarily for the hard disk drive component manufacturers. In recent years, we have taken some of these core competencies. Guzik Technical Enterprises has expanded the product offering guide to general purpose test and measurement market with Agilent Technologies. Together we are officially their solutions partners. We have a first product out which is a 8-bit, 40 giga-sample- per-second digitizer with up to 13 GHz analog bandwidth. This design from the beginning has been checked with ValueDFM DFX team. Every design we have checked has had a critical error and has saved us a respin of the PCB. In fact, division A is currently in production. We are working on a new exciting product also, a new AXie Four Factor for Agilent. And it is going to be checked as well again, to make sure that we don’t have to go through this fateful process of respin. Respins are costly and can be avoided. Respins on the product like would set the company of our size back about two months and would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I work for Guzik Test and Measurement. It is a new division by Guzik Technical Enterprises. It is focusing on general purpose test and measurement market. I am currently the director of business development of this company. It is run like a modern day start up. My history with Guzik Enterprises goes back about 8 years. I started in this company as a technician. I slowly worked up my way to management position where I work as an NPI manager for two years, cleaning up Guzik Technical Enterprises production. We had yield of about 30% . After assembly houses we have an army of 10 super engineers, basically soldering boards. Components used to come in tombstoned on the boards and no one really knew why. I worked two years cleaning up every single PCB design at Guzik Technical Enterprises. After I had finished cleaning up the production I became the director of production at Guzik Technical Enterprises. Two years later I took on a new venture at Guzik building up Guzik Test and Measurement. I am working on that right now.
So for the clean up portion of the job, while I was an NPI manager at Guzik, I was placed in between engineering and production. Not really know much about printed circuit boards or assembly processes but the problem was obvious. The 30 percentile needed ten technicians to work nonstop on the boards which we received from CMs. We had many cold solder occasions, tombstoning on the parts, also wrong footprints and pinouts and placement problems. During this two years we probably redesigned about hundred different PCBAs. The yield with the CMs went up to about 99% which in turn allowed us to decrease the technician force and production. As of right now, we are a company of 50 people. We used to be 130. We put out about the same amount of product.
With the Value DFM, we have compared its service to others big tier 1 CMs who are doing internal valor. We have found that the CM reports are usually not as detailed. We did the one to one comparison and found that the report covered everything what the CM found and went some more. I don’t really trust the CM’s reports because they have limited visibility.