POV: Ryan Thomas, Chief Operating Officer

When you design parts, you get flagged for where it's at in its product life cycle, whether it's recommended for new designs, not recommended, obsolete. So we go through this analysis of checking every part on the bill of material, and if every part is healthy, we say, "Okay, the BOM's good." And then the question becomes, how much are you maximizing your footprint on the board? Our new technology rolling out, we're trying to have everything on a single-sided board then stack up vertically from there, as opposed to having a board that's flipping.

Then you have to worry about weight, and as it' runs through reflow, have no components fall off. So it just adds a lot of complexity. And then we'll check to make sure there's no bridging, because a lot of times if you're trying to maximize your space, your components may be too close together.

If a person has a new design, they do it on a benchtop, it's really easy to avoid that bridging. But when you actually take it to a scale in manufacturing, you're running thousands of boards, and now you have all these different variations where you could have bridging. And that usually ranges anywhere from five to 12%, when you have that type of a challenge.