Socket Use

Please do not take this as a slam, but have you done real floorwalking amongst the assembly lines with your boards? Most design engineers have not - many have never even seen an assembly line*. Depending on the company, or even the project team, communication between the "front engineers" and the "back engineers" can range from excellent to poor. IBM generally was very good, I understand, across the board. At USR (where I spent time), it was mixed - some products were well coordinated but others were bombs (FaxServer, NetServer leap to mind. They were so hard to make properly that the line was killed prematurely). Anyway, my point is that you may not be getting appropriate feedback about the your designs when you send them out. They may get a board and say - "Great, more goddamn sockets. I wish he would stop." - then go ahead and make the boards. Or they may get back to you and say "Do you really need these sockets?". Yeilds do go down when sockets are used. Insertions are not perfect, and bad insertions can result in poor reliability and/or rework time. Sockets fatigue the machines (or people) more, and slow the line down simply due to that extra sliver of time spent on the sockets. All this adds up, tiny is it may be, but manufacturing lives and dies by yeild numbers. * Once again, please do not take this as a slam. I just suspect that many design engineers on this list have never seen the other side, regardless of their skills. Manufacturing engineering is an interesting mix of hardcore engineering, economics, unskilled labor, tricks of the trade, ancient Chinese secrets, and that ISO9001 garbage. Yes, there are places for sockets, but any manufacturing engineer will try his hardest to convince you otherwise! William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org