The U.S. PCB industry consists of approximately 725 companies with annual sales of about $6 billion. The electronic assembly market is roughly the same size. The competitiveness of the U.S. PCB and PCB Assembly industries is significantly impacted by environmental concerns related to the production, use, and disposal of the industry's products. It is clear today that addressing these issues early and rapidly during product development has significant and positive cost consequences. However, many companies still rely on end-of-pipe solutions to environmental problems and expend considerable resources to meet government regulations. One reason for this is the lack of appropriate PCB design tools.

In this paper, we describe a Design for Environment (DFE) software application, called EcoBoard(r), that will facilitate the design of PCB products that have minimal adverse environmental effects. EcoBoard, which is fully integrated with Mentor Graphics Design Architect and Board Station products, will work in concert with existing design tools, design processes, and business practices, to allow a designer to rationally estimate the magnitude and severity of potential environmental problems related to the manufacture, use, support and disposal of PCB products. It can be employed early in the development process. Environmentally sound product and process choices will be made in conjunction with performance and cost considerations.

Mentor Graphics is currently studying the feasibility of marketing the EcoBoard product.

Bio:
Dr. Karandikar is a Senior Consulting Engineer at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He is the program manager for the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program concerned with the development of EcoBoard. Dr. Karandikar's responsibilities include R&D and business development activities in environmentally conscious design and manufacturing, technical and operational assessment of systems using virtual prototyping, enterprise modeling, first principles modeling of manufacturing processes, probabilistic risk analysis, and concurrent engineering. Before joining SAIC, Dr. Karandikar was at the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC). He managed a group that was responsible for researching and developing strategies for implementing integrated development of products and services and deploying advanced manufacturing and collaborative information technology in industry.