Ex Officio: Advice From Designers Who Recently Began Telecommuting

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Most PCB designers are now working from home as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown. In a recent Design007 Magazine survey, we asked the following question: What lessons have you learned since you began designing PCBs from home?

Here are just a few of the comments, edited slightly for clarity:

1. Microsoft Teams can be a very powerful tool.
2. Clear documentation becomes the easier route, rather than frequent interaction.
3. There is an art to knowing whether a call, a message, or a video conference is the right path for a given issue.
4. Establish a reasonable working schedule, and at the end of the scheduled time, actually leave that office/room.
5. I tried talking to myself, but it made no sense.

An upcoming issue of Design007 Magazine will shine an office lamp on the PCB designers who are now working remotely.

08/12/2019 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 Magazine

I attended the recent IPC High-Reliability Forum and Microvia Summit in Baltimore, Maryland. The speakers and panelists focused on a variety of topics, but one issue that kept popping up was the failure of some microvias on military and aerospace PCBs. Fortunately, some smart technologists are focusing on determining the cause of these via failures. I asked Brook Sandy-Smith, IPC’s technical education program manager, to give us a quick wrap-up of this event.

01/09/2018 | Joe Fjelstad, Verdant Electronics

The 23rd annual IEEE International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME) was held in Constanta, Romania, in October 2017. It attracted more than 190 participants from Romania, and 13 other counties. While there might be some who question the suitability of Romania as a venue for such a conference, the country has a long technological history and has produced some top innovators and pioneers in aviation including Aurel Vlaicu, Traian Vuia, Henri Coanda, who prototyped an early jet aircraft in 1910.

12/30/2015 | Andy Shaughnessy, PCBDesign007

Rick Hartley has been in involved in PCB design and design education for decades, so it’s no surprise that he started working with the IPC Designers Council early on. Now retired from his day job at L-3, Rick still teaches PCB design and shows no sign of slowing down. I asked him to discuss his work with the Designers Council, and what the group means to the design community.