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Strutting Their Stuff at DesignCon
February 13, 2008 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
When February rolls around, you know it's show time. Trade show time, that is. DesignCon traditionally marks the first big show of the year for design engineers involved with PCBs, ICs and FPGAs.
Last week's DesignCon conference and trade show in Santa Clara attracted design engineers from around the globe - and PCBDesign007 was there to cover the action. You can watch our video interviews with conference speakers and exhibitors at RealtimeWith.com.
This may have been the biggest DesignCon yet. Show organizers don't have exact attendance figures, but the show floor was jammed the first day and fairly busy the second. There were over 135 exhibitors this year, a show record.
Now, many PCB designers go to trade shows for the conference. At least that's what they tell their managers. But after the classes end (and they ended when the show floor opened at 12:30 p.m. at DesignCon), it's time to walk the show floor and check out the exhibits.
Exhibitors at DesignCon 2008 ran the gamut, from IC companies like Magma and Synopsys to contract manufacturers like Sanmina and Celestica. This week I want to talk about some of the news and product announcments that PCB and interconnect companies made at DesignCon.
Altium's Innovation Station combines the Altium Designer layout software and Altium's Desktop NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware platform. This is a complete design environment. A PCB designer can capture and verify the PCB, as well as the software and hardware of the FPGAs. The NanoBoard lets you try daughter cards from different FPGA vendors, and the Designer software automatically senses the type of daughter card you're using. Best of all, you don't have to know a lot of code to work with embedded software. I'd compare it to using an HTML editor, though that might not be a perfect analogy.
Still, if you were wondering how Altium was going to combine all of the technology from the many companies and brands that preceded the Altium moniker - Protel, Accel, P-CAD, Tasking, etc. - Innovation Station is a pretty good indicator. Altium's tools provide a lot of bang for the buck, with a customer list that includes Microsoft, Boeing, Motorola, Philips and Daimler Chrysler.
On the library front, PCB Libraries has changed its name to PCB Matrix. CEO Tom Hausherr says the company has grown so far beyond libraries and land pattern tools that the company needed a new name. Tom says that PCBMatrix plans to create software to enable even more IPC standards, at a fraction of what most EDA companies charge. And PCBMatrix will continue providing library parts in all the major, and even minor, CAD formats. I don't think Tom ever stops working.
Like McDonald's, Agilent Technologies can now claim One Billion Served. Agilent announced that its Infiniium 90000A Series oscilloscope has cracked the one-billion acquisition samples barrier for the first time. It's hard to wrap your mind around a number that big. It has a lot to do with that scope's triggering system, the InfiniiScan Plus, which apparently enables 150 picoseconds hardware-event identification and 75 picoseconds software-event identification.
And W.L. Gore showed that copper is still a contender, even at the 10-gig level. Working with Quellan Inc., Gore demoed its next-generation extended-reach "active" cable assemblies that operate at 10 Gbits/s per channel over 10 meters of copper cable. The assemblies incorporate Quellan's Q:ACTIVE silicon technology. High data-rate signals over long distances is what it's all about, while consuming five times less power than fiberoptics, according to Gore.
For an industry that's supposed to be maturing, there surely were a lot of cool product announcements at DesignCon. Now that the show season is officially open, we can expect a flurry of news and product announcements as we get closer to CPCA, APEX/IPC Expo and PCB West.
So, get out to a trade show before the season is over. Where else can you run into so many of your peers and potential customers? As Irving Berlin wrote, "There's no business like show business."