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The Shaughnessy Report: The State of PCB Design
April 24, 2013 | Andy Shaughnessy, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Once again, it’s the season for trade shows and conferences. After attending events like DesignCon and the Designers Forum at IPC APEX EXPO, I can safely say that the state of PCB design is sound…for now. The “graybearding” of the design community continues unabated, but the designers I met with at both shows are as enthusiastic as ever about their careers and electronics in general.
The Designers Forum kicked of the week-long activities at IPC APEX EXPO 2013, much in the way that designers kick off the development of the PCB. And this year, the designers showed up early and stayed late.
IPC Director of Technology Transfer Dieter Bergman got the event under way with a look at IPC’s roadmap for design. For the rest of the day, attendees heard presentations from Rick Hartley, L-3 Communications; Ed Acheson, Cadence Design Systems; Daniel TiTuro, TiTuro Consulting; Happy Holden, Gentex; Vern Solberg, Solberg Technical Consulting; Mark Finstad, Flexible Circuit Technologies; and Mark Verbrugge, Pica Manufacturing Solutions.
For most of the day, Guest Editor Kelly Dack and I were busy conducting video interviews for our Real Time with…Designers Forum program, but I caught Hartley’s lunchtime presentation to a packed room. His talk focused on the risks designers face by accepting semiconductor companies’ app notes at face value, and he detailed a slew of horror stories to back his premise. Whoa! One particularly bad example wound up costing over $200 per board, but after a proper redesign, the cost per board dropped by about $200 — scary stuff!
For years, Hartley has been on a campaign to make designers aware of the power they can, and should, wield during the product development process. This year was no different. Hartley urged designers to take the initiative, run all the numbers, and refuse to settle for anything less than perfect. And in a Real Time with…Designers Forum interview, Hartley urged designers and EEs to continue their design education, even if it means shelling out their own money for classes and textbooks that can keep them ahead of the game.
Attendees also gave rave reviews to Finstad and Verbrugge for their “Ask the Flexperts” discussion. For years, these two rival flex designers have been answering flex design questions in their “Flexperts” column, and their presentations take on the air of standup comedy. At a technical conference, a little levity goes a long way.
Holden focused on the ever-increasing complexity of designs. What is the limit to the amount of technology we can squeeze into shrinking amounts of real estate? Solberg discussed the advances and challenges to embedding circuits, including embedded actives. Most PCB fabricators have little experience embedding bare die inside circuit boards, but that’s the way technology is heading.
DiTuro, formerly with Honeywell and now a consultant, detailed new approaches to designing for high-reliability PCBs. Ed Acheson offered an update on the vendor-neutral IPC-2581 standard. Now that the first PCB has been fabricated with IPC-2581 data, the members of the IPC-2581 Consortium are focusing on ironing out the final bugs.
Monday evening, the Designers Council’s San Diego Chapter held a meeting that drew a crowd that was about as big as the daytime crowd. San Diego PCB’s Mike Creeden gave a great presentation on the next generation of PCB designers, or lack thereof. Creeden asked if anyone knew any PCB designers under 30. I think one hand went up.
He made a great point: It’s up to us to identify and bring in the “new blood” that will become the senior designers of tomorrow. The best and brightest young people are not likely to find their way into this profession on their own. They’ll need to be steered in the right direction.
I like to ask my nephew’s friends, fairly intelligent guys in their 20s, what they know about PCB design. Usually, all I get are blank stares. They want to be Web designers or IT guys, or they’re considering law school. They get interested when I explain that some designers make good money with little or no college. But as a career, PCB design is not on their radar screen.
So, do you know any designers under 30? How about anyone in fabrication or assembly? If you do, I’ve love to hear from you.
Sequestration Trepidation
Almost everyone I spoke with at the Designers Forum and IPC APEX EXPO was optimistic about 2013 and beyond. The only exceptions were the military contractors, who were concerned about the effects of sequestration. For those not paying attention at home, the Budget Control Act of 2011 stipulated that defense and non-defense discretionary spending would be cut by sequestration if Congress couldn’t agree on a better way.
But if you cut to the chase (or go to this fantastic entry in Wikipedia designed for laymen like me), you’ll see that the end-result is that there are no cuts in military spending. What we have is just a reduction in the rate of the increase in spending; military spending will only rise 1.5% per year for the next 10 years. The big worry is that spending increases of 1.5% won’t keep up with inflation, which is a pretty accurate worry.
So, we wind up with a cut of about $55 billion in defense spending per year for 10 years. That’s about two aircraft carriers per year. Already, the Pentagon has announced that it can’t afford to send a carrier to the Mideast because of financial concerns.
Part of me can’t help thinking, “Hey, DoD, just be glad you’re getting a budget increase in the first place.” But I’d also like for our military to have all the funds necessary to keep our warfighters supplied with the best equipment in the world.
Is there a solution to the DoD’s funding blues? We don’t want to set up all of our warships with tourist-friendly railings and handicap-accessible bathrooms and start charging $10 a head for tours, do we? But it might come down to that!
The gridlock in Washington is not likely to dissipate any time soon and the budget fight will probably carry over into the 2014 midterm elections. We can expect to see a drop in military spending on PCBs, but the brunt of it will probably not take effect until next year.
So, the Pentagon is in panic mode, and officials are watching every penny. Welcome to the party, DoD.
This column originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.
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