09-12-2023

When I first started covering this industry in 1999, rigid-flex circuits were considered a niche market. In fact, Compaq was deemed a trendsetter for using rigid-flex in its laptops. Now, analysts at Credence Research predict that the rigid-flex market will top $5 billion by 2026, led in part by the adoption of IoT and the need to connect a variety of smart devices. That’s a pretty big niche. Rigid-flex circuits are everywhere, from servers and smartphones to cameras and pacemakers.

08-17-2023

How does a leader plan a strategy? In a field of competitors offering basically the same services, how can your company differentiate itself? Will you be a cost leader, or focus on serving a niche market such as medical or defense? As we learn in the August 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, one question that successful leaders need to ask themselves is, “What do I not want my company to be?”

08-14-2023

Getting today’s designs “right the first time” is critical, especially with costly advanced PCBs. Companies are slowly realizing that building two, three, or seven respins into the process—and budget—is like flushing cash down the toilet.I can hear some of you thinking, “But that’s how we’ve always done it. Why don’t you knock it off with those negative waves?”

07-11-2023

Designers are an off-grid group of people. I know several people who live in RVs, and they’re all PCB designers. Designers are all a little unconventional. In fact, being off grid may be a requirement for success as a PCB designer. Some designers are really “out there.” They like to push the limits of their design abilities. They don’t like the status quo; they enjoy the challenges inherent in this job. If I’ve just described you, you’re in luck. This month, in Design007 Magazine, we focus on designing PCBs with advanced, complex, and emerging technologies.

06-19-2023

You may have noticed a few open positions at your company, or among other companies in our industry. You also may have wondered why it’s so hard to fill these seats. Many fabricators and suppliers have had multiple positions vacant for months, and unlike even five or 10 years ago, most companies don’t have a stack of resumes to choose from.

06-12-2023

You’re probably wondering: Why is there a tortoise on the cover of Design007 Magazine this month? In one of the most popular Aesop’s Fables, 'The Tortoise and the Hare', the slow and steady reptile beat his much faster opponent by taking his time and persevering. Judging from what our expert contributors have to say in this issue, many PCB design problems could be precluded if designers simply took their time. (Yes, designers even called themselves out for this!)

05-09-2023

PCB designers are proud of their independent streak; this is one of the few careers in which being labeled “off-grid” is considered a resume enhancement. Designers all have their own little tips and tricks for designing boards, and this trait carries all the way to the material selection process.

04-20-2023

Do you remember when you started working at your current job? What sort of onboarding process did you undergo? If you’ve been with the same company for decades, you likely didn’t see much of an onboarding process at all! If you’re lucky, your boss took you out to lunch on the first day. Were you assigned a mentor? Were you welcomed with open arms into your new work family, or were you basically tossed in the pond and told to sink or swim?

04-11-2023

Many PCB designers are finding themselves concerned about accuracy while designing boards for radio frequency (RF) boards for wireless applications. Once a small but steady percentage of all PCB designs, RF is becoming more commonplace in this segment. The last few decades have brought on a proliferation of wireless handheld devices, and almost all feature some type of RF circuitry.

03-09-2023

The ongoing retirement of many of our colleagues has cast a spotlight on this month’s topic: tribal knowledge. As designers and engineers with 30 or 40 years of experience start pricing condos in Boca Raton, the entire industry is wondering: How will we hand down the knowledge acquired by these “silverbacks” to the next generation of designers? How do we know we’re not handing down tribal knowledge to the new crop of designers?

12-21-2022

It’s been a pretty good year all around. From conversations that I've had at conferences recently, I know that some of your companies have had great years, in spite of supply chain pressures, an old-fashioned shooting war near some of our manufacturing base, and some unfilled positions in your office. You are taking care of business, and it's a great time to be in this industry. To that end, we’re looking forward to meeting up at IPC APEX EXPO 2023, which takes place Jan. 21–26 at the San Diego Convention Center. In some ways, this will be the first true post-pandemic expo.

12-13-2022

If you ask anyone in this industry to describe IPC APEX EXPO, they’ll probably call it a PCB manufacturing show. They’re not wrong, by any means; the show was created to serve the PCB fabrication and assembly markets. But this year’s event has quite a bit to offer PCB designers and design engineers. Is this event becoming a PCB design show as well—a show within a show?

11-09-2022

Lately, we’ve heard quite a few design experts say, “PCB design is all about the physics. Designers should focus more on understanding the laws of physics and less on circuit theory.” While putting this issue together, we investigated potential cover ideas. “What if we had James Maxwell and Gordon Moore boxing on the cover, in a Faraday cage match? Let’s get ready to rumble!” That led us to the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots that now grace our November 2022 Design007 Magazine cover.

10-18-2022

Out of all the process steps in a fabrication cycle, imaging may be the most critical. This is where the design begins to take a physical shape, where the theoretical world meets the physical world. Much like photography, PCB imaging is a nearly magical process. I’ll bet the first technologists to use a Gerber Science photoplotter to create a PCB felt a lot like Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, trying to coax a Daguerreotype photograph into life in the 1830s.

10-11-2022

Comedian Steve Martin could have been talking about the latest issue of Design007 Magazine when he released his album “Let’s Get Small” in 1977. Or maybe not. Well, as Steve would say, excuuuuse me! (You may have to explain that reference to any young people in your company.) But it is tough to get much smaller than ultra HDI. This is a whole new level of miniaturization for most PCB designers and fabricators. UHDI folks speak in terms of microns, not mils. And everything changes when you start working with 15-micron lines and spaces.

09-12-2022

In a recent issue of SMT007 Magazine, we discussed “supply pain management.” This reminded us of the question that doctors often ask: “What’s your pain level on a scale of 1–10?” PCB Designers really deserve a lot of credit. For years, they’ve been working through supply chain pain, like Rip Wheeler after he got shot on “Yellowstone.” It hurts, but we’re short on cowboys, so get back to work. Designers and design engineers have learned to navigate this supply chain craziness, snatching up components that are in short supply or making do with lower-tech parts that are available.

08-16-2022

If you’re a fabricator, these are challenging days. But there are also plenty of opportunities available—if you know when to embrace them. Sure, margins are still non-existent. Sometimes you feel like you’re just trying to keep the lights on. But your suppliers have sent you an email explaining why their prices are going up—it’s because everything is going up—and now you feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

08-08-2022

The supply chain issues plaguing our industry don’t seem to be going away any time soon. Like an annoying mother-in-law, they’ve moved into our guest room, rearranged the furniture, and generally overstayed their welcome. Why don’t they take a hint? We’re seeing all sorts of interesting tactics for dealing with 50-week lead times. One of the most basic concepts I’ve heard lately is material conservation—when it’s hard to get the parts you need, why not just design PCBs with fewer parts? Materials typically make up 20% of the cost of the board, so we’re not talking nickels and dimes. Sometimes less is more!

07-12-2022

The “left shift” concept has been under way for at least five years, as EDA tool providers offer more powerful functionality earlier in the stages of PCB design and layout. This month, we focus on one tool that’s been shifting leftward for some time now: the field solver.

06-22-2022

Joe Fjelstad once joked that if someone working in a board shop 50 years ago were placed in suspended animation and woke up today, they would recognize almost everything in today’s board shop. They could theoretically go right back to work because so little of their work environment changed in those five decades. (After five decades, I’d probably want to take a week off and catch up on reruns of MASH and The Bob Newhart Show.)

12-08-2021

When we first started planning this issue, we looked back over topics that we’ve covered for the past few years. We noticed that our contributors spend most of their time discussing the technical side of PCB design. That’s to be expected. When we discuss “best practices” for PCB design, we’re typically looking at it from a technical viewpoint. After all, Design007 Magazine is a technical publication. And in PCB design, what is “design,” exactly? Perhaps we could quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said in a 1964 case about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

11-08-2021

“It’s all about managing your data.” That’s a refrain that we’ve been hearing from designers over the past few years—in surveys and conversations with designers and design engineers. When we started planning this issue, our most recent reader surveys pointed to data management as a perpetual problem for PCB designers. It’s no wonder: schematics, footprints, BOMs, netlists, fab notes, assembly notes—millions of petabits of data are used to design and engineer PCBs, and readers cite mismanaged data as a constant source of heartburn.

08-25-2021

If you’re a new PCB designer today, you may feel like a first-level fighter in “Dungeons and Dragons.” You thrive on the variability and complexity of this career but moving up to the next level is often the result of a series of choices that you have to make—often without knowing what’s going on. But there is one thing that you can control: your education. And the more you know, the more control you have over your career.

05-06-2020

Most colleges teach an economics curriculum. We’re not exactly professors, but this month, we’re going to whip out our calculators and look into the economics of PCB design.

04-21-2020

It’s easy to define profit, but it’s much more difficult to define exactly what “design for profitability” (DFP) means to today’s PCB designers and design engineers. How can technologists create profit in every design when the board’s stakeholders are often spread out across several time zones and continents? It’s a tough concept to get your arms around. Some of you work in giant OEMs; do you have any idea how much your last design cost—man-hours, components, laminates, etc.?

01-15-2020

It’s 2020, and it’s time to hit the ground running as we approach DesignCon and IPC APEX EXPO. If you’re not already networking with other designers or volunteering in our industry organizations, there’s no better time to start. In the January issue of Design007 Magazine, we give a special shout-out to the volunteers who donate their spare time to improving the PCB design community.

11-27-2019

“Faster” and “smaller” are still the watchwords for even the simplest PCBs. In one of our features, Lee Ritchey explains how he has watched speeds increase 40,000X in just the last 24 years. On top of that, designers have been told that they should have a decent working knowledge of 5G and IoT as well as Industry 4.0 and smart factories, just to be sure; that’s a lot to take in. Of course, designers like this kind of thing. They enjoy putting together pieces of a complex puzzle, and these are just a few more pieces of the puzzle. Tell them what the board needs to do, and they’ll design it for you.

10-24-2019

The AltiumLive PCB Design Summit in Frankfurt, Germany has come to a close, with Happy Holden's keynote signaling the end of this three-day event. Here’s a quick wrap-up of this year’s event.

07-25-2019

My 2003 Mazda Tribute doesn’t look very cool; it’s classified as a “cute ute.” But it can haul four guitars and a pair of PA speakers with room to spare. It’s been paid off for so long that I’ve been able to put more money away for my rapidly approaching golden years. As the saying goes, “Reliability isn’t just an added feature.”

06-20-2019

We may think that the days of throwing the design “over the wall” are over. But communication is still a big problem; many designers never speak to their fabricator until they get that Friday evening phone call. But many designers say that they have no earthly idea where their boards are going to be manufactured. They just design each board so that it can, hopefully, be fabricated anywhere.

05-23-2019

Like most rules, design rules came about for your own good. And no single designer could possibly remember all of the constraints required to design one of today’s PCBs. But with a set of well-defined design rules, a designer can execute the most complex PCBs on the first try.

05-02-2019

It sounds so perfect—“smart” manufacturing. That must be what we’ve needed all along! We’ve had enough of this “average intelligence” manufacturing. Yes, we’ve heard quite a bit of chatter about smart manufacturing over the past few years. Whatever “smart” means to you, everyone involved in designing, fabricating, and assembling PCBs wants to get on board. But many U.S. PCB designers are curious about what this smart new world means to them and their “old-school” CAD data.

04-15-2019

When was the last time your company hired someone straight out of school, or even under 40? Until recently, I would have guessed 1985. But there’s something happening, and I hope it’s the beginning of a trend. Young people are once again entering the PCB design community workforce, and the overall PCB manufacturing industry as well.

03-13-2019

Every DesignCon has an unofficial theme; a few years ago, it was the “Jitter Show.” This year may have been the year for PAM4, four-level pulse amplitude modulation, which was the topic of a variety of presentations and one panel discussion. Another big topic at DesignCon was 5G—one of the main components of IoT. Some engineers I spoke with said they were still searching for the perfect laminate for 5G, which is up to 1,000 times faster than 4G and features super-high bandwidth and low latency.

02-21-2019

Some of you won’t remember this, but gas lines were an everyday occurrence for a year or so in the 1970s. I was reminded of the energy crunch of the ‘70s while researching this month’s issue on the component shortage. Some PCB designers are finding their favorite capacitors on 50- and 80-week lead times. How do you design a board today when the components you need won’t be available for a year or more? Waiting isn’t an option if your product needs to be on store shelves in time for next Christmas. What options do designers have?