PCB WEST has, since its inception, been the leading conference for printed circuit board design and manufacturing.

One reason for that is the intense focus on what the industry needs in terms of training. Another is, besides the educational aspects, it can be fun, surprising and occasionally even provocative.

Years ago, the conference founder Pete Waddell introduced a session called EDA Face-to-Face, where CAD vendors took to the stage and addressed questions straight-on from their users. As you might imagine, the back-and-forth sometimes got a little heated. One particular memory includes a couple users, fed up with the lack of bidirectional electronic data transfer, roiling the crowd with their public callout of the major ECAD companies for not modifying their tools to permit data in.