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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.
Nearly 15 years have passed since Solyndra went out of business, but its specter hangs over the US government to this day as a warning of the risk of federal intrusion in a capitalist world.
Solyndra, of course, represented the US’s attempt to bolster the sustainable energy industry, specifically solar. The intentions were noble: solar was seen as a safe respite from combustible sources like oil and natural gas, which are expensive, nonrenewable and dirty.
But corruption and mismanagement conspired to drain its coffers. The resulting bankruptcy ultimately cost taxpayers more than $500 million in unreimbursed loans.
The financial hit, however, was nothing compared to the surgical job it did on the collective congressional spine. “Strategic investments” became a fool’s term, something you said if you wanted to be primaried.
The question was put forth at Siemens’ EDA Tech Day in May: Which of the following can be replaced by AI?
- Input
- Schematic
- Footprints
- Placement
- Routing
- Deliverables (DfM, validation, etc.).
It was posed by a user who indicated that routing takes up about 30% of the time of a typical design spin. In classical Pareto thinking, that makes it the best target for process improvement.
Among the many surprises at PCB East this spring was the appearance of a pair of scientists from a semi-obscure (to we laypeople) government contractor called, obliquely, JLab.
JLab is shorthand for Jefferson Lab, or its official name, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). The facility is operated on behalf of the US Department of Energy, which has a budget larger than Jabil or Flex, and oversees, among other things, the US nuclear arsenal.
Now, in the event you haven’t been paying attention, the US government has been in the media kind of often of late, for reasons too numerous for this page to detail. But one big newsworthy item has been the administration’s efforts to change the federal government’s budget priorities.
It’s not often you get the chance to talk shop with Hayao Nakahara, Gene Weiner, Tom Kastner and David Schild. When you do, you’re best off sitting back and listening.
That was the order of the day during the PCB East conference last month. Under the auspices of another media group, I was asked to moderate a panel on the future of PCB manufacturing in North America. And while journalists are often thought of as the seers of the industry, we are, in fact, more purveyors of others’ insights, versus prognosticators in our own right.
Since our founding, PCEA has sought to collaborate with other associations wherever we could.
We quickly formed alliances with peers in Australia, Germany, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and more. And our founders and leaders sit atop key technical committees in other organizations, such as IPC.
PCEA is the leading printed circuit design organization in the world, and in many instances these ties are intended to fill key technical gaps. We also see a mutual need to ensure our members have access to a wide range of manufacturing experts in every geography.
