Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1174596
36 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2019 we work with are never going to be big enough to do that. As far as I can tell, the service bu- reaus aren't going away. Shaughnessy: And the service bureaus that we know are going full-tilt. Ritchey: Right. And I would guess that a good bit of their business is startups. Johnson: And it would almost seem like the service bureaus are coming into an extend- ed heyday. You have had OEMs with in-house teams, and you see electrical or mechanical engineers being put in place to do the board design because they don't have a dedicated board designer. It seems like there is a huge niche for the design firms to fill that need with good hired guns on a project basis. Ritchey: I agree. Several of my clients couldn't do their jobs otherwise. A problem at small companies is that they do not have in-house CAD groups. If you look at a typical project, it takes a long time, and then there's an intense period of time where the CAD group has to de - sign a bunch of boards. They have to sit on their hands for six to months, or something like that. Johnson: Exactly. Shaughnessy: Are you surprised that China's service bureaus don't seem to have gotten any- where near as good at design as the American service bureaus? Ritchey: I had several clients who did that to save money, and we wound up having to redo everything. Today, a U.S. company sending a design to a service bureau in China is still go- ing to be a failure. But Huawei is as good as Cisco, if not bigger than Cisco, and Huawei has all of that stuff in-house. They have the same skills in China that we have here now. And I have to admit that I went over there and taught some of them, but don't tell the Presi- dent (laughs). Shaughnessy: You have to pay for the slip for your sailboat somehow! Ritchey: People in the U.S. are raving about how China stole everything, which isn't true; we gave it to them. You were around when Ja- pan became a major player, and it's the exact same picture. What Japan had was low-cost la- bor, to begin with, so the first thing that went over there were transistor radios, TVs, etc. We trained them to make cheap goods for us, and then said, "They stole all our stuff!" We gave it to them so we could get a cheap hammer at Costco. Shaughnessy: It does seem like China has mas- tered PCB fabrication, though. Ritchey: People like Apple trained them. Re- member the old Pogo cartoon? Pogo and his buddies are in the swamp at night, and they