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62 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 Interview by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 I recently spoke with Patrick Crawford, manager of design standards and related indus- try programs for IPC, about the design events at the upcoming IPC APEX EXPO, including a PCB design competition. Patrick explains what PCB designers should expect by attend- ing the show and points out the need for more young designers and engineers to volunteer with IPC Design. Andy Shaughnessy: Patrick, tell us what you have planned for IPC APEX EXPO as far as design. Patrick Crawford: We are pretty excited about this year. During the show, we're holding the finals for our PCB design competition. is is our inaugural event. We have 15 competitors from around the world, including India, Norway, the UK, the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil, just off the top of my head. It is a top-to-bottom design build-out. We hand you a schematic, a BOM, and a little interpretation letter for those who haven't used Altium before. e competitors are responsi- ble for handing us a complete file package at the end of the day. e preliminary heat took place between November 1 and December 1. We estimate that it's about 40 hours of design work. On Tuesday of the show, we invite three finalists from this preliminary round. We will have everything ready to go—the stackup, the materials, etc. It's going to be a simple, two- layer board—we can't have a 12-layer board in a four-hour competition. It's going to be a good time. Wednesday at the show is dedicated to Design for Excellence (DFX). at would be 2231A: DFX Guidelines, which was published in August. We're excited about DFX, because it pulls together the oen-disparate parts of industry and focuses on common things like design for manufacturing, design for fabrica- tion, for tests, for environment reusability, and recyclability. Another exciting thing we're trying is an AMA—Ask Me Anything, just like on Red- dit. We have a few individuals from industry who are excited to be our experts, so it will be like a design master session. I can't share all of the names yet, but we have confirmed Kris Moyer, CID+, who teaches PCB design courses with IPC and helped us build the cur- IPC APEX EXPO 2022: Focus on PCB Design Patrick Crawford