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48 The PCB Magazine • April 2014 After two years in San Diego, the Design Fo- rum was back on familiar turf this year as IPC APEX EXPO returned to Mandalay Bay Hotel and Convention Center in Las Vegas. Forum speakers included Greg Munie of IPC, Karen McConnell of Northrop Grumman, Gary Carter of Fujitsu, Dieter Bergman of IPC, Mark Laing of Mentor Graphics, Humair Mandavia of Zuken USA, and Ben Jordan of Altium. Although busy doing our Real Time with… video interviews much of the time, I managed to catch some of the sessions. Carter's discussion of the IPC-2581 data transfer standard was well re - ceived, and, of course, it led to some good back- and-forth during the Q&A period. While sitting in on the Design Forum, Guest Editor Kelly Dack met first-time attendee Halil Yaslak, a PCB designer with Aselsan, a defense company in Ankara, Turkey. We talked him into doing a video interview. Yaslak was one of the younger designers at the Design Forum, but he's a heavy hitter; he took home first place honors at the 2012 Mentor Technology Awards for a 26-lay - er HDI board. He's definitely someone to watch and we look forward to seeing him next year if he's able to make the long journey again. When the forum was over, most speakers and attendees trooped over to Rainer Thuringer's Pro- fessional Development class on optimizing high- speed design. Thuringer is chairman of the FED, a German organization that represents electron- ics designers and manufacturers. With a Ph.D. in physics, Thuringer has a unique viewpoint. He stresses the critical demand for finding "new blood," as well as the EMS community's need to focus upstream, on the challenges facing PCB de- signers and design engineers. Altium's Ben Jordan also moderated our pan- el discussion on data transfer standards, which is always a contentious topic. As Ucamco's Karel Tavernier joked beforehand, "No daggers?" Tav- ernier's company owns the Gerber standard, and he joined Mentor's Dave Wiens, who represented Designers Step up at Design Forum by Andy Shaughnessy managing editor, THe PCB DeSIGn MaGazIne co-managing editor, SMT MaGazIne