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66 The PCB Design Magazine • January 2016 library calculator software program. After a couple weeks of research, I sold CADPRO and went to work for Wind River. Warner: Why did you select Wind river as your next employer? Hausherr: Wind River was CADPRO's largest customer and when they heard I was selling CADPRO, they asked me to manage their CAD department. That is where I met and started working with Jeff Mellquist. Jeff and I started collaboration on inventing Excel spreadsheets that contained the mathematical model for IPC-SM-782. It took us three years to create a unique calculator for every standard component package. Then we opened pcbstandards.com to upload test librar- ies created from the Excel Spreadsheets. Howev- er, in 2001 Dieter Bergman introduced Jeff and me to a new three-tier library concept which became IPC-7351. Jeff and I took another two years to fully develop IPC-7351 calculators and in 2003 Jeff left Wind River as a senior PCB de- signer to learn software programming. Warner: is that how pcB libraries got started? Hausherr: Yes, Jeff created his first software pro- gram in 2003-2004, and it was released as the Library Navigator. I left Wind River in 2004 to join PCB libraries. The original Library Naviga- tor was a clunky tool but people purchased it because it shaved time off library creation. Jeff soon rewrote the program and we renamed it LP Wizard. We renamed the company PCB Ma- trix because we started to develop other soft- ware tools for PCB design layout and the name PCB Libraries no longer suited us. However, our flagship product was the LP Wizard, which was rapidly spreading throughout the industry. In December 2008 we sold PCB Matrix's LP Wizard to Valor Computerized Systems. Warner: What motivated you to sell a successful product? Hausherr: Because Valor offered an expanded reseller chain, upgraded customer support, ad- CATCHINg uP WITH ToM HAuSHERR oF PCB LIBRARIES gets processed by the Library Expert (where user preferences are applied), and output to the various CAD for- mats. This feature allows users to ad- just dozens of preferences and rebuild entire libraries based on future needs. Professional designers and engineers want boards designed in a consistent manner, not patched up with no con- sistency between free parts obtained from dozens of places. Among other powerful features, the Library Expert also allows users to search an entire bill of materials (BOM) against their parts to automatically identify the parts they have and the ones they need, which greatly simplifies the part search process. Warner: that's an interesting concept. What led you to develop a library tool like this? Hausherr: I started my first library of symbols and footprints at Beckman Instruments in 1982. My manager educated me that the CAD Library was the foundation of the PCB Layout. I'll never forget his words, "Garbage in, garbage out." Based on our need and the limited com- puter technology then, it took me nine months of working long hours before I could start my first CAD tool PCB layout. I thought to myself, "There has to be a better way." Ready-to-use, high-quality library parts where a must-have for us to increase productivity. Then, in the 1990s, I owned CADPRO, the largest PCB de- sign service bureau in San Diego at that time. Besides PCB designs, we offered the CADPRO library that helped hundreds of companies. Warner: What happened to the cAdpro librar- ies? Hausherr: In 1998, I took the IPC CID certifica- tion class with Dieter Bergman. I learned from Dieter that the electronics industry is in a met- ric conversion process and that the Inch-based CADPRO libraries will be obsolete in 10 years because most component manufactures will provide package dimensional data in metric units. Dieter also asked me to join IPC's effort to support IPC-SM-782 and that IPC would help me with the creation of the first standalone PCB interview