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20 The PCB Design Magazine • March 2017 by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 Twenty-five years ago, Tom "Flexdude" Woznicki got laid off. A lot of people did, back during the mini-recession that helped bring Bill Clinton into the White House. So, he launched his own flex circuit design bureau and never looked back. Since then, he's designed flex cir- cuitry for everything under the sun, including the Mars Rover; the flex circuits he designed are visible in many of the Rover photos. I ran into Tom at DesignCon 2017 and we discussed the benefits of flex circuits, the expansion of the flex market, and his company's first quarter- century in operation. Andy Shaughnessy: I'm here with Tom Woznicki of the Flex Circuit Design Company. Tom Woznicki: Guess what we do! Shaughnessy: And you're the founder… Woznicki: Founder, owner, president, janitor, maintenance guy, all rolled into one. Andy, it's good to see you. Shaughnessy: You too, Tom. Give us a brief back- ground on the company. Woznicki: We've been a service bureau that spe- cializes in flex circuit design and this is our 25th year in business. It started back in 1992 when I got laid off from Rogers Corporation. You know, necessity is the mother of adventure and inven- tion. I was a technical sales engineer for Rogers and they went through a re-organization and I got laid off. But I had been taking some CAD courses at night on the side because I'm a me- chanical engineer by education. I thought I'd find my millions in technical sales. I fell into some design work and said, "I think I can do this," and hung out a shingle and here we are 25 years later. Shaughnessy: And you were using tools that were in no way designed for flex right? Woznicki: Well, no actually. Back then Rogers was associated with Smart Flex. I don't know if you remember Smart Flex, but the designer at Rogers was using AutoCAD to design flex cir- cuits. So I had taken a course in AutoCAD. I ad- mit, a company who is still headquartered here, "Flexdude" Tom Woznicki Celebrates Company's 25 th Anniversary FEATURE INTERVIEW