Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1004549
26 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 Feature by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 As Bob Dylan once sang, "The times they are a-changin.'" We've all seen it: A new genera- tion of young PCB designers is (very) slowly entering the industry, and the designers we've known for years are retiring, or at least talking about retiring. These millennials are going to be the future of our industry. What does this mean for the PCB design community? How do we attract more of these smart young people to the world of PCB design? I asked Paul Musto, director of marketing for Mentor's Board Systems Division, a Siemens business, to explain the company's initiatives aimed at drawing more students into PCB design. We also discussed the recent move- ment of electrical engineers into PCB layout, the need for a clearly defined path for students seeking to become PCB designers, and some of the ways that young people are already begin- ning to revolutionize this mature industry. Paul Musto: Traditionally, as we all know, most companies had functional specialists; PCB designers, electrical, mechanical, software and signal integrity engineers. Many of these com- panies, if they didn't have that level of skill sets, would go to service bureaus or outside contractors and would contract for those kinds of services. I'm an EE. I graduated from Worcester Poly- technic Institute. I was hired into Data General, a minicomputer company in Massachusetts, as one of a new team of electrical engineers to layout printed circuit boards. At that point in time, they were transitioning from a traditional PCB layout process (hand and tape) to a new CAD based flow and wanted to have electrical engineers working on their PCB layouts. They believed that, due to the complexity and high- speed nature of their boards, EEs would have a better understanding of the fundamental elec- trical performance of what we're designing. Being a recent EE, I quickly realized that I didn't want to do PCB design as a full-time profession and only lasted about two years