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32 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 doing design. There's also another skill that's involved here. A lot of people invest their lives in becoming a great forward thinking PCB designer. To expect an electrical engineer to do that is not realistic. I'm not saying it's impos- sible, but I just don't think that, 10 years from now, you're going to see even large companies with CAD teams of PCB designers who are EEs. I think that the function is going to be dis- persed or disaggregated from the centralized function into project teams, where it's going to be shared amongst the engineering folks. This said, there will still be a need for PCB Design professionals to ensure design integrity is met and all manufacturing requirements are ful- filled…without this, ECO's will become more commonplace. Shaughnessy: Then there's China, graduating hundreds of thousands of electrical engineers each spring. Do you have any insight into the growth of PCB designers in Asia? Do you think that's going to be a threat? The US would hate to lose our dominance of PCB design. Musto: China is definitely different to what we have been discussing. They're graduating large quantities of electrical engineers and, because the pool is so large, we are seeing a larger number of PCB design professionals with EE degrees. In North America, engineering students are more interested with becoming the next entre- preneur or working on major electronic prod- uct innovations. In this spirit, they have greater aspirations than working in just one functional discipline. As stated before, they are diversi- fying and focusing on many elements of the product creation process, PCB design just being one of them. IPC is looking at this too. It'll be interesting to get their perspective. From my understand- ing, they are interested to reinvigorate the PCB design trade through education. I think that there's still going to be a place for this type of education for individuals who want to advance their knowledge of PCB design and manufac- turing. Good industry PCB designers will con- tinue to demand a premium, sometimes more than the EE's, for their comprehensive under- standing of taking a design all the way through to manufacturing. Shaughnessy: You mentioned training. A lot of U.S. companies still don't understand is that it's in their best interest to send their designers and EEs to classes at DesignCon, PCB West, or APEX, and they shouldn't have to take vaca- tion days to improve their skill set. When it comes to training, OEMs in the U.S. are stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime, and I wonder if it's that way in other countries. Musto: I agree. Here's an exam- ple: We conduct PCB seminars around the world each year. In North America, we're happy to get 30-40 people in the room. In the Pacific Rim, we could run the same exact session and have 200 people in the room. It's just unbelievable. In the Pacific Rim, there's a bigger desire to attend these kinds of events and is sup- ported by their companies. We do find that this changes when Image provided coutesy of Mentor