Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1071356
52 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2019 their designs including EMI, EMC, impedance control, power distribution techniques, board stackups, and placement strategies in more detail than what was in the CID. Further, participants took the exam first thing Friday morning. This allowed us time to attend the Designers Council "lunch-and-learn" meeting down the hall, and the Altium user group met afterward in the same location. Starting our Altium user group was a huge success. There were many requests from our members who do attend the meetings for such a group. David Haboud from Altium came and did a short presentation on the new Altium 19 features. Then, we discussed how these features will affect how we use Altium going forward. We were very excited about the 3D functionality and hope that it expands to be able to control more of the board-to-board signals. There was some skepticism about the new library functionality and how that will affect existing libraries. Most of us want to explore this in more detail at a future meeting. We'll probably have another one around March. History The Cascade Designers Council started in 2001 with a small group of designers and Prototron Inc. who were interested in networking and learning more about PCB design. Many of us had just taken our CID and were hungry for more information. We meet at various places including Prototron, Microsoft, Monsoon Solutions, SonoSite, and Medtronics—anywhere we could find a meeting room available. Some meetings were held at lunch and others in the evenings. The chapter flourished for about 6–7 years, getting up to 80 members at one time, and then the crash of '08 came. Many people moved to other areas and jobs or just retired completely. Some of us tried to get the chapter going again, but it just didn't take until 2016. A new group of individuals stepped up and took on the task of making the chapter viable again. These individuals still run the chapter today: Tim Mullin, president; Paul Berndt, VP; Aubrey Moore, secretary; Jerome Larez, treasurer; and Cory Grunwald, webmaster (Figure 2). They put in the time and effort to get the chapter registered in the state, re-opened a bank account (more difficult than starting over), and reached out to the designer community again. Let's admit it—designers are "tough nuts" to open! It is always difficult to get us to move away from the computer and actually socialize, even when you wave pizza or sandwiches in front of our noses. However, this group started to get that shell to open up a little bit. First, they tried evening Figure 2: Board members (L–R) include Paul Berndt, Tim Mullin, Cory Grunwald, Aubrey Moore, and Jerome Larez.