Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1153097
AUGUST 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 13 deal with IPC to make some of the PCB-design- related standards available to the college stu- dents for a discount because most of the stu- dents didn't have much money for books. It was the equivalent of the discount that mem- bers could get in the Designers Council. Some of our students were approved for federal as- sistance to take the courses and had to qualify for the books and papers that were associated with the classes. There is a lot of review and scrutiny in the public education system and lots of red tape. We were going to put them in the college bookstore, but the bookstore marked them up by double, so there went the savings we were hoping to pass on. Then, I negotiated another way that the students could go directly to IPC and order the design standards, cutting out the bookstore. All they had to do was tell IPC that they were students in my class and have me confirm it. That worked out well. We wanted to get as much Designers' Coun- cil information into the hands of the students as we could. I even had a Designers Council meeting in class one semester. About 20–25 students and designers showed up. It was a full room, which was a cool experience for the stu- dents and designers. The students asked ques- tions about the industry, and the designers en- couraged the students. Shaughnessy: Did they want to learn more about the tools? Brooks: Of course! The CAD tools are expensive and not readily available to the average person. That was one of my personal pet peeves about the classes that were generally available. I re- member taking the PADS class at Palomar with my son years before. It was really a CAD-tool- based class. They walked you through the CAD training but didn't dig into the "why" of how things were done. Basically, they said, "You push this button to get it to do this and that." It's tough to get a job as a designer when you can't answer basic questions about a board design much less about DFM, auto insertion, pick-and-place, clearances, creepage, plating thickness, tolerances, etc. I wanted to try to change that. I wanted the education focus to be on design-related skills and not make it so much about how to run a specific CAD tool. Mentor offered us their Xpe- dition tool for free, but that turned out to be very difficult for the average students. I lat- er chose Altium as the platform for the class- room, and they gave us 25 seats for a generous discount. Nobody in the class really needed a powerful autorouter to lay out the boards we did in my class; we needed good manual rout- ing, snap grids, DRC, and a design rules-driven environment that would alert you to issues but not stop or crash if you made a mistake. Alti- um suited us pretty well throughout my time at Palomar College. Matties: Talk about the curriculum a little bit. Were you starting with best practices? For a new designer, where should their starting point be? Brooks: I started with the basics. A prerequi- site to the class was Electronics Drafting 101. Familiarity with schematic design, symbols, reference designators, notation, formats, bills of material or parts lists, fabrication draw- ings, dimensioning units of measure—all the types of documentation required to manufac- ture a board assembly. The first PCB class was a beginning class, covering the use of the tool, making library parts for schematics, PCB com- ponents, and the parameters involved in doing that correctly. Matties: It was an elementary beginning. Brooks: It has to start there. Later in the se- mester, I introduced information as it related to their projects: IPC-2221 and IPC-2222 for rig- id boards, IPC-4101 for board materials, IPC- 6011 and IPC-6012, IPC-2615 for dimensions, IPC-D-325 for documentation requirements, IPC-T-50 for terms and definitions, IPC-7351 for land pattern development, IPC-J-STD-001 for requirements of soldering components, and IPC-A-600 and IPC-A-610 for assembly. It wasn't a requirement for the students to get the specifications, but it served to familiarize