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80 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Pietro Vergine, the chair of the leadership team for the new Italian IPC Design Chapter. Pietro is an MIT who has more than a decade of expe- rience in electronics manufacturing and is the president of Leading Edge, a Milan-based EDA solutions provider that also focuses on design, verification, and analysis at both the IC and PCB level. Pietro is passionate about training and design engineering education, and as part of Advance Rework Technology, Lead- ing Edge has been an active certified IPC training center. Pietro was one of the first volunteers to open a pilot IPC Design chapter. H i s c o m b i n e d expertise and drive made him a per- fect candidate for leadership within IPC Design, and he accepted an offer to join the Design Commu- nity Leadership—IPC Design's panel of indus- try leaders—in early May. In early July, the Italian IPC Design Chapter opened its virtual doors to affiliations, with designers from all over Italy invited to take part. I spoke with Pietro about the design space in Italy, as well as his plans for the Italian IPC Design Chapter. Patrick Crawford: Hello, Pietro. Thank you for taking the time to answer some of my ques- An Update on the Italian IPC Design Chapter tions. I know that this is a busy—or should I say insane—time for everyone. Let's start off with the big picture. Can you tell me a little bit about what the design landscape looks like in Italy, in general? What industries are most common? Pietro Vergine: Hi, Patrick. We have big com- panies as well as a lot of mid- and small-sized companies working in different domains, such as aerospace, auto- motive, consumer, and IC manufactur- ing. There is also military, but that is less than the oth- ers. There was—and still is—a tendency for big companies to use design ser- vice houses for PCB design. In the past, this was to satisfy the lack of internal designers, and that is still the case. However, they also do this because they feel that this reduces the cost of the design. This isn't always true, in my opin- ion. Crawford: There's definitely an opportunity for smaller design companies to be successful as well as the larger companies; it isn't only locked up in-house with the major players. That's a good segue to my next question. If there are a lot of smaller design houses, then there are Design Circuit by Patrick Crawford, IPC–ASSOCIATION CONNECTING ELECTRONICS INDUSTRIES