Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1436094
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2021 from customers who want things finished by Christmas. It's just human nature. Matties: We surveyed designers and asked about the skill sets that are required to be a designer. e answers led us to see that circuit design seems to be more of an art of commu- nication, an art of problem-solving, etc. All these disciplines are skills, if you will, but you must be able to creatively put them together to come up with something that is right the first time and optimally efficient. Olney: You must have a thorough knowledge of your EDA tool. You must know how to drive it forward and backward, no matter what tool it is. en, you must understand the fabrication process, assembly, and testing of the board. If you've got a high-speed board, you're also considering signal and power integrity, cross- talk, and EMI. ere are these other issues that come into it apart from just taking the trace from one point to another on a board. You must understand how the board is manufactured and how close that trace can go to certain obstacles. You must allow for the reflow process, depending on which sol- dering process you're using. Back in the old days, there was wave soldering and you had to worry about shadowing of two components. ey all had to be in the same direction so the wave comes over both pins of a chip at the same time. It's simplified these days with reflow, especially double-sided reflow, which makes it really easy. But all those manufac- turing concepts must be considered during design. Pfeil: People like us have had a long career with printed circuit board design, and part of the attraction was the artist experience. Of course, we had to learn how to design boards that fulfill the engineer's requirements; but as more designers come from the engineer- ing side, they must learn how to do layout and solve the problems that prevent successful per- formance. What's going to happen? Will they care about the efficiency of artistic solutions? Probably not so much. Maybe the automatic tools will do that automatically. I can tell you that since I've worked on the soware side for many years, when we develop autorouting and interactive routing tools, we must come up with solutions that current artistic designers will also accept. If the results do not produce results that the designer would have produced themselves, they're not going to use it. is has been a problem for the soware industry since the 1980s. Trace glossing routines are intended to improve the routing, which can be rather cha- otic. ese routines will minimize lengths and smooth out unnecessary jogs, while hope- fully fulfilling all the rules. Automatic routines will need to continually evolve to make the design—especially with new circuit technolo- gies—function as desired and be easier to edit when it's done. ese are the tools that the people from the engineering background will want to use, and current artistic designers will Barry Olney