Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1520492
REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2024 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE I I-CONNECT007 79 design heat this year. That design used a similar LED structure, and then we said, "Is this something that would be fun for the final heat as well? Is it something that would be a cool thing to have in your home?" We all thought it would be fun, so we made the board in the shape of the IPC logo." How do you judge a competition like this? Moyer: It is a little different this year because they're not doing designs from scratch. We did all the up-front work on the schematic concept and the engineering side before we gave the design to the competitors. We spent some time looking at the electrical engineering, and we used some known good schematic design concepts. All they really have to do is placing and routing. As far as judging the designs in the final heat, we have a rubric of criteria based on the IPC standards—design, footprints, library com- ponents, library component creation, and with the music and dance and give me some mood lighting or change colors if I want. This is something that you could put in a lightbox on your wall, and you would see changes in the color LEDs as they change with the music. This year, we did something unique: We decided to make it our IPC logo in the shape of the board, so you can see all the cutouts. So, rather than one solid, rectangular board shape, we actually have the logo and the various parts of our letters all cut out. That makes it a very challenging shape to work with. It's difficult for the contestants to get all the parts physically placed and complete all the routing. There are many narrow chan- nels, and a very thin gap to get a signal from point A to point B. Also, being a somewhat rounded shape means we can't use the stan- dard placement—placing components in a nice, rectangular grid. They have to use dif- ferent rotation angles. I can see what they're doing on their moni- tors, and you can see one of the competi- tors spinning parts around in weird angles to try to make it fit against the radius of this outside shape. We chose to give them the completed schematic along with the design rules and the layer stack-up. Their goal with this competition is solely to get all of the parts made, physically placed onto the board, and get the board routed to comple- tion, along with cleaning up the legend ink, the silkscreen, numbers, letters, and so on. We're not asking them to do the manufac- turing file generation or fabrication drawing generation. We're simply asking them to do the routing. What was the thought behind this new type of design? Moyer: This was actually borrowed partially from the design we did for the preliminary Kris Moyer