IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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72 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2026 nervous about AI. The fear is that AI will take over the artistry and the tactical demands of PCB design, regulating us to focus on design setup and then just pushing an AI-autoroute button. There are lots of possibilities and no guarantees. I am sure that, eventually, AI will make PCB design easier to produce. Personally, I remain on the fence. I am more excited about digital twin as it allows PCB design constraint management and routing to move forward in parallel with signal and power integrity analysis and allows more real-time edit- ing and therefore a better and cleaner design that doesn't suffer from so many routing iterations and holding up schedules. Everyone in the PCB design industry needs to finally accept that PCB design is a legitimate engineering discipline, not just button pushing and drafting. We've come a long way, baby, and the PCB designer with the best all-around engineering skill set is the one that will make your boards evolve into great work products and change the world of technical engineering design. Looking at the rapid advancement of technol- ogy and the competing things designers must achieve, what is the most difficult challenge in PCB design? I believe there are two huge challenges that con- tinue to make board designs difficult, challeng- ing, and fun: the respin of old designs and the advancement of board designs to be smaller in envelope size but pack more circuits, power, and gadgetry than the previous board design version. Today's design respin includes revisions of both electrical and mechanical models, and also includes the obsolescence of components. These make any respin significantly more difficult than initially planned or imagined. These model-level respin functions and features may also be multi- plied by levels of complexity due to stackup neces- sities, material, via sizing and stacking, and BGA- type component grid sizes along with separation of specialized power and grounding circuits. Probably, the single most challenging single advancement of PCB design lies in taking, for exam- ple, a 0.250 x 0.250-inch square board and rede- signing this board to be smaller than a postage stamp while packing more power, circuits, and whiz- bang circuit options. The routing of power becomes tougher, and more layers and more exotic materials are not always the panacea to making this miniatur- ization work, but it's a start. Using model-based and constrained ideologies can help meet this signifi- cant design engineering challenge. Fil, how do you see PCB designers engaging in advanced packaging? Will that stay with or fall to another area in hardware design? This question is as challenging as explaining the duality of mankind. PCB design engineers must learn something new every day with respect to rout- ing and PWB methodologies, as well as understand- ing and being an active student in learning about electrical and mechanical model baselines. Advanc- ing your skill set makes you a better engineer and there is no such thing as learning too much or learn- ing outside your main engineering discipline. As for advanced packaging, I highly encour- age all PCB design engineers to make the effort to understand the methodologies of advanced pack- aging, which includes learning transistor/semicon- ductor theories, HDI routing methodologies, and SoC components, and applying all of this into any board design type. PCB design engineering is a gateway to the advancing technologies of the current and distant future. I know several colleagues who have chosen to learn how to design at the chip level, saying it's similar to board design, only smaller and more chal- lenging. I advise all engineers, not just PCB design engineers, to learn all there is about engineering and apply tangent sustainable methodologies to make it all work together. Learning and solving a range of issues from simple to complex problems and systems is why we become engineers. Fil, as a senior design engineer and a high level educator to new designers, what do you feel is the most important thing new designers can be doing to be really valuable in their jobs? I have enjoyed a blessed career, worked with many kinds of engineers and people, and learned so much from them. I have always taken the time to learn from everyone who wants to help me learn. It inspires me to teach those I work with to keep the flow of knowledge moving in the hope that they will do the same and mentor new design engineers in the future.