IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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104 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2026 Greetings from "balmy" Santa Clara for DesignCon 2026. The February conference began in 1995 as Design SuperCon, and now in its 31st year, remains Silicon Valley's annual summit for signal and power integrity pros. As I walked into the hotel next to the Santa Clara Convention Center on the first day, I could sense echoes of the thousands of football fans who packed the area just weeks ago for the Super Bowl. For me, though, DesignCon is the big game, where our industry's MVPs take the field to show how fast the technology playbook is evolving. I've attended DesignCon since the first Santa Clara show, and yes, there was once a homemade "Chiphead" mask involved check it out here. PAM6 and the 448G Reality Check On Day 1, I joined a PAM6 tutorial led by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) engineers Geoff Zhang and Peijun Shan. I am happy to say that the message was more pragmatic than "PAM6 solves everything." The presenters indicated that if we want 448 Gbps, we DESIGNCON 2026 From Copper to Quantum to Agentic AI BY K E L LY DAC K , C I T C I D + A RT I C L E