Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 dissipation, reliability, high speed, and some are focused on automotive, aerospace, con- sumer, and there's a huge, huge range in mate- rial choice. Trying to help our customers navigate through that choice of materials, we try to work very closely with all the material sup- pliers who are material partners with us. This ensures that designers and pre-layout people, PCB technologists, have a good informative background in terms of how they're going to choose the right material for their design. And once they lock the material in, that's done at an early stage, so it's critical to get that right the first time. We work with that community to make sure that customers are well-informed about what's important for their design and what's maybe less important. Shaughnessy: This is a question for everybody. How much of what you do focuses on educa- tion, and educating your customers? Hepburn: I think we have a unique challenge here with moving an industry expert in tra- ditional authoring tools into more enterprise- grade analytics and intelligence applications; there's some education that has to occur there. One of the things that we're doing is trying to focus on the result of the data. For an engi- neer, it's not a very exciting problem to man- age data, right? But the insights, productivity are very interesting to the company and the engineer. However, the education process for data management can't be done without huge methodology changes and articulating the ben- efit you get by having access to all this data from you, your colleagues, and across your organization. So that's the challenge that we're working through. It's the messaging of how do you link the value of what this data can do for the engineer, and link that back to what does it do for the enterprise and the company at the same time? It's a learning experience; however, we are finding enterprise customers have bought into the business value, so we are making some good progress. Gaudion: Just to focus on the education front, I was just looking at our website. It's been 21 years since we launched the Polar website, and now there are over 900 pages for the industry to dip into. We've been updating it, and it's about the third time we've had a major refur- bishment on our site. We started the site about two years before Google even came into exis- tence. Shaughnessy: You all have a pretty good idea who's using your tools. Are you seeing more young people coming in as designers and EEs? Shah: Well, obviously in India and China, you see many more younger designers than you see in North America and Europe, and the industry is struggling with trying to get the younger peo - ple into the industry here. And it's a problem; the industry needs to create some program that allows and influences younger people to get into the trade, and smaller mom-and-pop shops obviously cannot afford to invest in it, although they need to because they have a graying popu - lation as well. They have a real chicken-and-egg problem. Larger companies, though, will tend to go to younger populations and solve that problem first. But Europe and North America are lagging and that's a problem. Almeida: I almost disagree with you. I don't think you're seeing young designers come in. I think if you're seeing any young design- ers, they're coming in as EEs. Because I think that that the traditional, dyed-in-the-wool PCB One of the things that we're doing is trying to focus on the result of the data. For an engineer, it's not a very exciting problem to manage data, right?