Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
JANUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 17 Almeida: Sure, but it didn't really take off as a mainstream technology, and it certainly has been there for a while. It's been slow to be embraced. Shah: We see a lot more customers doing HDI and embedded. And HDI is really driven by the finer-pitch BGAs that customers are faced with. In fact, there's a trend going on where custom- ers are forced to go to an interposer, because the BGA pin pitches that are coming out for the next generation of BGAs is even smaller than what they could do with HDI. But you know, the next set of things that are coming out there are still in a proof- of-concept stage. One is the VECS technology, which is the vertical con- nect system which allows you to have a via which is not round but flat. It's a 2D trace going from the top of the board to the bottom of the board. So that's a new technology that's in a proof-of- concept stage right now. Hepburn: Something else, just a little differ- ent perspective on all this is, the disruption here, we're looking at it right now as where does it come from a pure technology or tools perspective? But especially with the younger generation that's coming in, they're looking for completely different ways of designing. For example, agile development methodologies which are now taking half of a development organization because of the software content, are driving into even the hardware design, and there's a bit of an impedance mismatch there. How do you make that work? And the younger generation, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for that highly-collaborative, very iterative-type design, and frankly a lot of our tool sets today are not organized for that. desi gner is going to be a thing of the past. Sur- veys show that about 50% of board design- ers plan on retiring in the next 10 years. And there's really nobody coming up behind them. When I was young, there were all kinds of programs for drafting and electromechanical design. Now, designers are being replaced with EEs who need to know everything about the circuit, the performance, the layout. And the problem they're going to have is really under - standing things that are further downstream. How do you design for manufacturing? How do you know that what you design matches what your fabricator can build? There are still a lot of PCBs being designed, but you have a differ- ent skill set, and the skill set is geared more to wards performance, not manufacturability. Shaughnessy: Right. Susy Webb's PCB Basics class at PCB West was almost entirely made up of EEs. Most of the young designers I meet now are electrical or mechanical engineers. Almeida: Well, simulation has always been important, but it's becoming a bigger factor tied to the board, and the analysis part, and a lot of times it just is outside of the skill set of your traditional printed circuit board designer, no matter how well they can route a tight dense board and eliminate cross talk that goes with that, they just don't understand the electri- cal issues that are associated with it, and you need that EE discipline to do that. The other big problem PCB has is this: When was the last big breakthrough we ever saw in PCB tech- nologies? The last one I can think of is surface mount, and that was in the early '90s. That forced a lot of companies to retool their CAD systems, because the gridded systems didn't work anymore. The PCB problem has pretty much been solved a long time ago. You don't see any more disruptive technologies being introduced into the marketplace. Where's the next CCT? Where's the next P-CAD or PADS, or PSpice, for that matter? Shah: There are a couple of things that are on the horizon, not quite there yet, but after sur- face mount we had HDI and embedded. Hemant Shah, Cadence Design Systems