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56 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2018 by Barry Matties I-CONNECT007 EDA Technologies is a South African com- pany that offers PCB design engineering ser- vices, mainly for the domestic electronics mar- ket, which makes up a surprising 12.5% of South Africa's GDP. I recently spoke to founder Nechan Naicker about the benefits of outsourc- ing to South Africa, the market segments they service there, and any advice he had to offer from his 20+ years in the industry. Barry Matties: First, tell our readers a little bit about your company and what you do? Nechan Naicker: EDA Technologies is a concept- to-complete electronics solutions company founded over 20 years ago. We've always been involved with PC boards. Back in the day we sold and supported P-CAD, one of the earliest PCB design tools working on DOS, developed by IBM for their own use and later sold off. PCAD changed owners numerous times and evolved until what we have today in Altium Designer. Over the 20 years of selling and sup- porting PCB CAD tools, we've obviously done a lot of training. Being at the bottom tip of Africa, people always imagine that we have lions running around in the streets. They do sometimes, but thankfully not where I live. What's interesting is that most of the people that I speak to have no idea how advanced South Africa's electron- ics industry is. To give you an idea, a large part of SAAB's electronics engineering is done in South Africa, employing a few hundred engi- neers. We have many hundreds of engineering contacts in our database, so I would say that South Africa has a thriving and advanced elec- tronics industry. Matties: Expand a little on EDA Technologies and the services you offer. Naicker: Originally, we started as a PCB design house, but then we also started to sell and sup- port PCB CAD tools. Today we offer turnkey South African Electronics Industry Going Strong Images courtesy of EDA Technologies.