Getting a 'designer' education.

EVERY year, UP Media Group and Printed Circuit Design & Manufacture host two technical conferences and trade shows. PCB Design Conference West, now in its 16th year, and PCB Design Conference East (2007 will be its 12th year) have been for years the place for PCB designers to go for real-world, hands-on educational opportunities.

The PCB West conference is a northern California fixture. The timing, however, could be better as it follows on the heels of a number of other conferences. Starting next year, the conferences will flip-flop, PCB West 2008 moving to the fall and PCB East slotted in the spring and at a new location, Chicago. Most participants we spoke with since the announcements were made believe the change will strengthen each show's reach and appeal.

More than anything, the PCB Design Conferences have become a magnet for design and layout engineers, those new to the business as well as seasoned veterans. For most, the education component is key. The conferences bring together best-in-class electrical/electronic design professionals who are also superb educators. These luminaries provide instruction on a range of topics using hands-on workshop and tutorial formats.

Rick Hartley of L-3 Communications has been teaching at the PCB Design Conferences for over a decade. His classes cover a range of topics from high-speed design, including signal integrity, EMI and crosstalk issues, to grounding considerations, and designing for RF and microwave, including base materials selection. Many instructors work together, leveraging each other's strengths. For example, at this year's PCB West, Rick and Susy Webb of Fairfield Industries team-taught a course on placing and routing complex PCBs. Likewise, Susy and Gary Ferrari of Firan Technology Group co-taught a two-day DEC (Design Excellence Curriculum) course covering PCB design basics.

In addition to the conference and trade show, there is a design contest dubbed Top Gun. This year's Top Gun winner, Randy Holt, was a relative youngster: He's been in the PCB design business just nine years. Yet he landed the top prize with a perfect score on his design, something none of his predecessors accomplished. When I spoke with him, one of the things that struck me was a number of comments that he made about the opportunities for PCB design education-more pointedly, the lack of it--at the college level. It prompted me to do some investigating.

Those in California are in luck. There are two college programs, at Las Positas College in Livermore (laspositascollege.edu) and Palomar College in San Marcos (palomar.edu/drafting). (The Palomar program is supported by the IPC Designers Council chapter in San Diego.) Both offer a few courses. Moving east, we find Pueblo Community College (pueblocc.edu) in Colorado, and Purdue University's College of Technology (tech.purdue.edu/southbend) in South Bend, IN. The latter has a few courses integrated into its Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology degree program. Veering south, Louisiana Tech University (latech.edu) offers a few hands-on design tool training courses, while in North Carolina, Wake Technical Community College (waketech.edu) offers CAD and PCB layout in as part of its electronics engineering curriculum. The Pennsylvania College of Technology (pct.edu) features a few focused PCB design courses. To the north, at Centennial College (centennialcollege.ca/index.jsp) in Toronto one could choose from a handful of courses in the continuing education department. There are a few programs scattered here and there, but nothing close to what we need to support the profession's educational requirements. Rick Hartley offers excellent insights on the education issue that bear repeating here. According to Rick, there are, "no formal (read: college level) training programs for printed circuit designers. Many designers rely on circuit engineers to understand how the PCB needs to be designed for noise-free operation."

"A second reality," he continues, "is that many circuit engineers don't truly understand the issues any better than PCB designers. Major colleges and universities are not teaching them the physics of noise or energy transfer." He says nine of 10 circuit engineers he's met (who have not been to the PCB Design Conferences) don't know where high frequency current flows in ground planes, and are uninformed of simple concepts such as 'ground loops.'"

As a nation we have significant problem that needs serious attention. We are failing to encourage and train the next generation of designers. As the PCB Design Conference coordinator; one of the tasks PCD&M has accepted is education. We will continue to provide training for PCB designers of tomorrow, and we will provide a venue for the PCB designers and circuit engineers of today to refresh their education. Things change rapidly in the PCB design universe. We will, with continued support of conference instructors and speakers, provide the design community with the tools it needs for continued success.

Many thanks to this year's instructors and speakers. Our hats are off for your continued dedication to the industry. A complete list of this year's instructors can be found at pcbwest.com/conf/bios.html.