Talking Data Transfer at ZDAC

I had the great pleasure of attending Zuken’s ZDAC users group meeting earlier this month in San Antonio at the invitation of Steve Chidester, head of product marketing, and Amy Clements, marketing/sales manager.

Steve and Amy had asked me to present on electronics data transfer, a subject many readers know has long held my interest.

There were about 100 people who attended the event this year, slightly up over last year. All the usual Zuken folks were there: Gerhard Lipski, GM of Zuken Europe; Dave Gullickson, GM of Zuken USA; apps engineer Griff Derryberry; Humair Mandavia; Sandy Jones; and so on. I also was fortunate to meet with Zuken COO Jinya Katsube and CTO Kazuhiro Kariya.

As we’ve reported over at PCDanfF.com, just before ZDAC, Zuken rolled out two new tools: DesignForce, which accelerates prototyping by enabling chip-package-interconnect substrate optimization in a single, native 3D format. The CAD company also released CR-8000, its primary CAD flow. (DesignForce is embedded in CR-8000.) They spent a considerable amount of time discussing those two new tools and their ongoing product roadmap, including CR-5000 Lighting v. 14 next March, which will include a netless router. Zuken says it sees a need to move more information to upstream design, such as system and architecture. The main takeaway was that design makes up 4% of the cost of the process, but it determines 60% of the product cost.

I had about 45 people in my session. There was great interest in the topic, in part because some of the people there have been pushing their companies (RIM, Rockwell Collins, Northrop Grumman, to name but a few) to standardize on IPC-2581. All in all, it was well worth the time.

Also, Zuken is doing a lot in wiring harness design. This is a big market for many EMS companies (especially for military and aerospace work), and there are probably 12 to 15 companies that supply design software for wiring harness. (Some big ones are Mentor, Zuken, Eplan, Autodesk, and IGE-XAO). I didn’t attend the wiring harness design sessions, but it seems the audience was fairly split between the two.

Next year’s event will be held in Newport, CA, around the same time frame (early November).

Making the Rounds

We will be at several events over the next six weeks.

On Thursday, senior editor Chelsey Drysdale will attend IMAPS’ annual symposium in Long Beach, CA. There’s a number of EMS companies focused on medical electronics exhibiting and it will be interesting to hear what the latest trends are.

The following week, I will be at SMTA International, covering it for the magazine and cochairing (with CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY columnist Sue Mucha) the session “Global Strategies for Lowering EMS Costs” on Oct. 18 from 10:30-1 pm. CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY also is taking part as an exhibitor (booth 528).

On Nov. 8, I am honored to be speaking at Zuken’s US ZDAC users group meeting. We also will be out in force in mid November at Productronica, the biennial trade show to end all trade shows.

Looking forward to seeing you … somewhere.