Author Archives: Mike

About Mike

Mike Buetow is president of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (pcea.net). He previously was editor-in-chief of Circuits Assembly magazine, the leading publication for electronics manufacturing, and PCD&F, the leading publication for printed circuit design and fabrication. He spent 21 years as vice president and editorial director of UP Media Group, for which he oversaw all editorial and production aspects. He has more than 30 years' experience in the electronics industry, including six years at IPC, an electronics trade association, at which he was a technical projects manager and communications director. He has also held editorial positions at SMT Magazine, community newspapers and in book publishing. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikebuetow

New Zuken Tool Offers Look, and Questions, for Future

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SANTA CLARA, CA – What role will artificial intelligence truly play in electronics design, and what will the impact be on hardware engineers?

Zuken took a step toward answering that question today with its announcement at PCB West of a new AI-based tool for printed circuit place-and-route. Yet the first public mention of AIPR for CR-8000 – the actual rollout will come in the first quarter next year – poses not only a dramatic vision for a highly automated future of design but a host of new questions as well.

The new tool itself is an extension of Design Force, Zuken’s layout, routing and verification tool within the CR-8000 platform. It’s AI, explained Kyle Miller, Ph.D., who architected the engine, involves all three basic types of machine learning: supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement. AIPR stands for Autonomous Intelligent Place and Route, and like previously announced AI-based CAD tools, it starts with routing. The “Basic Brain” performs so-called smart routing by means of exposure to Zuken’s database of PCB designs built in CR-8000. Over time, it mimics human routing, with channels organized in logical ways. Smart placement is next, at an undisclosed time.

According to Bob Potock, vice president of sales and marketing, Zuken will add IPC-2581 capability as part of the next-generation Dynamic Brain, allowing designs from other ECAD systems to be incorporated and learned.

The first two stages are working up to Autonomous Brain, a goal-based utility that the product designers, including Miller, say will use text-based inferencing whereby it detects descriptions of different parts of boards. According to Miller, four functionality levels will be used to inform local and planning decisions.

The system, notes Steve Watt, manager of PCB engineer, can learn from both good and bad designs. “The brain can be untaught if it is sent a dirty design,” he said. Zuken has tested it on about 100 designs, most of the high-speed, digital variety.

Adds Miller: “PCBs are complex. They involve numerical data, geometrical data, the layers in the board, text, constraints … Autonomous Brain is multi-modal; it combines all of these data and extracts the designer’s intent.”

With designers in high demand due to the aging out of many veterans and the length of time and amount of knowledge it takes to develop expertise, some of the concerns about AI replacing humans are eased. But can AI-based tools be realistically used in anything but local environments? Zuken is still working through the issues of cloud-based system, as users point to security concerns. (Miller will be among a group of experts tackling this issue on a free panel session titled AI in Electronics: What Can We Expect? on Sept. 20 at PCB West.)

And how are time-based licenses affected? Miller indicated it takes about five days to learn to use AIPR. But once mastered, Zuken tests showed it eliminated autorouter setup time, and cut autorouting time to 30 sec. from 15 min. Potock noted the conundrum of issuing licenses for products that, on paper, reduce the time of use from hours or days to mere seconds. At this time, it appears Zuken will make AIPR available as a perpetual license.

Given the broad industry resistance to using autorouters, it remains to be seen how tools like AIPR (and others, which are coming right behind) will be integrated into general industry use. That said, the trend in board design is away from the traditional dedicated specialist, toward layout and placement being a small function of engineers’ overall responsibilities. That shift may finally tilt the field toward automation, and if Zuken’s vision is correct, even near-complete abdication to the machine.

Zuken will exhibit AIPR at the PCB West exhibition on Sept. 20 (show hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center. A webinar is planned for November.

Add Wisconsin to the List of Failed Foxconn Bettors

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The ink was barely dry on the lawsuit filed by Lordstown Motors against would-be savior Foxconn when the next round of news hit: the world’s largest ODM/EMS company is pulling out of Wisconsin.

If we go back to 2019, we will recall Lordstown opened the doors of its plant, formerly owned by GM and seen as critical to its hometown’s economic future, to Foxconn, which came bearing (the promise of) much-needed cash. In return, the ODM was to obtain access to Lordstown’s electric vehicle technology, which Foxconn sought as it reportedly focuses on building electronics and other products for what is seen as the future platform for individual and fleet transportation.

That dream ended in a crash, unfortunately but unsurprisingly. The investment never really materialized, Lordstown went bankrupt, and the winners will be the lawyers.

Some 30 miles south of Milwaukee, Foxconn’s much-ballyhooed splash into the Wisconsin cornfields is resolving with the sale of its 315-acre campus to Microsoft.

That’s a far cry from the $10 billion in investment and 13,000 jobs the company forecast — and lots of politicians touted — as longtime homeowners were hit with eminent domain mandates to make way for the 200,000 sq. ft. plant. Some $500 million of taxpayer money later, the prairie landscape is left with a mostly vacant shell. Likewise, company plans to build innovation centers in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Eau Claire and Racine have mostly been shelved, and the properties are going on the block. 

What both deals had in common was that they took place in states that of late are highly contested in federal elections. That’s no surprise: Foreign companies have often (always?) tried to influence the outcome of US elections to suit their strategic interests. (The constraints foreign entities should have on such maneuvers, if any, are for others to decide.)

Experienced bettors know when to fold their cards, however, and Foxconn is well-known for exiting the table when it doesn’t like the stakes. When the trade winds blew cold, the company headed for warmer climes.

So a shout out to Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, among others: If Foxconn comes calling, look hard at the cards before asking for a hit.

Online Component Market Ideas Never Die, But Can They Prosper?

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More than 30 years ago, one of the first stories I reported on in the electronics industry was a startup whose founder wanted to create a marketplace for electronics components.

Called FastParts, the idea was based loosely on the US stock exchange. Sellers of excess parts could come together with buyers, and FastParts would act as the intermediary — much like the NYSE — providing a trusted guarantor of one company’s inventory and another company’s monies.

Depending on your perspective, founder Gerry Haller was either ahead of his time, or a solution in search of a problem. FastParts never panned out, but over the years we’ve seen several other companies attempt the same thing.

Today, the supply chain has rebounded more or less back in balance after the Covid shortages. In fact, there’s probably more inventory than buyers right now. Right on queue, another startup has entered the fray, offering safe harbor for buyers and sellers.

I’m not entirely sure what separates BidChip, the latest entrant, from its predecessors. But I do know this: Sooner or later, Amazon will recognize that the electronics components industry is one of the largest in the world and jump in with its both of its very oversized feet. And when that happens, will any of the others be left upright?

So Long, Mate!

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Sad news: Andy Kowalewski, a longtime friend and speaker at PCB West, passed away Feb. 4.

Andy was hugely popular among his PCB design industry colleagues. He was instrumental in forging the IPC Designer Council ties between Australia and the US. And his knowledge was only surpassed by his charm and never-ending kindness.

He will be missed.

Optimizing Test Cost Webinar

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There are many cost drivers in today’s electronics manufacturing environment. That is why it is important to eliminate unnecessary cost wherever possible.

In a new free webinar, Optimizing Test Cost, EDM’s test engineering team discusses how best to optimize inspection and test strategy. Product design considerations, automation, standardization and best mix of test technologies are discussed. Test robot options will also be demonstrated. The webinar length is 20 min with a 5-minute Q&A.

Date: Tuesday, November 2, 2022

Time: 11 am Eastern Time

To register, click here.

Grounded! What The Electronics Industry Can Learn from Airlines

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Anyone who has boarded a plane in the past several months knows this all too well: the near-term future of airlines is up in the air.

From smallest to largest, all the carriers have been dramatically affected by the post-Covid rebound in passenger air travel. Delta and United Airlines each cut 30% of their respective staff in 2020.

And while many observers point to the attractive buyouts the carriers dangled before critical employees (read: pilots) as means to cut costs amid the mass groundings during the pandemic, employment has shot up over the past 18 months.

Take Delta, for instance. The second-largest airline in the world has hired 18,000 new employees since January 2021. But even with its staffing back to 95% of what it was pre-Covid, capacity reportedly is some 10 percentage points lower. Reason: it takes time to train the newbies.

“The chief issue we’re working through is not hiring but a training and experience bubble,” said Ed Bastian, CEO, Delta.

And the more complicated the job, the longer the training period. Which reveals yet another crack in the fuselage: a lack of trainers. To wit: American says its pilots are basically stuck waiting for training classes to open up, as the number of new hires far outpaces the available slots. The backlog is said to be six months or more.

The issue runs so deep, it has its own name: the Juniority problem.

United has gone on the offensive, blaming — who else? — the government. United chief operating officer Jon Roitman estimates “over 50% of our delay minutes and 75% of our cancels in the past four months were because of FAA traffic management initiatives.”

But all this comes back to the industry’s lack of foresight — or unwillingness — to continue to invest in its workers during the inevitable economic cycles.

You know where I’m going with this.

The PCB industry is historically boom/bust. We are coming off a run of very strong years, and the forecast, according to Dr. Hayao Nakahara, the preeminent researcher in the industry, continues to look bright.

But the graying of the industry is very real, and its long past time OEMs invested in recruiting and training the next generation of designers, design engineers and manufacturing engineers. (And yes, I am pointing at OEMs, since they are top the of the pyramid and ultimately their needs are the driver for the rest of the supply chain’s decision-making.

Let’s learn from the airlines, or, more precisely, their mistakes. It’s time for the push to onboard the next generation of engineers to take flight.

Conductor Sizing Software: How Much is Knowledge Worth?

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My name is Mike Jouppi and I am the sole owner of a software application for sizing electrical traces in Printed Circuit Boards.  A description of the application is here.  

TraceSizingCalculator_rev1Download

I would like to sell this software application and all of the material that went into creating it.  My company has developed 68 design charts.  It also has the capability to create charts for any technology and tools to import the results into the software application.

The electronics design community has started to recognize the importance of the pre-design phase of conductor sizing.  Altium has incorporated IPC-2152 for trace sizing and has training on the topic.  There are many calculators on the Web that are applying IPC-2152 design charts.

Unfortunately, very few understand the physics behind what they are employing as a tool and continue to add confusion to the electronics design community.

If you are interested in contacting me for a conversation on this topic and having a discussion about purchasing my company’s software, my email and phone number are provided below.

Mike Jouppi

Thermal Management LLC

303-359-3280

www.thermalman.com

Irene Sterian: In Memoriam

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I am heartbroken to share the news that Irene Sterian passed away on May 8. Irene was director, technology and innovation development at Celestica, and before that held engineering roles at IBM.

But she is better known as the always cheerful mentor to younger engineers through SMTA, the REMAP technology accelerator she founded, and before that, NGen Canada,  Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster.

She is survived by her husband, three children, brother and mother, not to mention legions of colleagues and friends.

For details on how to remember her, please click here.

Done Deal

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The Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA) today announced it has closed the acquisition of the functional assets of UP Media Group Inc., including its industry leading publications and trade shows.

The deal, which was announced during the PCB West conference and exhibition last October, includes the annual PCB West and PCB East trade shows; PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & FAB (PCD&F) and CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY magazine; the PCB UPdate digital newsletter; the PCB Chat podcast series; the PCB2Day workshops and webinars; and Printed Circuit University, the dedicated online training platform.

Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA) (pcea.net) is a nonprofit association that promotes printed circuit engineering as a profession and encourages, facilitates, and promotes the exchange of information and integration of new design concepts through communications, seminars, workshops, and professional certification through a network of local and regional PCEA-affiliated groups. PCEA serves the global PCB community through print, digital and online products, as well as live and virtual events. Membership is free to individuals in the electronics industry.