Susy Webb: The History and Future of the Designers Council

Reading time ( words)

When we started planning this issue on the IPC Designers Council, I knew I’d have to speak with design instructor Susy Webb, a longtime DC member and currently an executive board officer. I asked Susy to discuss how she first got involved with the DC, why designers should join their local chapter, and what the future holds for this group.

Andy Shaughnessy: Tell us how you first became involved with the IPC Designers Council. Why did you decide to get involved with the DC?

Susy Webb: Houston had already started a chapter of the IPC Designers Council when I got involved. I joined because I always had the desire to learn more about the PCB design profession and getting together with other people who felt the same was very enticing. When I happened to mention in a meeting that we should bring in speakers to teach us all, they appointed me to that task! It became a real growing experience for me.

Shaughnessy: What were the early DC meetings like?

Webb: What the early meetings lacked in knowledge, they definitely had in passion! People understood changes were coming to the designing of boards because of the new high-speed and signal integrity issues, and they were hungry to learn about them. Our first out-of-town speaker was Rick Hartley, and we had over 100 people come out in the middle of a tropical storm to learn from him.

Shaughnessy: What are some of the benefits a designer can gain by joining the DC? I know that IPC stopped charging $50 to join because so many designers said they couldn’t afford to spend that much to network and help advance their careers.

Webb: There have always been some fairly good benefits. In the earlier days, one could attend IPC functions for a discount or ask questions of industry experts on the DC forums. More recently, the benefits include classes brought to the local area by the chapter, meeting discussions on timely topics with others sharing experiences, and making friendships that carry over into other parts of our daily lives.

Shaughnessy: You’re on the executive board for the Designers Council. What exactly does the board do?

Webb: The executive board as a group is the advocate for the DC to IPC in general. We encourage chapter organization and participation, brainstorm ways to encourage new designers to get into the industry, give our thoughts to IPC about issues important to designers, discuss ways to enrich CID and CID+ courses, and most recently, we will be reporting through the industry’s design magazines what other chapters are doing and what classes are available so that all might use those same ideas.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the December 2018 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.

06/13/2019 | Chang Fei Yee, Keysight Technologies

When the return path is broken due to the switching of reference planes with different potential, e.g., from ground to power or vice versa after layer transition on PCB, the return current might detour and propagate on a longer path, which causes a rise in loop inductance. This might lead to the sharing of a common return path by different signals that pose a high risk of interference among the signals due to higher mutual inductance. This interference results in signal crosstalk. To mitigate the crosstalk due to return path discontinuity (RPD), stitching capacitors are mounted on the PCB to serve as a bridge between the two reference planes of interest on different PCB layers.

05/31/2019 | Scott Miller, FreedomCAD Services

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of "The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to… Executing Complex PCBs," written by Scott Miller of Freedom CAD Services.

05/16/2019 | Nolan Johnson, I-Connect007

Materials are no longer a passive part of the design; they play an active role in the manufacturability, reliability, and speed of a PCB. I-Connect007’s Nolan Johnson and Mike Creeden, founder of San Diego PCB Design, discuss several key characteristics that designers should consider in their material selection process.