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Miller: If the question is related to the design community, it's really important to recognize that the world is evolving and what you did two years ago isn't going to get you where you need to be two years from now. The tools are changing, the technology's changing, and there's a huge push on trying to stay current with what's out there in the industry and what changes. At a higher level, I'm in meetings all the time with customers where they're wrestling with tradeoffs. It's the tradeoff of pushing the state of the art as far as their DFM rules, standards and what their CMs or their internal factories are willing to accept. Yet they're being pushed to differentiate their products in the marketplace and do things that nobody else is doing. You can't do that all the time staying in the safe box of “this is the way we always do things.”
Matties: And you have to do it wisely, because even with unlimited resources, you could still wind up being a Samsung and having phones burn up from bad design.
Miller: I was talking to a few of my counterparts in the industry last night at Geek-a-Palooza about the fact that the technology is challenging us on a daily basis. It's really important that we look to bring in new designers. Mutually, we have a lot of mature designers that have been in this business for 30–40 years. There's not a lot of young people coming into replace the aging designers. At Freedom CAD, we have invested in a program to bring in and train new designers, and we're now in our third class of apprentice designers. There's a lot of designers that do things the old-fashioned way because that's the way they've always done it. It may get the job done, but it's not as efficient. The young designers are much more interested in finding out how to do things efficiently and use the tools to their optimum intended use.
Matties: More productivity per minute. Anything that we haven't talked about that you feel like we should be sharing?
Miller: No, I think we're proud of what we do and that we've built a good reputation in the marketplace. The core bones of this company have been in this PCB design business since the beginning. Lou and Lauren Primmer and the company were one of the first CAD users in the country, and they started in this business at the time of Mylar and tape. The bones of the company go back that far and PCB design has come a long way since then.
Matties: Wow, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing your insight and time today with us.
Miller: Thanks, Barry.
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