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Matties: Your tools allow for collaboration up and down the supply chain, as you were saying. Is it a simple solution for people?
Musto: Yes. Actually, the other piece of the collaboration factor is at the individual board level. Multiple people can be working on the same PCB design at the same time, in a concurrent, real-time design environment. That's real time.
Matties: Designers must be really excited when that feature came online, or maybe they weren’t [laughs]?
Musto: It's a double-edged sword, yeah [laughs].
Matties: They're like, "What the hell? Why are you doing it like that, Bob?"
Musto: They're very protectionist. For management teams who are looking at reducing cycle time and improving efficiency, this was the way to do it. You put two or three people on a design and let them crank away. A lot of the designs today are built up of IP blocks. This allows them to go work on the GPU section, the MPU section, or whatever section of the design that can be separated and partitioned so designers can collaborate and get the project completed quicker. Then you have the higher level of abstraction where you have all these multiple boards in the same system that all need to talk to each other to some extent.
Matties: What would you say to a designer who walked up and said, "I'm a designer. What's the best piece of advice you could give me?"
Musto: Obviously, I think it's all about broadening your experience and opening your mind to doing things differently and in new ways. It's really vital and critical, whether you're a design engineer or a PCB layout guy, to extend your reach beyond just your particular function. As a PCB designer, you need to start incorporating simulation analysis and more verification checks into your world to make you more valuable as an individual. As a design engineer, you need to understand simulation, analysis, verification, and even board design, in order to increase your value within the enterprise, beyond your specific job function.
Matties: With the average age of designers though, does the phrase “teach an old dog a new trick” come into play?
Musto: Exactly. We face this all the time, absolutely.
Matties: If I look for the youth in design, do I have to look oversees? Is that where the design boom is going on in terms of demographics?
Musto: That's correct. I think that's another factor in driving the change in the way companies work. The PCB design community is definitely an aging community, and we actually have studies that show there aren't enough people to fill the spots that are being vacated by this generation of PCB layout designers. Again, some of the PCB design task is falling back onto the design engineers.
Matties: What's the impact of that? What do you think the impact of that will be in 10–20 years?
Musto: We've talked about it for 30 years where we’ve said that the design engineer is going to take over the PCB design task, and it's really never come to fruition. We are in the cusp of that happening where the board design process responsibility is shifting more to the engineer. I believe on the back end of that you'll have people who are manufacturing experts or those who take the enterprise design and pull it together. It's going to elevate everybody's role where they need to play at a different level.
It's going to drive changes in the tools as well. Now you're going to have tools that will be more intuitive to use. There’ll be designers using their tools for short periods of time, so when they need that tool again, it has to be intuitive enough for them to pick it up right away. We also need to increase the levels of automation because they're not going to want to do everything manually. So as this shift is starting to happen, we're working very hard to make sure that the tools are ready.
Matties: Do the marketing or presentation between Asia, and China in particular, and America differ dramatically? Are their values different in terms of what they're seeking?
Musto: We see the work environment is very differently in Asia than we do here in the United States. In Asia we tend to still see companies using manual and resource and time-intensive methods of getting designs completed; for example, multiple people on a single design. It seems that Asia’s priorities rely less on automation and more on interactive design efficiency.
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