Altium Focusing on Educating Designers of Today and Tomorrow

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes

Matties: Happy, what trends have you seen, or concerns do you have around education?

Happy Holden: We haven’t got enough universities or junior colleges interested in us because every other profession is also wanting them to teach welding or some other skill and we’ve got to fight for their attention, and also show that we have employment and career opportunities. I hope we’re making progress. We have a lot of meetings, we put together a lot of things, but you have to find somebody within that educational institution that really wants to champion it, because if there’s not a champion on the inside, like Dr. Middlebrook at Michigan Tech, then it’s easy for some other insider to shoot you down and sway it. Fortunately for Middlebrook, the heavy automotive here in Michigan is emphasizing electric vehicles. The demand for electrical and material engineers is going to be so high that the Dean of Engineering agrees that since we’re a Michigan university, automotive ought to be at the top of our list. But you go down to Ohio and you’ll see they’ve moved semiconductors up to the top of their list because Intel’s going to invest $100 billion.

But I’m kind of worried that between electric vehicles, semiconductors, and a few other things, we’re going to be enormously shorthanded, and unfortunately becoming shorthanded, people start looking at outsourcing and—ta-da!—those guys in India and China would love to do our design work. But if you lose design, you lose the high ground.

Peterson: Yeah, I totally agree. This has been a persistent problem ever since I was a student. In college, nobody even mentioned printed, circuit and board in the same sentence; it was always semiconductors, Moore’s law, transistors, scaling, getting to the next technology node. When I was teaching at Portland State--we have an Intel campus here in Portland very close to us—it was the same thing, most of my students were electrical engineers or electrical and computer engineers, most of them wanted to go and put on the bunny suit and work in the clean room.

Matties: So how does somebody already in design, 10 years-plus, go about mapping their education? What steps should they take? What should they be looking at?

Peterson: That’s a very interesting question, and I think it’s tough to do that when you don’t know what you don’t know, so the first challenge is to find out what you don’t know. For me, that involved a lot of subscriptions to industry publications. I can see what’s new, I can see what’s coming out that I need to learn more about and use that to figure out what my next steps are and just really understand what interests me.  

Matties: Are you looking at this by segment? “How do I design PCBs in the automotive sector?” You’re being very specific as to your career path at this point, though, right?

Peterson: You could be, yes. 

Matties: So if you’re plotting your education, I think one of the first things you have to do is pick your path because it’s so wide these days. There’s one conversation we’ve been having recently: How the hell do you even know what to learn if you don’t know what you’re going to specialize in?

Peterson: Well, generally find what interests you first, because there’s what’s relevant to your career but there’s also what interests you. There’s overlap there, and it’s okay to be broad. As you go through that, you start to see current and future trends that you need to dive into and learn more about. And there are so many companies out there beyond just the EDA companies that put out these resources that help you learn more in areas that both interest you and are career specific.

Another important point that I really believe in is find the conferences that have information that you love or that you need, whether they’re online/virtual or in person. Make it a point to go to one of them yearly or even every six months. That’s something where, if you’re employed, you are definitely going to need employer support. But if you’re working somewhere and they care about your education and increasing your skills, they’re going to want to support you.

Matties: Well, you’re putting a thought out there that who you work for is important, too. If you’re working with a company that fosters and encourages education, then you’re going to advance a lot further, quicker, I would think, versus somewhere that doesn’t.

Peterson: I would agree with that. I think they’re going to be more willing to allow you to pursue some of those resources that may be a bit at the higher end of the quality spectrum, that may require more time away from your desk, but there’s no substitute for getting out in front of people.

Who you work for is going to expose you to different challenges. You’re going to have to deal with many different spinning plates as a designer working on progressively more advanced electronics.

Matties: This is where I think AI plays a role. The demand for knowledge is only increasing because there are so many variables to design, so many things that can go wrong. How do you become an expert in all of those areas?

Peterson: I agree! It’s impossible. You need to be pretty good at a few things and you are usually going to have to collaborate with someone else who’s pretty good at a few other things. And the tools do help, if you know how to use them efficiently and you know how to set them up to work for you and not against you. This is also really important because they will help you catch a lot of that stuff that you may not have thought you needed to think about while you’re in the middle of it, laying out everything, finishing the design.

Matties: When you look at design, are there any skills that are more valuable than others that you would recommend?

Peterson: Yes, and some of the most advanced stuff is going to be done by the fewest number of people. I’m not saying that everybody needs to learn how to lay out 100 Gbps boards, but if you’re working in a company that has to do that, then you should strive to be the best at it. But I think the other side of that is the understanding that designers are not working in silos anymore, and you’re going to have to work with the firmware people, the manufacturing people, a mechanical person. I think that’s where soft skills come in; you have to be able to communicate with all those people and you have to at least have some exposure to what they all do. I’ll just give you an example, I’m not a software developer--I can do some cool stuff in Python, so I can speak that language to an extent, but I’m not a developer--but I have to know how to work with the developer in order to get the job done.

Matties: You need to know what’s possible; you don’t need to know how to do it.

Peterson: Exactly. And I at least need to know how to set someone else up for success.

Matties: Right. You’re keying in on soft skills as part of the educational challenge for people. As the demand for communication grows, are you teaching anything in your curriculum to help people be better at communicating in technical terms?

Peterson: I think the way that we’ve set up the curriculum lends itself to that. However, I will say this, being a better communicator means you have to actually go out there and communicate. You need to write; you need to read a lot; practice makes perfect. That is still an outstanding challenge as far as how to properly communicate what you need done, and I think some of that is best learned through experience. Now in terms of what you have to do in order to get a design into production and get it fabricated correctly, it’s important for students to use the correct vocabulary and understand what it is that manufacturer is thinking when they’re looking at that. That’s one side of the communication, the manufacturing side. The design side is a bit broader in terms of what you have to talk about because a lot of it suddenly becomes application specific. So, it’s really hard to generalize that into a course, in my opinion.

Matties: Right. Now additive is starting to gain some traction in North America, and we’ve seen it in other places. But one of the things we hear is it’s a designer’s challenge because you have to approach methodology differently in the design of that board. Are you in the additive space in education as well?

Peterson: No, we’re not in the additive space yet. Currently, our college-level offering is kind of a 101-level program—basically, an undergraduate program. But we’re looking at what other opportunities there are to continue providing these skills to designers, and we want to stay current, we want to make sure that we’re preparing students to enter this brave new world of design and manufacturing with everything that they need, and additive is a part of that. But, we’re not just stopping with a 101 course.

Matties: That should be really interesting. We know that it’s growing and that there’s a demand and we know that there’s a challenge for designers in terms of learning the best method for design.

Page 2 of 3

• < Previous Page
• Next Page >