IPC Design Competition: On Your Mark, Get Set, Go!

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I recently spoke with IPC’s Patrick Crawford, manager of design standards and related industry programs, and Kris Moyer, certified IPC master instructor, about this year’s IPC Design Competition. Now in its third year, the preliminary heat began in January, and the winners will compete in the final heat at IPC APEX EXPO in Anaheim.

I asked Patrick and Kris to discuss the Design Competition, advice for contestants, and why designers should enter next year’s competition. As Kris points out, an open mind and knowledge of IPC standards will go a long way.

Andy Shaughnessy: Patrick, give us an overview of the IPC Design Competition.

Patrick Crawford: The competition was launched in 2022 from a desire to engage with designers in an extracurricular way, outside of standards, development, and work. This is our third year and it’s been successful so far. We opened registration on Jan. 1, and 50 people signed up in the first week, which is really cool. We do two heats—a preliminary and a final heat. The preliminary heat is an at-home design. We provide contestants with a schematic, a bill of materials, a scope of work—it’s all on paper, and we say, “Go forth and read the design, schematic, specs, and requirements.” We expect them to create a fabrication file for us. The few that we've gotten in so far have all been Gerber and the associated manufacturing files, but in theory, they could also give us IPC-2581.

IPC India has its own competition designed a little differently than ours, but we invite their two finalists. They're essentially assessing the same criteria in a different format. We invite the IPC India winner and runner-up, but we only invite three of the top-placing competitors from the prelims to the final heat. Last year, the final heat featured five competitors: two in the room at IPC APEX EXPO and three people calling in. This year, based on travel budgets and some competitors requiring a visa, I it won’t surprise me to have full virtual attendance. But that doesn't matter; we'll still have competitors. Last year, Sathish Vijayakumar from India, won the IPC India competition and eventually the whole shebang. He couldn't be in India's competition this year, so he signed up for our competition. We'll see if he can take the top prize again.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the April 2024 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.