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The Shaughnessy Report: The Designer of Tomorrow

It’s a great time to be a PCB designer. The job is more complex than ever, but it's also a lot of fun. We can only wonder what the PCB designers of 1975 would think about today’s typical workday.

What will the designer's job look like in the future? There has been a move toward working remotely, driven partly by the COVID pandemic and partly by reality: Many experienced designers simply will not relocate, even for a more lucrative job.

Will an electrical engineering degree be a prerequisite to being a designer? It looked that way for a few years. Before COVID, I heard from veteran PCB designers with more than 30 years of experience who were out of contention for PCB designer gigs because they didn’t have a degree.

But things have changed, and with many designers heading for retirement, many requirements have been relaxed. Plus, I don’t know if there will be enough EEs to fill the thousands of design jobs open in early 2025, much less a few years down the road.

Will designers be using AI throughout their design cycle? Will the designers of tomorrow have to become experts on the silicon-to-systems approach? Will they need to master mechanical CAD tools? Will the industry ever settle on one data transfer format?

These are just a few questions our expert contributors discuss in this issue. We start with an interview with David Wiens of Siemens, who looks into his crystal ball from an EDA company’s perspective. Dan Beeker of NXP Semiconductor shares his thoughts on the typical design engineer of the near future, and Stephen Chavez, also of Siemens, focuses on the innovation that is shaping the designer’s job. Former animation artist Melissa Martinez discusses PCB design from the vantage point of a brand-new designer.

Bob Potock of Zuken explains how PCB design software is responding to the needs of tomorrow’s designers. Barry Olney discusses the new technologies that designers will be facing soon, and Martyn Gaudion predicts some of the changes coming to UHDI. Vern Solberg addresses the challenges facing tomorrow’s designers, and Joe Fjelstad looks 10 years into the future. 

We have short interviews with speakers from the upcoming Pan-European Design Conference in Vienna, Austria, and Anaya Vardya has another installment in his UHDI series. Matt Stevenson rounds it out by covering surface finishes in this month’s column.

I hope you all have a fantastic 2025!

This column originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Design007 Magazine.