Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

PCB Design: The Best Beat a Reporter Could Have

I've always liked telling a good story, so becoming a reporter made perfect sense to me. As a reporter for the past 17 years, I've covered a diverse group of beats. (Sure, I'm an editor now, but I still try to think like a daily newpaper reporter.)

As editor of my college newspaper, I covered student government, tuition increases and the lack of parking spaces. As an intern and features reporter, I wrote about car shows, air shows, rock concerts and ballroom dancing.

I covered real estate - residential and commercial. In commercial, I learned what little I know about finance. The real estate investment trusts and commercial mortgage-backed securities were starting to take off in the 1990s, and I picked up the basics from interviewing the commercial real estate investors.

As a crime reporter in metro Atlanta, I once stood in a bedroom decorated with bullet holes. The victim and the killer had fought over a pistol, the gun spraying a lead arc before one bullet hit the victim in his leg. Leg wounds on TV shows are never fatal, but if you get shot in the femoral artery, you are a goner.

As a city politics reporter, I covered the most boring city council meetings, and - even worse - work sessions in which the content for the council meeting is laid out. If I ever have to cover another city council meeting, you have my permission to shoot me in the femoral artery.

But PCB design is the best beat I've had yet, hands down. It all started out as a mystery, almost a crime story: Who are these people who design circuit boards?

I wanted to find out more about my new audience, so I asked several designers, "What sort of education or training did you need to become a PCB designer?" After all, there must be a career path to becoming a PCB designer, right?

Wrong.

Apparently, no two PCB designers have similar educational backgrounds. Many designers have only driven past a college. Not that it matters: Few colleges offer PCB design instruction, and I can't locate an accredited four-year degree in PCB design. Am I missing one? Circuit design is the one career that your high school career counselor has never heard of.

So, I asked designers about their training. One designer replied, "I used to work in CAM and gave design a try." Another said, "I was a draftsman but they lured me into design." A third replied, "I learned from the guy who was retiring, who learned everything when he worked at Bell Labs."

PCB design reminds me of Key West: A lot of people go for a visit and wind up staying for 30 years.

I decided to run the numbers: How many designers are out there - in North America? Europe? Asia? Worldwide? I've asked around for years, and the answers are all over the map.

The mystery continued. EDA analyst (and fine bass player) Gary Smith said there were 363,000 PCB designers worldwide in 2008. In 2009, former Altium CEO Emma Lo Russo estimated the number of PCB designers in China alone to be over 300,000, perhaps close to 400,000.  

How many designers are in the U.S.? Anyone care to take a guess at it?

The PCB design beat is unlike all the other beats I've worked. It's a beat that is constantly shifting. Sometimes it's tough to get your arms around a topic, but that adds to the challenge.

When I started writing about PCB design, Cadence was finalizing the acquisition of OrCAD. Over the next few years, VeriBest, DDE, PADS, Accel and Innoveda were all absorbed by other companies.

The future of the PCB itself is constantly being questioned. (Crime and real estate will never go away.)

Years ago, I attended a few meetings dedicated to the SoC. Was it going to make the PCB obsolete? I don't know how the SoC was going to connect to anything without a PCB, but the SoC scared quite a few PCB people around 1999. Then optoelectronics sounded the death knell for the PCB. Now, it's printed electronics that has some people worked up. Before my time, it was the multichip module.

On top of this, PCB designers are always afraid that their jobs will end up in China, along with all the high-volume manufacturing jobs.

So PCB design is a fragile sector within the already-fragile world of PCBs. I think it's this fragility that makes designers so proud and protective of their career. They are also the most responsive audience I've ever had. They let me know if I'm right, wrong or just very confused about an issue, which is often the case. Audience participation is a great thing.

Best of all, designers actually need the information we provide, especially the technical columns and articles. When I was a crime reporter, I don't think anyone in the community truly needed to read my news articles about the fight at the Waffle House, or the city's CFO who was fired for charging car tires and vet bills to the city credit card.

Come to think of it, that crime reporter job never would have taken me to China or Canada either.

There are still plenty of mysteries to solve in PCB design, and more stories to tell. See you next time.