Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

The Shaughnessy Report: The Evolution of the PCB Designer

One of the benefits of my job is getting to meet so many of you. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of you have been designing boards for quite a few years, and you love to tell war stories.

I love hearing about the good ol’ days, especially the years you all spent hand-taping boards. That must have been quite an experience.

Instead of sitting at a computer, you used tools for cutting and taping, and a lot of the work was based on feel. You were artists, pure and simple, even though you didn’t get the respect you should have.

You must have felt a certain pride that comes with being pioneers in a field. You were members of a small, exclusive club. There was no career path for joining the PCB design club, a situation that hasn’t changed much.

For many of you, getting that first design job was a matter of “sink or swim.” You just had to be good at designing boards. And when some of you began designing board in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there weren’t many senior designers to learn from. There were no schools, no consultants, and no instructors with decades of experience teaching classes and Webinars every week.

In a lot of ways, you were on your own, but you liked it that way.

You had your light table, your favorite X-Acto knives, and little adhesive donuts – all kinds of cool manual accessories. It must have been thrilling, stretching and cutting Bishop Graphics tape (and fingertips) on sheets of Mylar, and having so much unused real estate to work with. And doing it at 4X.

And what about all the pranks you played on your co-workers, rigging up their tools while they were at lunch? It’s a wonder you didn’t put somebody’s eye out! But you had to let off a little steam from time to time.

It must have been time-consuming to verify that the schematic matched your artwork. You had to get your buddy to call out pin numbers from the schematic while you identified everything that was connected to that pin number, layer by layer.

Then, once the design was complete, you might have to drive it across town to be fabricated, and if it was extremely hot or cold or outside, the whole thing could expand or contract on you. How many times did that happen?

It was all very personal; no machine could do what you did. Until EDA tools came along.

And many of you, pioneers on the frontier of technology, swore you’d never use a computer to design your boards. I’ve heard that sentiment from quite a few longtime designers; it must have felt like the end of an era.

Now, you’re still an artist, but you use EDA tools. You may have a love/hate relationship with them, but you grudgingly have to admit they do a decent job most of the time. Your supervisor likes how they make you more productive, though you counter that a more productive worker is not necessarily a happier one.

Your job function itself continues to evolve. You’ve gone from “connecting the dots” to working closely with fabricators and assemblers. And now some of you now find yourselves working on 24-hour global design teams, some of which include PCB designers located in China and India.

At SMTA Atlanta this year, several designers explained how their jobs involve coordinating designers located in Asia. These Atlanta designers do some design work, but not as much as they used to do. They’ve become project managers in a sense, and that’s OK with them.

They explained how their offshore co-workers are talented designers who follow directions and speak English well. But they are unable to “think for themselves,” as one designer put it, when they run into problems. They can complete Step A, Step B and Step C, but they need a Western designer’s help to put it all together or deal with potential fabrication and assembly issues.   

Conventional wisdom says that America and Europe create the ideas and the design, and then we hand the manufacturing off to a country with lower labor costs. And now part of the design work is taking place overseas too.

It must be a good business model – all the major EDA companies offer tools with co-design and partitioning capabilities. The team leader can use these tools to hide the sensitive sections of the design from offshore designers.

In theory, US OEMs could employ foreign PCB designers to layout boards for US fighter jets or satellites. But that would never happen, would it?

So, expect your job description to continue to evolve. In the end, you’re still an artist and a craftsman. It takes a creative person with true vision to be a PCB designer, and all the college degrees in the world can’t help a noncreative person design a board.

It’s not easy being a PCB designer. But being an artist has always been a tough and rewarding job. If you still drag out your old Bishop Graphics tape, X-Acto knives and sticky donuts every so often, you know exactly what I mean.