Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

2011: The Year in Design

This has been one crazy year, and 2012 is likely to be even more volatile. But when we look back over the past 12 months, we realize that things actually could have been much, much worse.

And so, in the spirit of the New Year, enjoy this brief snapshot of 2011, as recorded in the pages of PCBDesign007 and the Inside Design Newsletter.

January

Polar Instruments started the year off by releasing the Atlas Si test system,which measures insertion loss in a PCB fabrication environment. Polar had a busy year, releasing a variety of new products for PCB designers and fabricators.

Signs of recovery? The EDA Consortium Market Statistics Service started off the year with some good news about the EDA tool market in Q3 2010, but bad news about the PCB market: EDA revenue was up year-on-year, but PCB tool revenue dropped from the same period in 2009.

The UK-based CNC tool retrofit company A-Tec Systems adopted Zuken’s E3.series software for all of its electrical system and wire harness design projects. And ARBURG, a German manufacturer of injection-molding machines, chose Zuken’s CR-5000 design platform.

Columnist Paul Reid kicked off the year with an article on butt joint failures that has drawn nearly 3,000 views so far. Any content on buried via failure modes always garners a big audience.

Flex designer Tom Woznicki, “the Flexdude,” crafted a column on reverse-engineering flex circuits. With AutoCAD and a few other tools, Tom demonstrates how a flex designer can work backward and solve this type of jigsaw puzzle.

Columnist Mark Thompson started the year with his most popular article of 2011: 10 Most Common Fab Misconceptions. So far, this column has had over 11,000 views.

Columnist (and veteran instructor) Doug Brooks addressed an issue that’s high on the minds of attendees at design conferences, often bombarded by instructors with competing theories: Why should we believe your design rules?  Naturally, fellow instructor Eric Bogatin had to weigh in with his take on this topic!

February

Agilent Technologies launched a power integrity tool as part of the new ADS 2011 Momentum platform.

RF and PCB tool functionality continued to converge. Intercept Technology teamed up with AWR to create a bidirectional link between their respective PCB and RF solutions.

The value-added reseller Technical Systems Integrators joined the Zuken sales team.  The Florida-based company will represent Zuken in the Southeastern United States.

Atlanta-based E-System Design launched Sphinx DC, a DC analysis simulator.

Cadence Design Systems reported $249 million in revenue for Q42010, up from $220 million during the same period one year earlier.

Will the metric vs. imperial issue ever be resolved? Tom Hausherr’s column, From the CAD Library, debuted in February. In his introductory column, Tom advocated metric dimensioning, which drew a letter to the editor from Ericsson’s Harold Pattie, CID+. And William Burton, CID+, of Blue Sky Electronics chimed in with his opinion on the matter.

Dr. Bruce Archambeault, distinguished engineer with IBM, updated us on some of the newest non-traditional techniques for avoiding EMC problems.

Agilent Technologies released the Electromagnetic Professional 2011.02 3D electromagnetic modeling and simulation platform.

DownStream Technologies released CAM350 Version 10.5, which included a new Design Analyzer function.

Dan Smith, "The New Mr. HDI," put together a five-hour hands-on workshop on HDI topics. I interviewed Dan about his work on IPC’s HDI certification class, the state of HDI, and our next chance to play music, of course.

Carl Icahn’s battle to take over Mentor Graphics began to heat up. Is Wall Street sees beginning to see value in EDA?

What recession? Ansoft parent company ANSYS posted record numbers for Q42010 and for the entire year.

March

DownStream Technologies released version 3 of its BluePrint-PCB documentation tool. DownStream posted an 18% YOY revenue increase.

The number of engineers keeps growing: IEEE reached the 400,000-member mark for the first time in its history.

Are embedded resistors ready to become mainstream? Bruce Mahler, VP of Ohmega Technologies, explains why he believes their time has come.

Mentor Graphics rejected Carl Icahn’s bid, but things were just getting interesting.

Sometime, second place is not a bad place to be. Zuken’s Griff Derryberry discusses data that showed Zuken to be No. 2 in worldwide market share of PCB design tool providers.

Columnist Max Maxfield banged out one of his most popular columns – a look at the Curta Mechanical Calculator. Its inventor worked on the plans while imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp in WWII. How many of us are that tough, and that talented?

Dr. Michael Steinberger, lead architect of of serial channel products at SiSoft, discusses the DesignCon panel "How to Avoid Butchering Your S-Parameters."

April

Dan Beaulieu interviewed fellow columnist Mark Thompson, in an attempt to find out why Mark’s columns are so popular. Some of his pieces have garnered over 10,000 views – Mark is obviously doing something right.

Australia-based Altium relocated its headquarters from Sydney to Shanghai. The company said China represented the best location for it to execute its long-term efforts.

Mentor Graphics has secured 50% of the worldwide market share in PCB design solutions, according to data from the Electronic Design Automation Consortium.

We brought you complete video coverage of IPC APEX EXPO 2011, with a focus on the Designers Forum. As IPC’s Anne Marie Mulvihill explained, the Designers Council and Designers Forum are not just for designers anymore.

One of the biggest attractions at IPC APEX EXPO 2011 was the educational conference. Chris Kershaw of TAIT Radio Communications explained how he passed his CID+ certification and brought staffers along to take courses during Designers Forum.

Charles Pfeil, engineering director in Mentor Graphics' System Design Division, discusses his Designers Forum presentation "Effective BGA Fanouts." Will large-scale BGAs routinely feature over 2,000 pins?

Sunstone Circuits began providing a CAD conversion service for designers who place orders for Sunstone's Full Feature or quickturn printed circuit boards.

Carl Icahn wasn’t through yet. He posted this letter to the Mentor Graphics shareholders, making his case for minority representation on the Mentor board of directors.

May

Zuken launched a tool module for concurrent analysis of power and DC noise effects and electromagnetic interference, CR-5000 Lightning Power Integrity Advance.

Carl Icahn’s efforts paid off, with three of his representatives winning seats on the Mentor Graphics board of directors. Mentor management promised to work with new board members Jose Maria Alapont, Gary Meyers and David Schechter. (I still don't believe Carl really understands EDA, much less the vagaries of PCB design.)

We launched The PCB Magazine in May, barely one month after BNP Media shuttered CircuiTree. (Have you ever tried to create a new magazine from scratch in one month?) The PCB Magazine soon became one of the most popular I-Connect007 publications.

Barry Olney, managing director of Australia-based In-Circuit Design, came aboard as a columnist for the Inside Design newsletter and The PCB Magazine. His columns often draw thousands of views within the first 24 hours of publication. May’s “Ground Pours: To Pour or Not to Pour?” is such a column.

Polar Instruments added enhanced modeling of high-speed PCB stack-ups to its Si9000e PCB transmission line field solver.

Local chapters of the Designers Council survive based on the work of volunteers, and Prototron Circuits stepped up to revive the Designers Council’s Cascade Chapter.

June

Famed analog engineer, author and curmudgeon Bob Pease died in a car crash. His columns were always a real treat.

Oh, Speedboard C, we hardly knew ye. Columnist and Arlon consultant Chet Guiles drafted an obituary, of sorts, for the dearly departed Speedboard C pre-preg.

Sigrity released the SystemSI family of signal integrity analysis solutions.

Mentor Graphics expanded its suite of Capital wire harness design tools.

Intercept Technology showed design performance increases of up to 75x through the latest enhancements of its Pantheon application.

Agilent released EMPro 2011.07, a platform that is tightly integrated with Agilent’s Advanced Design System software.

ANSYS acquired Apache Design Solutions for approximately $310 million in cash, bringing a variety of signal integrity tools together under one roof.

July

In 2011, any article with the word “via” in the title usually drew a plethora of readers. This year, veteran engineer Bert Simonovich began writing his column, Bert’s Practical Design Notes. In July, the founder of Lamsim Enterprises penned his most popular column yet, “Practical Differential Via Modeling Made Easy.”

Happy Holden was a keynote speaker at ASQED 2011 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He updated us on the state of HDI, and one thing is certain: Asia is driving HDI, while the West has been largely relegated to also-ran status.

More hints of recovery: According to the EDA Consortium, EDA revenue increased 16% in Q1 2011 to $1.44 billion, and PCB & MCM revenue rose to $140.4 million in that period, an increase of 28%.

Mentor Graphics launched the Embedded Hardware Enablement Program.

Cadence Design Systems posted second-quarter 2011 revenue of $283 million, compared to revenue of $227 million one year earlier.

August

Zuken launched the E3. Topology Diagram Generation Software, a module that enables the user to determine the location of functions and components, the number of harnesses and sub-harnesses, and do early calculations of cable length, weight and cost.

Laird Technologies released an EMI shielding effectiveness calculator.

Traditionally, there hasn’t been much instruction for designers of flexible circuits, but that’s changing. SourcePlus & Affiliates released a free course entitled Designing Flexible Circuits.

Sierra Circuits posted a white paper on HDI design, "Insider Design Tips for Affordable High Density Interconnect (HDI) PCBs."

I penned a Shaughnessy Report column (there was no actual pen involved) titled “The Evolution of the PCB Designer” that recounted the oft-lamented “golden years” of hand-taping PCB designs. Some of you who have moved into management positions called to say how much you missed doing hands-on PCB design work. But it looks like many of you are becoming project managers, coordinating PCB designers located around the globe.

Do you consider your supervisor and EE to be your customers? If not, maybe you should. Jack Olson addressed this issue in his article “The Customers of a Circuit Board Designer.”

Mentor Graphics reported Q2 revenue of $213.7 million, up from $187.9 million the previews second quarter.

September

Polar Instruments released Speedflex HDI, which supports stackup design for HDI and flex-rigid PCBs.

DownStream Technologies released DFMStream, a comprehensive tool suite designed to help engineers and designers verify design and manufacturing rules.

When Bert Simonovich started writing his column "Bert's Practical Design Notes" earlier this year, it was clear that Bert had plenty of great stories to tell about high-speed design and especially about the halcyon days at Nortel. We caught up with the bespectacled Canadian and let the tape roll.

Just in case any of us needed reminding, Mark Thompson discusses the need for designers to “Slow Down and do it Right.” What if your fabricator can’t find – and correct – errors in your design?

Intercept Technology's Pantheon PCB layout suite, developed in the early 1990s, had grown "clunky" to use. So the company completely redesigned the interface. I spoke with Project Lead Brian Jones about the new Pantheon interface, which the company believes allows users to feel like they're driving a Ferrari instead of a Gremlin.

Zuken launched System Planner, a new system-level design environment for up-front planning and partitioning of electronics systems. This solution enables engineers to optimize form, fit and function of single and multi-board systems.

October

PCBDesign007 contributor Jack Olson attended the 20th anniversary of PCB West. Having attended many of these conferences, he wrote up a great post-show review.

The EDA Consortium reported that EDA industry revenue increased to $1.4 billion in Q2 2011, an increase of 17.6% compared to $1.2 billion in Q2 2010. And PCB & MCM revenue rose 21.7% compared to Q2 2010, reaching $144.9 million.

Who says there’s no such thing as a merger of EDA companies without layoffs and bad feelings? Columnist Abby Monaco explored the merger of National Instruments and AWR, which she hopes will become a model for the rest of the industry and not an exception to the rule.

Do we really care about reflections from discontinuities along a transmission line? We may care, depending on the relationship between the propagation time down the trace and the rise time of the signal flowing on the trace. Columnist Doug Brooks addressed this issue in one of his most popular columns, “Current Flow on Traces, Part: Transmission Lines.”

In-Circuit Design Pty Ltd., Australia, in conjunction with Desktop EDA Pty Ltd., released a new Stackup Planner for Altium Designer users. This allows designers to route to impedance in Altium Designer.

Cadence Design Systems reported third quarter 2011 revenue of $292 million, compared to revenue of $238 million reported for the same period in 2010.

Does your company perform incoming inspection on IBIS files? Incoming quality can be checked in a matter of minutes for many models. Longtime IBIS specialist Lynne Green of Green Streak Programs discussed this and more in her article “Top 10 Issues in IBIS Models.”

November

Zuken released CADSTAR 13.0, which features several new modules, numerous enhancements, and greater ease-of-use, representing excellent value for small and medium-sized companies.

Fabricators sometimes claim that designers don’t visit board shops often enough. Well, Bay Area Circuits decided to take action with an evening of pizza, pop, and PCBs that educated future PCB designers about real-world PCB manufacturing issues.

Resistors and capacitors have been buried into circuit boards for years, but that doesn't provide enough space savings for some designers. They're beginning to squeeze active components into the substrates. Is this the next high-density design technique? Terry Costlow investigated this small but growing trend.

Mentor Graphics posted positive results for the third quarter ending October 31, 2011. Mentor also announced the winners of its 23rd annual PCB Technology Leadership Awards.

The gap between mechanical and electrical CAD continues to shrink. Keith Richman, president of Simplified Solutions, spoke with me about his new IDF-To-3D tool, which allows PCB designers to create 3D PCB designs without using MCAD software.

December

This year, PWB Interconnect Solutions tested staggered and stacked microvias. Both staggered and stacked microvia failed for separation of the base of the microvia from the target pad. But in this column, Paul Reid explained that the staggered microvias were two orders of magnitude more robust than the stacked microvias.

ISD Italia joined forces with DfR Solutions in offering DfR Solutions’ automated design analysis tool, "Sherlock." 

Agilent launched the latest release of its Electromagnetic Professional software, EMPro 2011.11. The updated 3-D modeling and simulation platform features enhancements to further speed and improve RF design and verification.

Bypass capacitors are an effective way to filter switching noise off power planes. But some designs go overboard with bypass caps. Bruce Caryl of Mentor Graphics explained how, with a little planning, designers can analyze and simulate the impedance profile of the PDN, ensuring that the PDN is noise-free without using more bypass capacitors than required.

Have a Happy New Year!