I happen to lead a group of Printed Circuit Board Designers
(no, don't hang up, please!) in the Boston area. We are a
chapter of the IPC's Designer's Council, a national group
trying to provide a platform for the ongoing professional
development of the physical design community.
With 50-70 members, for two years we've put on monthly to
bi-monthly chapter meetings exploring topics including new
Via and Embedded Component technologies, BGA Substrates,
Design for Assembly, Design for Test, GD&T, Plant tours,
and many others.
I would like to get more content from "upstream", the core
engineering or specialty consulting communities. While cer-
tainly all of our members spend significant time working
with and learning from our respective engineers, it is al-
most inevitably under severe deadline pressure. For most
of our group, the workday is not an easy environment for
learning, at either fundamental or advanced levels.
Can I find any volunteers, able to talk and/or show slides,
films, or demonstrations for 1 to 2 hours for perhaps 15 to
30 eager learners? Prior or preliminary (practice?) talks
would be most welcome, as would low-key informal discussion.
Put that Toastmaster's time to work, or test a new case
study or lesson plan!
Topics are pretty wide open, although we have both "basic"
and "advanced" constituents. I can see utility in any of
the following, or I'm sure if you've worked with a few PCB
designers you've developed some opinions on what's needed.
Here's a quick list of "would be great" topics:
(basic/fundamental) (advanced/serious)
Digital Structures Topology and Signal Integrity
Analog Structures Predictive Analysis
Power Distribution Power Distribution
Device Families Noise and/or Skew budgeting
Partitioning/Prioritizing Compliance and Safety
Learning/Resources Thermal Management
Technical Writing Perl, .bat, shells, HTML
Anyway, I'm sure you catch my drift. If I can tempt any
participation, or referrals to likely presenters, I (and
my group), would be most heartily grateful. There is not
much infrastructure for the physical designer to draw upon,
and I've been very fortunate to get some great presentations
and response with "downstream", but from my experience it
is only (or even less than) half the problem. We've had
presentations on EMC and on Mixed Signal techniques; these
were among our high water marks IMHO.
We lack a real budget, but could possibly defray any expen-
ses or if you were really interested we could try to do a
seminar type situation, although it would be a first for us.
Normally we meet in a gracious host's cafeteria (Lockheed
Martin in Lexington) and have pizza with a $5 meeting fee.
Of course, speakers eat on the house <g>. Or I'd be happy
to buy you a real dinner (one volunteer to another).
Thank you for your time and bandwidth, and I hope I haven't
offended anyone's sensibilities. I value these groups very
much indeed, and really do try to contribute when I can....
Thanks again and best regards to all,
--
Jeff Seeger Applied CAD Knowledge Inc
Chief Technical Officer Tyngsboro, MA 01879
jseeger "at" appliedcad "dot" com 978 649 9800
I am most easily reached by email, too unpredictable by phone.
President, Greater Boston Chapter, IPC Designer's Council
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