This year’s PCB West held on September 9-11 was busy and informative as usual. But I want to focus in on the some of the survey data we gathered. Here is a sample of the data and you can read more on the Zuken Blog.

Zuken USA is now accepting abstracts for the 2019 conference. We welcome case studies, tutorials, best practices and general educational sessions with each presentation being 45 minutes.

The technical program consists of four tracks focused on the areas of:

• Board design including SI/PI/EMC, ECAD/MCAD co-design and IC packaging
• Electrical design including wire harness, panel and fluid design
• Design data and library management including supply chain and PLM integration
• Innovative technologies
  

A discussion about the Top 5 challenges in harness design and manufacturing has been long overdue. Harness manufacturing is growing driven by the electrification across industry lines. The challenges are consistent across industries for the most part without a consistent solution. We have heard pretty much all the challenges and worked on solutions with customers for over 40 years.

OEMs have made enormous strides in feeding back information from the manufacturing process into design to increase process yields. Metrics important to customers such as performance, reliability and usability would be much more useful inputs to the design process, but traditionally they have been much more difficult to obtain. Now Internet of Things platforms can collect and analyze this information and modular design systems can present it to designers in context.

The proliferation of packaging designs that combine multiple chips into a single package is creating new challenges for package, printed circuit board (PCB) and integrated circuits (IC) designers. The common practice of designing the package, PCB and IC in standalone environments requires time-consuming manual processes that are error-prone and limit the potential for design reuse. What is needed are 3D co-design tools that integrate planning and final design implementation at the system level for PCBs, ICs, packages and mechanical enclosures.

This webinar will explore the technology requirements and implementation best practices behind Stretchable Circuits, also known as Stretch-Rigid.  A number of industries including wearables, health and medical devices are taking advantage of this emerging technology.  If you are new to Stretch-Rigid or are interested in design best practices, please join us for this webinar.