Printed Circuit Design & Fab - August 2008 - (Page 18)

The Weakest Link With software performing at peak levels, it’s the designer and hardware that need to pick up the pace. PeRFoRMANCe, PeRFoRMANCe, PeRFoRMANCe…the word was dropped like a Molotov cocktail in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. A year ago, my company won a large customer who we were excited to bring into our user base because of its complex circuit designs. We knew that the company would help aBBy us continue to push the envelope as far monaco as our software was concerned, just as its end product would push the envelope in its industry. It was a win-win for us both and the beginning of a promising partnership. Then, the bomb dropped. Our new customer reported that our software performance was not good enough to handle its mammoth-sized designs. Customer disillusionment normally occurs after the love affair with sales and marketing has ended and the commitment is sealed by money exchanging hands, but this was a requirement we thought we had already satisfied. Performance is one of the most difficult areas of software and an area where the job is never complete. This description of a fairly normal tussle between customer and vendor actually has a much deeper set of issues, of which the software only presents one small part. While we work away at pushing the performance envelope, we know we’re always chasing a moving target. By the time we’ve made something sing at lightning speed, a new customer comes along with an even bigger and more complex design. We know it’s coming, so we accept that our efforts to improve software performance will be an eternal race with no finish. fiGurE 1. Software, designer or hardware: which really is the weakest link? 18 Take a step back and consider the chain of events that leads to this bigger and more complex design that is the subject of the phone call to our headquarter. A company has an electronic product that is successful; a specialized testing machine for airplane communication systems, for example. The company decides that in order to remain competitive in a niche market, it must improve that particular testing machine to handle more tests than just communications systems. Once the executive decision is made, the new design must be created and tested until it is deemed ready for market. Here lies the first challenge. The company has been turning small revisions of a static product for many years. When the new project begins, the company finds that its engineers don't know how to take the product to the next level. This is where we find our industry shrinking to a mere handful of people in the population because this company must now hire people with the expertise to execute a sophisticated design revision. As those of us in the EDA industry know, this isn’t merely a process of placing an ad in the local newspaper. Feelers go out with a few job postings on industryspecific sites, but more often than not, the person hired is found by a friend of a friend who happens to have a friend that is an old acquaintance of the CAD manager. This comfortable little friendship ring is the lifeblood of the entire EDA industry. All of us are connected somehow because we all have an acquaintance in common somewhere. But more and more, that friend of a friend with the right experience level has retired and declines the job offer. The search goes on and on, sometimes for six months or more. So while my team members have a CAD manager breathing down our necks for better software, that very same manager is struggling with our response to the evergrowing complexity of his designs. We give him better performance in a new software release, and he subsequently has to find the right drivers for our applications. Once he finally finds and hires the engineer to execute the more sophisticated product revision, he must then find the board designer who can also execute a more sophisticated layout design. Not only do both engineer and designer have to have solid experience with a higher-level design, but they must also be adept at using sophisticated software programs. It’s no longer a push-button, connect-the-dots job. The level of knowledge required for laying out a board design is constantly on the rise, and with this higher standard, companies are finding that there are fewer people capable of filling the jobs. While these two facets of the process – software and AUGUST 2008 printEd circuit dEsign & faB

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Printed Circuit Design & Fab - August 2008

Printed Circuit Design & Fab - July 2008 Contents Our Line Market Watch Around the World Happenings ROI Tip Jar Software Performance Interconnect Strategies Final Finish Forum Product Development Challenges in a Global Market Innovative Modeling Supports Co-Design of the Power Supply Chain, Part 2 Low-Loss Fluoropolymer Copper Clad Laminate Qualifying PCBs Outsourced in Asia Copper Plating and Microvia Fill for Advanced PCBs Off the Shelf Marketplace Ad Index BGA Bulletin

Printed Circuit Design & Fab - August 2008

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