Observations from the Road

I just completed a 2 week trip through the PacRim as part of the PADS 9.0 rollout.  This included stops in 2 cities in India, Taipei, and 4 cities in China.  All in all, there were over 1200 attendees at these seminars, with 475 in Bangalore India alone! 

Some of my observations from these seminars:

• Engineers and designers worldwide are facing the same issues – time to market pressures, high-speed design issues, need to improve processes, the economic downturn.
• The way these issues are addressed is a little different depending where you are.  For example, because of the cheaper labor rates in southern China, they typically will put more “bodies” on the problem.
• The users in India and northern China are more often than not electrical engineers doing the full design, where in southern China we see the more traditional engineer doing the design definition, then passing the design to a dedicated PCB layout specialist.
• I have been presenting at seminars in the PacRim for 5-6 years now.  There was more interest in analysis tools this year than ever before.
• The user profile in China is much different than the rest of the world.  In the US, the typical PCB layout designer is generally male, probably older than 45. In China, the designers were very young: 35 or younger, and evenly split between male and female.

Rollout seminars are continuing throughout the summer for both PADS 9.0 and HyperLynx 8.0.  Check out http://www.pads.com/events/ to see when these will be held in your area!