Communication, trust, process: The three pillars every co-design team must get right
“If you started back in the light table taping days and you decided that when the first CAD tools came out, “This process is working and I don’t need that stuff” — and you never learned the new CAD tools — then you were obsolete.
Charlene McCauley, Senior PCB Designer and owner of McCauley Design Group LLC
- (00:46) Charlene and Terrie’s origin story: a teacher, a career-changer, and 45 years of PCB experience
- (02:29) What concurrent design actually means — and the “chasing the sun” shift model
- (04:10) Why communication is the foundation of co-design — and what happens when it breaks down
- (05:57) The trust factor: building confidence in a teammate’s work to hand it straight to the customer
- (10:06) Where concurrent design goes south in real organizations
- (11:31) Version control without PLM software: the date-letter-initials convention
- (15:52) Partitioning a complex motherboard without enterprise software — and who holds the master
- (21:38) Upfront setup essentials: Gerber outputs, stackup lock-in, and avoiding the rework avalanche
- (27:40) Treating co-design like a scientist: test revisions and never saying “it won’t work”
- (32:41) The CAM2 success story: world-standard connector, half the typical timeline
- (37:03) AI in PCB design: a tool for experienced designers — and the lesson from the taping-board era
More about the episode
In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez sits down with Charlene McCauley, Senior PCB Designer and owner of McCauley Design Group LLC, and Terrie Duffy, Principal Electrical Engineer of AI Automation at Dell Technologies. Charlene brings 45 years of industry experience, including server planer design at Dell and PCB instruction at Austin Community College — where Terrie was her student, worked alongside her for nine years, and now teaches the course herself.
The conversation is a practical look at what concurrent and co-design require beyond the tooling: master file ownership, cross-discipline communication, and version control discipline. Real war stories — wrong revisions loaded, external teams deviating from specs — illustrate where co-design breaks down. The CAM2/DDR5 connector project anchors the episode: a world-standard achievement completed in four to five years by a small, tightly coordinated team. The episode closes on AI — not a threat to experienced designers, but a tool that rewards those willing to learn it.
Charlene McCauley
Charlene McCauley has over 45 years’ experience as a PCB and mechanical designer. Twenty-four of those years she has built and managed two different design service bureaus. Currently for over 15 years an Austin Texas business called McCauley Design Group, and 8+ years had an Oklahoma based business called Production Graphics Co., Inc. Charlene has over 11 years’ experience as an Adjunct professor at Austin Community College teaching PCB Design, Electrical Electronic and Technical Drafting. She was employed at Dell for 9 years as a Senior PCB Designer for the Rack, Tower, Blade Server, and Storage Systems. Now is a Dell Vendor providing design services for the Precision laptop and server systems. Over the years Charlene’s two companies has provided design services for over 50+ customers in the server, semiconductor, space, military aircraft, radar, satellite, medical, simulator, oil field industries. She also provides Allegro/OrCAD training for her customers’ engineering departments.
Terrie Duffy
Terrie Duffy is a principal electrical engineer-AI automation, at Dell Technologies. She is also an adjunct professor at Austin Community College. She previously was a senior printed circuit board designer at McCauley Design Group for six years. She has a bachelor’s in computer science from Texas A&M.
