The library is the foundation: Why design reuse is energy conservation

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (00:01.134): Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the Printed Circuit Podcast, where we discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities across the printed circuit engineering industry. I’m your host, Steph Chavez. Today, we’ll explore the evolving world of design reuse and IP management. From reusable circuit blocks and libraries to workflow optimization and collaboration across engineering teams, we’ll discuss the tools, the strategies, and innovations helping designers bring complex electronics to market faster and more efficiently.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (00:33.206): So thanks for tuning in today. I’m very excited to welcome today’s guest, who is a friend of mine and who is a very seasoned printed circuit engineer, Paul Fleming, senior printed circuit board consultant.

Paul Fleming (00:42.897): Hi, Steph, thank you for asking me to join you. I’m looking forward to talking with you and the whole universe, I guess, is what this is.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (00:52.398): That it is. It’s great to have you, Paul. Paul, can you the audience a brief introduction to your background, experience, and education as a long-term industry veteran in PCB design?

Paul Fleming (01:04.627): Well, I started.

Paul Fleming (01:11.113): Let me pause, let me put this, hold on. Okay. I started designing back, gosh, close to 45 years ago. And it was really a blessing from the standpoint as I was an unemployed guy looking for a job, had a college degree, but couldn’t find anything out there and computers were just coming around. there were, you know, we didn’t even have personal computers at the time.

Paul Fleming (01:34.903): And a friend of mine invited me to check out what he did. And when I first got introduced to it, went into his facility and I saw that he had a team that were designing printed circuit boards. And I thought, that looks really interesting. So I jumped on that. You can imagine I was highly motivated. I jumped on that. And it turns out I had studied electronics as a kid, just reading books and playing around as a hobbyist. But I didn’t know that this kind of career actually existed.

Paul Fleming (02:05.473): So what it ended up doing was opening a great door for me. And I had two apprentice mentors that took me in and they began to teach me. And within one year, I had grown to where I was doing all of their hardest designs and really really thrived in that environment. One of the things that that led to was I was able to, after a few years, start my own design business.

Paul Fleming (02:35.793): And that was in San Diego and it was quite the operating experience. really, really enjoyed it. But what I did find was that at the time CAD equipment was just coming out. So I ended up purchasing CAD equipment from a company called Cadnetics. And some of the old timers out there will remember that name. But when I saw that tool, I thought this is really amazing. They had a route engine that you could take and download jobs to.

Paul Fleming (03:05.793): I could route overnight so I could be sleeping and the system would continue working. And I thought that’s the way to go. So when we built this business using the CADNETIC system, I began to realize that I could go beyond just having a business and get involved in the CAD industry where I could help people in businesses all over in selling the software, but also servicing them, training them.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (03:33.518): Thanks

Paul Fleming (03:35.989): and helping them. And that’s really what led me down a path where I was an application engineer in the CAD industry for 20 years. Began with CADnetics and it became Dasix, which became MentorGraphics, which in a short period time with Cadence and then ultimately MentorGraphics and then Siemens. So.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (03:57.902): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (03:59.761): So then what ended up happening was during that process, I met a guy by the name of Gary Ferrari in a parking lot. And he was having this meeting to help build this organization called Designer Council. I was sold, the first time I met him, was sold. became very good friends from that point on.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:06.85): Yeah, who’s that? Industry icon there.

Paul Fleming (04:28.868): And then ultimately I moved to Phoenix and I got involved and took over the Phoenix designer council for a number of years. And that’s where I met Steph. And when I first met Steph, recognized this guy’s got the enthusiasm that I can really share. He shares my enthusiasm, I should say, because he loved what he did. And as you can tell, he’s really thrived in this environment.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:40.738): Hehe.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (04:53.934): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (04:55.462): But I dragged him to that first meeting and it just opened up the whole world to him. And so we have been working closely over many years, much of it within the IPC environment. And so I really appreciate his friendship.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (05:11.938): Yeah, you you mentioned Gary Ferrari, man that, you know, he is an industry icon, know, IPC Hall of Famer, the godfather, him and Dieter Bergman of Printed Circuit Designers Education and the Evolution. I mean, he’s provided and continues to provide mentorship to me today as well as you do, and many others that have helped cultivate me in my skill set. You know, so, you know, with today’s topic of design reuse and IP management, you know, let’s get right into it. But first, you know, we need to start with, you know, a core…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (05:50.046): introduction or the core concepts and the importance of design reuse and IP management. So to start, you help us understand what design reuse and IP management mean in the context of PCB design and why these concepts are so critical for engineers and companies today?

Paul Fleming (06:00.231): Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking about this. It takes me back to when I first had my service bureau and CAD was brand new. And I realized early on, let me get a drink here real quick.

Paul Fleming (06:19.26): I realized early on that what I had in my hands was something that could be reused. So in the past, what we would do is you would sit down and you would tape, you’d tape and you’d have the light, the little tape items that you would put down. We would put them on mylar and then we would photographically shoot them. You couldn’t really reuse that very easily.

Paul Fleming (06:56.718): But in the CAD world, everything that you did created something that could be stored and used in the future. And I began to realize, and I had met this mathematician, in my discussion with this mathematician, he said time, he said money, money is energy. And if I relate that to what we have here, because everything that we do in the design world is decisions. It’s small decisions, it’s big decisions, but it’s.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (06:56.718): You

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (07:14.399): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (07:17.264): It’s decisions that lay the groundwork, it’s decisions that solve problems. And if we can find a way to collect those and save them for the future and then rely on that going forward, we can literally save money. And so what I look at is design reuse is actually energy conservation. And what I realized was that I didn’t know how to do it.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (07:38.926): Mm.

Paul Fleming (07:45.979): and I searched around in the industry. I couldn’t find anybody that knew how to do it. The CAD companies couldn’t help me. And I met a gal at one point by the name of Sherry. Can’t remember her last name right now, but she actually had started using CADnetics and she was actually putting information out there about library management. It was a brand new concept and I studied, I met her, I studied what she was doing and from that I created a process.

Paul Fleming (08:20.27): And I put my best designer was my librarian. He was the top guy. He was the most detailed person. And from that we were working on a library that I knew that if we had a solid library, it was one more thing I didn’t have to worry about. We could focus on solving the future problems and not solving past problems. And then that led to the idea of intellectual property. So design reuse.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (08:20.27): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (08:44.834): reusing the design, but then storing that data is where it actually becomes something that can be drawn on in the future. And I thought about that as where reuse is energy conservation, IP management is energy management. Because of these concepts, designing a board is very expensive.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (09:08.451): Hm.

Paul Fleming (09:15.11): So anytime you can store that like a dam, water, holding water behind a dam, anytime you can store that and draw on it where it’s not costing you new energy, then you can save tremendous amounts of money and time in the company. Things will go faster, but you’ll also be able to do things much less expensive. And that translates into being able to do more. And you can take a company further in their product of their…

Paul Fleming (09:44.593): of creating their products and that sort of thing.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (09:50.423): Yeah, know, time is money. And when it comes to the development process of a printed circuit, it’s how fast can you get to market with the best quality product with the highest yield and lowest cost? And you think about today’s, especially in the mil-aero industry of utilizing circuits in layouts that are already certified on an aircraft.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (10:20.354): and just reusing some of those modules or some of those circuit blocks is advantageous, especially when you think about your bringing on young engineers. They may not be quite experienced, but it’s all about mitigating risk. Designing circuit boards is about mitigating risks. That’s what engineers do. And I think what you describe is just that, is how are you saving the company money and maximizing what little time you do have to bring your product to market?

Paul Fleming (10:36.465): Exactly.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (10:46.114): But that leads me to the next topic I want to talk about, which is.

Paul Fleming (10:47.707): Well, I have a quick story. I have a quick story for you that I think relates to exactly what you said. it kind of is an illustration. We’ll call it an illustration. I recently bought an electric car, my first electric car. What I learned about the electric car is that I can charge it cheaply and I can charge it expensively. And that’s just like the design process. I could design boards cheaply or I can design them expensively.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (10:51.501): Sure.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (11:14.765): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (11:16.475): When I design them cheaply, I’m putting the information in when the costs are low and they’re stored and it’s low risk and it’s low pressure. But if I’m out somewhere and I run out of charge and now I have to go out and I have to find someplace, I’m paying the maximum amount of charge and I’m paying, it’s fast, but it is very expensive.

Paul Fleming (11:47.535): and design is just like that. When you have a lot to draw on, you’re drawing from the lower cost but higher quality stuff. And if you don’t have that, you’re trading that for high pressure, get it done quick and at a high expense. And companies will tend to a lot more money when they have to, when they’re under pressure, than they need to if they handle their IP management consistently.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (11:56.342): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (12:17.058): Yeah, what the thing is, I related to internal company culture. How does a company’s culture, they really all in to design reuse or are they, they’re in such a hurry, they’re gonna stick to what they know and what they know as a legacy process of not using that, you know, in regards to how they’re bringing their product to market. And that’s the challenge. And that’s the evolution. In my opinion, those that get on board with it and take that and use it to their advantage will thrive. Those that don’t, they’re going to get left behind. like what I would like to say is they should be OK with second and third or fourth place because other companies that are using it are going to beat them to market every time with

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (13:10.154): better quality products and faster and less expensive. So again, we’re talking about cost here. So let’s go into the next topic. The high cost of neglect. You actually mentioned companies that when they’re under pressure and they don’t utilize design reuse, the costs are higher and the risk are higher. You’ve seen firsthand, especially with your multiple decades of experience of not just being a designer, but being a business owner.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (13:40.106): of the service bureau, and then especially as an application engineer, throughout your career and then now in your, I want to say retired stage, but you are just as a consultant, you’ve experienced this firsthand of what happens when IP management and design reuse are neglected. Can you share some compelling real world examples of problems that arise such as data loss, costly redesigns, and even manufacturing errors?

Paul Fleming (13:59.345): Ha ha ha.

Paul Fleming (14:02.139): I have so many to choose from. One of my favorites is I was driving to a customer in the Navy out on North Island. North Island is a military naval air station in San Diego. And you have to cross a Coronado Bridge to get over there and that sort of thing. And that was back in the days when they let you drive around. So I’m driving around and I turn the corner and there’s the President’s plane, Air Force One is sitting there and there’s nobody around and me.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (14:05.761): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (14:13.486): Mm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (14:30.606): Mm.

Paul Fleming (14:32.059): And I’m thinking, I just froze. I backed off real slow. thought, there’s probably guns on me right now. And I went around, I finally found my customer. I went in and he showed me what he was doing. He was working on Tomcat, which is the F-14, dating myself because they were still flying back then. And he was literally taking a board. He showed me how he was doing. He had these boards and he was.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (14:39.374): you

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (14:53.901): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (15:01.553): He was taking pictures, actually copies of each layer and then he would grind down to the next layer and he did this all the way through the board. He had to grind off each layer and then he had to reverse engineer. This is for Tomcat. This is a ugly one. Now realizing that the Tomcat, the electronics for Tomcats were done long before they actually had CAD equipment. But.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (15:10.297): my goodness.

Paul Fleming (15:28.323): He was using that and using our CAD equipment to redesign the board, but it was all based on having to reverse engineer this thing. So that has stuck with me for all these years. Just thinking about that probably helped that Air Force One was sitting there as well, freaked me out. Another problem I have seen, and I have seen this more than one time, but in the most recent occasion that it came up again.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (15:43.822): That’s amazing.

Paul Fleming (15:57.607): and that is putting a square pin in a round hole. And it’s so common when, especially in the older days, understanding that when you’re looking at data sheets and you’re seeing the size of the pins and that sort of thing, you gotta know whether it’s a square pin or a round pin, because it’s a square pin. It appears to be smaller than it really is. Pythagorean has a, you know,

Paul Fleming (16:27.278): a problem with that. And so I have seen where a problem was solved. they built, know, company built the boards for probably 10, 15 years. And all of a sudden they get a load of boards, hundreds of boards, and the square pins won’t fit on the board. And we tracked it down to a library part.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (16:27.278): Hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (16:27.278): Exactly.

Paul Fleming (16:55.0): So the problem was solved locally but wasn’t solved in the library and what ended up happening is something for some reason an old library part got replaced within the design and now there was an interference fit that, it was tough, it was a tough lesson, right? So one of the…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (17:08.11): Mm.

Paul Fleming (17:21.326): One of the problems that came up was that they ended up having to shave these pins down on every one of these connectors in order to have them fit. We did solve the problem and I think that they have mitigated the situation, but that was an issue where a library was not controlled and somehow put, and I have seen that not just with square pins. It’s a common problem across the industry. You have,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (17:29.23): Mm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (17:46.018): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (17:48.517): Many companies will start with tight controls and they’ll start with a library that’s good, but then somehow either people change or something happens and they forget, they forget the value of it. And what ends up happening is that little things start to creep in and then the same problems begin to go roll over and over again.

Paul Fleming (18:10.852): Yeah, I think that was, then I had a, there was a, issue. think we’ll talk about that one in a little bit future because, you know, the, the, the, the defense industry, the government industry, they create these things for the very long term. And what ends up happening in then is that, that people will sometimes lose track of pieces of the projects. So I’ve seen projects where schematics got lost.

Paul Fleming (18:43.743): but they had the board. I’ve seen where boards, where the schematics were there, the boards were not, they were either not there or they were an older version that didn’t match. And so somehow the process broke down and all of the IP either was partially lost or totally lost. And that’s a real problem.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (19:03.04): Yeah, I mean, you mentioned a couple of things there that jump out at me. And the first thing is, your library is the foundation of your design and it’s got to be accurate, correct and consistent. And at a minimum, it’s got to be, you know, IPC standards. The second thing is control of the data. And when I say control of data, you also need that manufacturing feedback loop that has to feed back into the library to maintain the quality of the products that you’re making.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (19:43.086): within the library itself, because the library is the most basic, simplest form of reuse, because you design a part or a component that has a symbol on a cell or a land pattern, and it’s reused over and over again. But how many times have you and I experienced throughout our career where it was either built inadequately or inefficiently or incorrect, but yet it keeps getting reused over and over because

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (20:13.066): the design isn’t being fed back or the feedback isn’t being fed back to the librarians to update it. And, you know, this leads me to the third thing about processes. You know, a lot of companies, they lack a true process in designing boards as well as library creation, but then they may have, some may have a process, but they don’t actually follow it. And it’s just there as a placeholder to say, yeah, we have a process, but you know, are they truly following it? You know, many times they’re not.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (20:43.046): But that’s a big issue. And this leads me into the next topic I want to talk about, which is the library’s central role. It’s the heart of IP management. So it sounds like the design library is an absolute central to effective IP management. You and I both agree on that. What makes it a tightly controlled and well-managed library is so critical. And what are the risks of not having one?

Paul Fleming (20:58.438): Well, you know, beyond the risks that we just talked about, I have another story for you. I was called out to a company that, I had to fly to the company because what happened was an engineer called me up and said, we’ve had your software for a number of years and we can’t get any designs out. This is the same software that I had used in my service bureau. We were turning like 12 boards a week.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (21:04.984): Sure.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (21:21.613): Heh.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (21:21.613): You

Paul Fleming (21:24.41): He says, it takes us six months to get a board out and it’s wrong every time. So the company flew me out there to meet with this company.

Paul Fleming (21:44.714): And it was a pretty intense company. I’ll tell you that. They said, if you’re found in that area, they will shoot you before they ask you who you are. So I said, okay, I won’t be in that area. So in my discussions with them, what I found out was that it was a highly secure environment. And because of that and the management not understanding how to manage CAD systems, they were letting each of the designers control their own library. So we ended up.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (21:44.714): Mm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:04.115): my goodness.

Paul Fleming (22:05.304): with every, I don’t know, there was probably half a dozen or more designers, everyone had their own library, they shared nothing. They were, in one sense, were, because it was a secure environment, they thought that they were kind of, you know, not supposed to share any data, but the library data is the one thing you want to share. And what ended up happening was that they had no processes or anything else, so everybody was creating their own bad library.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:08.984): Hahaha.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:08.984): Ugh.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:24.43): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (22:33.797): And every time another designer picked up the design to fix it, created more problems because he just threw his stuff in his bad stuff into the into the board. And they really were having problems trying to get through that. So that was a nightmare situation, but I could see where it could easily happen. And part of it was the designers were also very much they wanted, they were into self preservation. They wanted to, you know,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (22:33.806): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (23:03.039): They were trying to control their own job and that sort of thing. It would have been a rough environment to try to fix and they dealt, they did deal with that for quite some time.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (23:03.539): sure.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (23:09.964): Hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (23:19.096): Yeah, I’ve, you know, during my early consulting days in my career, I’ve been planted at locations like that and it is Pandora’s box. And I think the biggest thing that jumps at me is you said self-preservation. Each engineer is trying to do what he feels is best for him and not what is best for the company. And, or in that case, in those instances where I’ve been that is not what’s best for the government.

Paul Fleming (23:29.701): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (23:46.636): because it’s a government company. yeah. So.

Paul Fleming (23:50.574): Yeah, to take that another step further, one of the things that I learned early on, pretty early on in my career is how to invest in my career. And I learned this because I made some mistakes and almost let my career lapse. But I had a good manager and he mentored me in this. And what I learned was that, you know, it’s not the job, it’s my career.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:04.013): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (24:18.041): the more valuable I am, the better I am for the company. If I’m trying to go in and just please people and do a job, it’s like a library, right? I’m either utilizing it as IP or I’m utilizing it as having to learn all over again. And I learned that…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:18.446): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (24:22.733): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (24:41.525): And part of it was through the IPC and right around the time that I met you, this all came about. And that was, I changed my thoughts on, on, investing in a career that made me valuable rather than investing in a job that made really nobody valuable and really didn’t help anybody except, you know, dig a hole versus actually engineer a foundation. And, that was a, that was a big lesson. And one of the things that when I do have the opportunity to speak or teach for IPC or designers,

Paul Fleming (25:19.586): I usually almost always bring it up that the importance of investing in your career and creating a career and expanding and self-learning and really becoming valuable as opposed to trying to build a little kingdom and control information. The more you give yourself, the more you give of yourself, the more you give to help others in their career, the more it will benefit you. And you’re a very great example of that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (25:19.586): Hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (25:38.607): Thank you. you. You one of the things that, you know, we neglected to mention was the fact that you’re a certified IPC design instructor. And I know you and I have…

Paul Fleming (25:48.761): That’s right. Yep.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (25:51.213): you know, walked those paths in parallel because, you know, as I used to teach the CID and CID+, and I evolved to a master instructor for IPC. I mean, we’ve seen the spectrum. And when you think about the engineers we’ve taught and the experiences, you know, that we both bring to the table, you know, one of the things that I liked when you describe is the concept of the family tree. Can you let us know what your, can you share with the world about that?

Paul Fleming (26:15.567): The family tree. Can you expand on that just a little bit?

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (26:17.74): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (26:17.74): Yeah, know, especially your concept of a family tree, you’ve said this a couple of times. I’ve heard you in some of your lectures when you talk about the family tree in regards to designs and managing the variations of the design and how it’s like a family. It branches, you have all these different variations. But yet at the core of it, they come back to the main design.

Paul Fleming (26:38.798): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (26:43.301): Oh yeah, one of the great things that I get to do as a seasoned designer is work with companies that have to go through and figure out what is going on and what happened. Their engineers a lot of times have gone. They don’t know what’s been done. They don’t know how things got to where they are.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (26:51.758): you

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (27:09.549): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (27:11.109): And so I have to go through and research these family trees and try to figure out where did the problem get introduced and how do we solve it and what’s the next step. so the challenge is this, is that you have the main design and it’s working, there’s a lot of these companies have different customers and each customer has different requirements.

Paul Fleming (27:41.149): And they, so the design begins to branch out. And so you get what they call variants, variations. It might be the same, in some cases it might be the same board, but with variations. In some cases, it’s a whole new sub design where certain things have changed and maybe some of the discretes have changed. And another one is that they’re going along, they’re building, they’re moving quite frequently, know, quite…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (27:52.056): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (28:06.213): Everything’s going great. The product’s great. All of a sudden the parts are obsolete. They can’t get a part and it’s maybe a, maybe it’s a memory. Maybe it’s a big part. I had the case where a memory part, was, it was on chip and it turned into two. That wreaked havoc in the design cause there was no room for it. What ended up happening was we ended up having to take two parts, put it in the place of one, but they were a DDR, was DDR memory. And so there were strict requirements on how we had to route that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (28:11.347): yeah. Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (28:36.449): So we ended up having to get pretty creative on that. And I ended up hiring a RF engineer, I mean, not RF, a high-speed engineer to help run simulations on that. I would design it, simulate it, and then redesign what needed to be redesigned. We went through four or five iterations. Well, in the process of doing all of that, the VP of engineering who didn’t understand really what was going on called me into his office.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (28:58.199): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (29:04.855): every day for an hour and half to rant at me as to why the design wasn’t done. And every day I told them the same story is that we have this process because I have to break all of the rules we have to simulate to make sure that it’s going to work. Otherwise, we’ll spend all this time and money in this product and it probably won’t work as you expect it to without tweaking, a lot of tweaking. And so.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (29:10.296): Hmph.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (29:19.982): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (29:28.632): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (29:30.821): Finally, after four days, the guy, I saw him, he visually sat back and relaxed and he says, you’re telling me that we can simulate this design and we’ll know if it’s gonna work or not. And I says, 99 % it will work if we simulate this design. And there’s a good chance that it will not work if we don’t. And he says, okay. And he gave in and he said some pretty funny things which I will never forget. And then I completed that design.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (29:51.694): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (29:59.161): That’s probably one of my favorite designs that I have ever done. And the engineering manager later on, I don’t know, was it six months or a year later, took me out to lunch and he said, that design was rock solid. We had no problems with that design. And 10 years later, I’ve actually been back to the company and seen it working in the laboratory and it works great. I will tell you that

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (30:19.982): you

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (30:24.034): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (30:26.754): That design started out because of the library issues this company had. They had me start out by redoing the entire library every step of the way. Everything in there was redesigned with brand new parts. That library was, from my perspective, rock solid because I built the thing from the ground up before we even started the design. and.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (30:26.894): You

Paul Fleming (30:52.564): And I just say that because of the fact that had we taken what they had and tried to reuse it, we would not have had the stability in that design that it ended up with. So I was very, very, very happy about that. I was very excited. And it was great to get the feedback from the engineering manager on that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (31:06.359): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (31:13.742): Yeah, I think today’s day and age with simulation and design, simulation and analysis, know, in print circuit design is a must. can’t just, we used to be lucky because the speeds were so slow, the edge rates were so slow that we can get away with, you know, without simulating or without doing any analysis. Today’s day and age is different, you know, in our evolution. But, you know, I want to stick to what you’re talking about regarding the library.

Paul Fleming (31:27.897): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (31:39.744): and what I brought up earlier regarding processes. So beyond the library itself, what role do clear processes and standards play in successful design reuse and IP management? How can companies ensure their teams are following these guidelines effectively?

Paul Fleming (31:55.173): They’ve got to review, they’ve got to do a process of what’s working and what’s not working. Because old habits, you know, they develop over time, but they also get imported from other companies. So many designers have only worked for one company and they only know one way of doing things.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (32:14.04): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (32:22.382): Whereas when you’re in the design service bureau world or you’re exposed to lots of companies like you have been as well as I have been, you get a very large variety of experiences and you see how, you know, there’s a million different things that go through my head on how things can be done. What is best for this situation versus this is the way we’ve always done it. So I’m gonna do it this way. And you can’t document everything.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (32:42.14): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (32:48.472): I mean, as detailed of a document and process, and it should be detailed, but as detailed as you can make it there, you know, we’re dealing with humans here and humans make decisions. We’re back to the decisions. Decisions, you know, decisions are energy. That energy, bad decisions get stored up just like good decisions and it always gets stored up as energy. So the good energy is gonna work for you and the bad energy is gonna work against you because it’s all gonna come back to haunt you.

Paul Fleming (33:31.912): and one way or the other, it’ll either be positive or negative or it will interfere. you’ve had, I don’t know if I’m sure you’ve heard of one of the projects I had in high school was creating a laser research project. We would create interference patterns where you would literally see the patterns because they would cancel each other out. So you’d have a bright band and a dark band and they would, well, that same thing happens within this world of design. You can have great,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (33:56.611): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (34:04.662): positive, but you can have a couple of negative things come in and it’ll cancel out the positive stuff. There’s great power in bad information. so rooting that out, controlling it is important. to resource what happened, what’s going on, what’s working well, and then feed that back into the process is really important. And then you gotta train your people. And there needs to be, you you need to have a resident expert that really likes this kind of stuff.

Paul Fleming (34:17.156): It’s kind of funny. remember, and I’m not saying there’s anything against like the secretaries of a company because they, you know, that’s a role that’s important, but I have trained a lot of secretaries of companies in design because they did show an interest in, and they usually started them out in library management. And so they…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (34:25.998): Haha.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (34:42.958): Mm.

Paul Fleming (34:44.484): Once they get to an IPC training class, they are serious about their work. But if you take somebody that’s not experienced and you put them in the role of thinking that an inexperienced person is gonna be good in this role of creating libraries, you are opening yourself up unless you have a very extensive process for weeding out and solving the information, fixing problems, finding problems.

Paul Fleming (35:14.484): It’s a big jump. And the other thing is that most library parts are, they used to be on data sheets. I mean, they’re still on data sheets and a lot of data sheets are wrong. You’ll hear that a lot in our training. So it takes a seasoned designer to look at it and say, you know what, that dimension’s wrong, rather than just go, oh, this dimension’s there, let’s put it in. And I recently had all kinds of…

Paul Fleming (35:44.484): things that I have found on data sheets that were wrong.

Paul Fleming (35:50.484): So if, in taking somebody that is just learning and putting them in that role, it’s a risk, it’s a risk for the company. Now under tight supervision, that’s different. If you’ve got somebody else who’s responsible for the library and every single part that goes in there, then you’re gonna use that to train people. It’s just like anything, right? They become the apprentice to the master.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:09.72): Sure.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:09.72): Mm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:18.094): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (36:18.537): I really would encourage that because I think, know, for one thing, we’re short of designers. We really need people that understand what’s going on. And a good way to bring them up is I learned as an apprentice. I’ve never, I have a business degree, but I ended up being, I I don’t want to, kind of wanted to be an engineer, but then I changed through college and I ended up with a business degree, but I ended up spending 45 years as an engineer without a specific degree. But I’ll tell you, I have learned.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:47.896): Ha

Paul Fleming (36:48.705): I’ve learned from the front to the back how all this stuff works. It’s been an extraordinary business.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (36:57.294): Yeah, you mentioned the human element or having, if you just get someone with the least amount of experience and you just toss them into the deep end, when it comes to, whether it’s library creation or design, mentorship’s key and oversight, even if you have a good process, if they’re not following the process, it’s key. So let’s actually focus here on the human element, when we think about roles and responsibilities.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (37:37.266): You know, this isn’t just about tools, you it’s about people. You know, what are the key responsibilities an individual engineer and equally important, you know, what roles do or does management play in fostering a culture of effective IP management?

Paul Fleming (37:44.599): Management needs to be aware of what’s going on. They can’t just drop it into the engineering world and say, you guys take care of it. At the same time, engineers can’t just do work thinking that the management doesn’t care and that no one’s watching them. So there has to be a connection between management and engineering that’s positive.

Paul Fleming (38:19.566): and not just bottom line because bad habits will sneak in and they’re easy to sneak in. Engineers I found are focused on just getting things done. How can we do it quickly and get it done? That’s their project. Then they’re onto the next project. The role of the printed circuit board designer is not to build boards. The role of the printed circuit board designers is to create an experience.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (38:19.566): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (38:42.445): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (38:42.743): that experience goes from the beginning of the design process all the way to the end user, all the way. it bridges all the engineering processes along the way. So you’ve got the guy, you’ve got the engineer who’s designing the board, you’ve got the engineer, you’ve got the thermal guy, you’ve got the mechanical guy. Then you’ve got the guy who is going to troubleshoot and poke around and measure things. You’ve got the person that’s gonna inspect the product. You’ve got the…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (38:51.522): Hmm, interesting.

Paul Fleming (39:11.585): You’ve got the cam guy that’s going to run it through his cam gear and then it goes into the assembly guys. Those manufacturing engineers have got to be, they’ve got to know what they’re doing. They’ve got to have clarity in what they’re doing. You provide the clarity. You’ve got to understand what they need. And then from there, it will eventually go to test and then test or test will be following the process, but test is one of the last things.

Paul Fleming (39:41.585): So the test engineers got to be able to know what’s going on. So if he can’t find pin 1 or if he doesn’t know and he doesn’t know that that part’s rotated because it’s not marked and knowing, know, just guessing how that’s, you’re creating an experience for him. He’s not going to be too happy with you. Then it goes to, you know, it goes out to the marketing and the sales department of the company and they sell products and all of a sudden they don’t work.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (39:58.648): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (40:06.188): and the whole company goes, what’s going on here? And these sales guys have to lose their commission because they got a return product. And then it gets out there and maybe it works for a while and then something breaks because there’s a thermal issue and it’s not gonna show up until it goes through so many cycles or whatever. And now you gotta find that. The designer sits in the middle of every piece of that product, the entire process.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (40:15.532): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (40:33.787): And the more he knows and the more experience he has, the better off he’s going to be in providing the experience because ultimately it comes down to the end user. That end user has to have a good experience. And if it’s a medical device, mean, it’s gotta work no matter what. If it’s a cell phone, know, hey, those are disposable. If it’s a little credit, you know, little, you know.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (40:34.327): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (40:59.715): So often I bring home these little trinkets to my grandkids to play with, They have little printed circuit board in there. If it works, you throw it. If it doesn’t work, you throw it away, all right? Everything, but all of that is in the control of the designer. Designer doesn’t, you don’t want to do a class three board for a credit, for a card, a greeting card, but you don’t want to do class one for a satellite board, right? So.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:02.934): Yeah, gadget, gadget. Yeah, exactly.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:10.05): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:22.99): Correct.

Paul Fleming (41:25.911): You’ve got to experience all of that. You got to know what’s going down. This board, I’ve done satellite boards. I know this board’s going to go into a vacuum. It’s going to get shaken. It’s going to get baked. And it’s going to get rattled to the point where your teeth would fall out before, right? Those parts have got to stay on there. So it comes down to it. so some of it’s a personal mission. I encourage the designer. It’s back to the career.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:26.241): Exactly.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (41:35.703): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (41:55.553): You become valuable in your career, you’ll never go without work. Jobs come and go, you you finish up a job, they might. Now some companies, I know of designers that they were the top paid people in the company because they saved the company from going under. It’s not uncommon. So it’s an important role and management training.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (42:11.874): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (42:16.91): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (42:25.89): remember one guy was, he would give seminars on how to train your manager. And the importance thing about that, and again, I went through that with that VP of engineering, and that is that not only do you, and you you could be a mid-level manager or whatever, not only are you managing damage, you’ve to manage up. And part of that is helping to teach in a way that can be understood, the importance of certain things that are done.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (42:32.376): Good luck with that.

Paul Fleming (42:54.002): And it’s not something that when there’s a problem, you come back and you go, hey, this is what you do. No, he taught you do it every single week. You create a habit every single week, a little bit at a time. You’re training your management a little bit at a time. so, and again, it’s making that deposit when the cost of energy is low.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (42:54.274): Yeah.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (43:17.134): You know, you mentioned the designer, you know, being it’s in the middle. mean, you know, those of us who’ve been in the industry long enough know that the printed circuit engineer is the focal point in the cross pollinator from mechanical world to the electrical world to the manufacturing world. And it is the printed circuit engineer or the designer that is the one who has to straddle all that, all those domains and bring all that information collectively together and make sure these teams are

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (43:53.306): communicating to deliver the best possible product to market. with that said, Paul, you know, there’s one more topic I want to cover before we close this out because we’re running close on time here. So let’s talk about tools in the future. You know, when we talk about supporting IP management, you know, what kind of tools and technologies are essential for supporting robust IP management and design reuse today? You know, and looking ahead, you know, what do you see as the future trends or critical advancements in this area?

Paul Fleming (44:15.433): I think, you know, having saw, there are solid tools available for managing, you know, your data. And I’ve seen data management systems that are pretty extensive. I’ve worked with one company that had very extensive data management systems that integrated right into the tools. And it took me a year to learn the depth of that tool.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (44:22.68): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (44:40.97): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (44:45.058): for some of the projects that I was doing with them. it was impressive and it could track changes to parts all the way through the family we talk about, right? Because you don’t want to create problems by getting the wrong information, cross-pollinate into the, so if I make a change in one part, I don’t want it to affect another design and that sort of thing. So they had tools that were able to do that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (44:46.318): Mm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (44:56.942): Mm-hmm.

Paul Fleming (45:13.856): And I think that, and again, that’s the low cost versus the high cost. So the high cost is when you find a problem, the low cost is when you’re investing ahead of time into solving problems. And these were over a lot of users and they’re managed, they took their library management very seriously. you know, even so you’re gonna, you’re gonna find issues, but they’re not big issues. They’re the little issues, right? Not the big issues. Maybe there’s a…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (45:36.75): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (45:41.856): Maybe there’s the wrong part or that sort of thing, but nothing where, you know, a whole section of a board can’t be used because something went haywire with the wrong part and the wrong pinouts and stuff.

Paul Fleming (45:59.856): One of the challenges when you’re dealing with data management systems is that the information is complete. If we look at in my past, in my experience over the many years, it’s likely that if there’s a problem with the board, it has to do with a connector. Connectors have got to be the challenge to manage because if you go to a connector’s data set,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (46:14.606): you

Paul Fleming (46:24.77): They lump a thousand connectors into one data sheet. It is so easy. It is so easy to mess those up. And a lot of the information you get from them is from overseas and you can’t hardly read it and that sort of thing. to clearly know that if I use this connector, it’s got to mate with this other connector and this is the pin outs and that sort of thing.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (46:30.249): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (46:53.964): There’s no way to manage that without having it managed through a data system.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (46:59.95): Yeah, you know, it’s important that… Go ahead.

Paul Fleming (47:02.633): go ahead.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (47:04.482): No, you know, your electronic data management is extremely important and know, accuracy, know, correctness and consistency in your library is key. And personally, I hate connectors, but I love the challenge of creating the land patterns for them because as you said, you know, a lot of these data sheets are multiple connectors in one data sheet and multiple families and variations of that connector. it’s, it’s always a challenge because, you know, the mechanical world isn’t talking to the electric world and, and

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (47:34.482): They have different perspectives, so you’ve got to understand that.

Paul Fleming (47:38.242): Yeah, yeah, and so you end up with, know, where’s the pin one connector? Where’s this, that, and the other thing? And so a lot of times, you know, the pin outs might be odd even versus straight. It’s just, it’s kind of nightmarish, but once you, you know, when you get past that, data management helps you, you know, integrate into finding things like obsolescence or even, you know, a big problem right now is fake parts. So.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (48:06.774): No,

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (48:14.093): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (48:14.093): it gives you the ability to track stuff. You’re not just getting stuff in and you don’t know where it came from, that sort of thing. So it’s very important. And then you asked about where’s the future? I’ve had the experience of being able to use AI, not for design per se, but from the perspective of pulling in information and going through vast amounts of data. And what I find with AI is that

Paul Fleming (48:35.829): that it’s a tool that will allow an experienced person to do what they’re experienced at faster. I wouldn’t trust it by itself without that. My electric car is a Tesla and it drives itself. And it moves along and it’s doing great. And we get off on the freeway, we get off on the side street, we’re going down the road and all of a sudden it’s trying to turn onto a

Paul Fleming (49:05.829): wrong way, a one way street, the wrong direction. So, know, AI is kind of like that. You can have a great experience with it and it’s moving along and everything and you begin to rely on it and you’re not watching it. You know, it’s only comparing, it’s not making decisions. It’s just running comparisons on data. The decision power is still in your hands. You’re the one that has to be in control of the AI. You’re training it how to make decisions.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (49:27.256): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (49:34.197): but then you guys, still have to be aware of what’s going on and verify those decisions.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (49:39.17): Yeah.

Paul Fleming (49:41.793): I like the idea though. mean, if you think about AI, when I first bought Cadnetics way back when the route engine was AI for us, I would take and I could create three or four different versions of my placement and then I could stack them and I’d go home at night and I would run those in concession and I could come back the next morning and see which one did the best.

Paul Fleming (50:11.793): because the system was figuring out how to route. So that was really an early version of AI. And it has done nothing but grow. But I remember that some of that stuff, was just the most fascinating thing to me.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (50:18.615): Mm-hmm.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (50:24.846): Yeah, you when I think about AI in our evolution today, AI is one of the big things, the same with like UltraHDI technology. So I’ll just comment on AI. AI is a tool, and in the end, the engineer still owns the decision. You’ve got to learn to wield that tool and use it to your advantage when you can and how you can to make it easier for you to be more innovative.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (51:04.846): Now it’s a culture shift and you got to embrace it. And if you choose not to, there’s nothing wrong with it. You can still continue to do legacy approaches. But again, this goes back to my point I made early on is that it’s an evolution. If you don’t evolve, you will get left behind. It’s that simple. And AI will not take your job. Who will take your job will be the engineer utilizing AI as a tool to his or her advantage. And then with UltraHDI content, when I think about the evolution there is, looking ahead is, if you don’t have to go down that route, then why should you? You know what I mean? If you’re not boxing a corner where you’re designing very small, tiny things, my advice is don’t do it unless you need to, as part of your requirement to meet your customer’s needs. Because as I said earlier, our job as engineers is to mitigate risk.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (51:58.131): So, you know, with that said, Paul, we’re running up on time here. So I want to thank you for taking time today. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Paul Fleming (51:58.131): I guess just to wrap it up, it’s a…

Paul Fleming (52:08.131): You know, time and money are energy. And it’s really learning how to manage your energy. I mean, we only have, in our lifetime, we only have so much energy. And if we can start to think about our career and all the decisions we’re making, because I don’t know about you, but there are times after placement of a board, I’m just spent. And I’m not lifting weights, but I am tired because of the amount of energy that it’s taken. And to…

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (52:24.59): Hmm.

Paul Fleming (52:30.815): to begin to understand that if I can think about my job or my project as managing energy, how do I best manage this for the future? How is what am I doing today going to benefit me, the company, and the product in the future? And if I can put everything, if I can just filter that through the glasses of everything that I do, I can begin to lay the groundwork for just creating great processes, improving processes, and training the right people to carry on those processes the way that they need. One of the things that a bad habit is that I have seen, I won’t say there’s a bad habit, it’s just a habit, but just people pulling stuff off the internet and just throwing it into a library and then that’s right. so, and I’m dealing with, I’m dealing a lot with that. So that.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (53:22.067): my gosh. That’s, that’s, that…

Paul Fleming (53:27.989): That is just one of the things that, So if people understand what’s really going on, they’re not just trying to solve an immediate problem, they’re trying to solve a future problem. It changes how they look at their role.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (53:29.164): Asking for trouble.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (53:42.031): Yeah, don’t even get me started with that. That’s a whole nother podcast regarding, you know, the noise, quote unquote noise on the Internet. And what you’re grabbing, if you don’t know the source or the resource of where that came from, you’re just asking for trouble. The second, you know, pet peeve I have is, you know, we talked about the human element is.

Paul Fleming (53:44.148): You

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (54:03.626): Why is it today in the university’s designers education of apprentice circuit engineer doesn’t exist? There is no bachelor’s degree. There is no formal education that is dedicated to apprentice circuit engineering, but yet it’s one of the most focal positions in the industry that really, IP reuse and design reuse is this individual is the one who’s really cultivating it and applying it, but yet.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (54:43.626): And also that individual is one of the most highest paid in the company, but yet it’s just not there. I don’t get it. And hopefully, through PCEA and our activity in PCEA, what we’re doing will help in collaboration with Siemens. The collaboration between the two will help change that as we move forward. So again, Paul, I want to thank you for being on the show today. Thanks for sharing your insights and design reuse and IP management.

Stephen V. Chavez (Siemens) (54:58.626): To our audience, continue to tune in for more trends, challenges, and opportunities across the printed circuit engineering industry.

Paul Fleming (55:04.929): Thank you.