Ask questions now to save heartburn later.

I have been selling PCBs for over 30 years and have numerous longtime customers with whom I’ve developed close friendships.

But as with any relationship, there are ups and downs. Given the dynamics involved in being a buyer under pressure to obtain good quality boards at the best possible price, or in my case, being a supplier expected to ensure those perfect PCBs are delivered on time and with no problems, things can sometimes get testy.

Frustrations can arise, especially when the supplier needs to maintain a profit margin either through raising prices or increasing the quantity of boards purchased, while the buyer is expected to constantly cut costs without hurting production.

PCB designers can have many different career pathways.

The route a PCB designer takes through the job market can lead to a number of different outcomes.

A board designer comes in with a knowledge set that helps transform an abstract schematic into physical electronics. A lot of that has to do with knowing what happens downstream from the day the artwork was created. The steps involved with PCB fabrication and assembly are complex, even for the simplest of jobs.

Take a factory tour and notice the rooms full of different machinery. Material is cut to shape and drilled in a kinetic energy field that makes so much noise. Vast plating lines do serial dunking in different vats of bubbling hazards. These are the CAD data manifested in copper for the first time.

Another room is more Zen, with tons of pressure and high temperature being applied. It’s a slow process, and the presses are very expensive. This is usually a small factory’s bottleneck. Down the hall, a brightly lit room full of automated optical inspection equipment ensures compliance. What we do on the monitors plays out across the factory.

Will 2025 bring new solutions to familiar challenges?

The desire to solve problems is ingrained in human nature. But we know that our solutions often create new problems. It’s a cycle that will likely never end.

So if you want to know what’s coming in 2025, the short answer is nothing we didn’t already know. Important trends will include, of course, more AI spreading from cloud to edge, as well as developments in commercial space exploration and sustainable technologies. Each of these presents exciting opportunities while also being the subject of dire warnings if things were to go wrong.

Elon Musk recently suggested that the chances of AI turning out badly are about 10-20%. That sounds alarmingly high. Without delving more deeply into his comment, a logical, if slightly facetious, response is that the chances of AI working in our favor must then be 80-90%. That sounds more encouraging. In practice, however, we must be prepared for good and bad outcomes. Legislation is beginning to arrive as technology acts proposed in the US and Europe put forward restrictions on the use of the AI, including prohibiting undesirable practices like deception, social scoring, biometric categorization and untargeted facial recognition.

Respinning a board to eliminate PTH parts can pay off in production.

When an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider is involved in developing a new product, it is easy to provide design for excellence (DfX) recommendations that align with Lean manufacturing philosophy.

Addressing manufacturability or testability issues associated with legacy products is much more challenging, however. The reasons printed circuit board layout or product design choices may not be optimal are many. Design cycles have been compressed and design resources have been cut at many OEMs. When layout or product development is outsourced to a third-party design team without manufacturing familiarity, the result may be a PCB assembly (PCBA) that meets form, fit, function and cost recommendations, but ignores industry standard design rules, sole sources much of the bill of materials (BoM) or requires unnecessary processing.

SigmaTron’s new product introduction (NPI) process evaluates these issues as new projects are onboarded through a combination of an engineering team review and automated checks through a third-party design tool. When improvement opportunities are identified, the team can provide redesign or PCB layout services to correct the issues.