Where are PCB professionals heading?

led2015

Where are PCB professionals heading? [Copy link]

I came across this article by accident. It is really well written. I would like to share it with you all. . .

Understanding the future of circuit board layout professionals is an important issue in itself, but suggesting that these design engineers need to "move on" is another matter. This is referring to a shrinking design field, and in a rapidly evolving technology industry, the concept of entropy is always upsetting.

Note that the question says "professionals" and that this is about the current view of the profession and what needs to be changed. So the real concern here is the future sustainability of expert electronic product designers working in isolated design environments, especially those who specialize in PCB design.

When you take a holistic view of the industry and where it is headed, this concept is not what it first appears. As technology advances at a rapid pace, the way engineers work and the tools they use are struggling to keep pace with the uncompromising change. It is these technological developments and the various needs of those who work with electronics that set the timeline for how designs are completed and determine the future direction of development.

For board-level design engineers, this path is primarily determined by the development of technology surrounding PCBs. This ultimately determines the functional and physical properties of circuit board designs, as well as the materials, techniques, and design tools needed to achieve these properties. If the goals and formats of PCBs change, their design methods must also change.

What is the development direction of PCB?

Most of the fundamental trends in PCB design and construction today, in a narrow sense, are set to continue.

The consumer and industrial industries will continue to drive demand for smarter and smaller products. The electronics used in those products will become smaller while providing more advanced functionality. The PCBs used to connect these components will also continue to shrink, adjusting the overall capacity of compact user function enclosures.

There won’t be many surprises here, and these trends can have a direct impact on the development of advanced PCB technologies, such as flexible boards, microvias, high-density interconnect systems, and high-density routing. For this reason alone, it seems that the future of PCB professionals is to further improve their skills and master new circuit board design technologies and processes. This is no different from the old path of focusing on circuit boards.

However, when you step back and look at these changes from a broader perspective, it becomes more realistic. This perspective is to consider the design of the entire product, rather than just continuing the traditional thinking of circuit board design, and no longer looking at the development of the entire electronic product from a perspective limited to the PCB.

For example, the transformation towards smaller products is driven primarily by the development of semiconductor technology, while PCB technology and processes have only evolved accordingly. Large-scale devices using high-density packaging will continue to provide more functionality while reducing the requirements for chip support, thereby reducing the number of devices and the number of board-level connections. In this sense, PCB design will become increasingly simpler.

The revolution brought about by programmable devices such as FPGAs has taken this change to a new level by introducing a “soft” hardware design and programmable SoC approach. This change reduces non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs, increases design flexibility, and further reduces board complexity by moving much of the physical hardware into the “soft” realm of programmable logic.

The promotion of programmable devices and the increasing emphasis on software-defined design IP have led to an increasing shift towards soft design. As a result, hardware will no longer be the dominant factor in product design. Board-level design is becoming increasingly simpler and more modular, while physical configuration, connectivity, and construction can also be dominated by other design factors.

An example of other factors at play is the connectivity of the FPGA. One unique aspect of FPGAs is that the device pin configuration is inherently programmable. Traditionally, this has been a source of frustration for board layout engineers. Not only do they have to fan out hundreds of pins for densely packaged devices, but they also have to deal with hundreds of pin assignments that are determined (and changed) in the realm of individual FPGA designs.

From a pure PCB design perspective, this can increase design complexity. However, from a more holistic perspective, variable device pinouts can also be an advantage when the PCB and FPGA designs work together. More specifically, the PCB designer can rearrange the FPGA pinout configuration to simplify routing, and these changes can be directly reflected in the FPGA design world, where the place-and-route tools can automatically reconfigure the FPGA to match.

The design of the board is simplified again, in this case involving another area. In a fully connected PCB-FPGA design environment, this process can be transformed, where the work can even be pushed to a new level by moving problematic routing paths in the FPGA programmable fabric. FPGA placement and routing tools can solve various technical challenges of board routing, but only when the PCB-FPGA development work is in the same design environment and uses a unified shared design data model.

While these concepts are already very attractive, the revolutionary opportunities provided by programmable logic will be further expanded as patents on the technology expire. Imagine the design possibilities when hardware devices such as processors incorporate a certain degree of programmable logic into their structure.

As a result, it is now possible to program how the processor connects and interfaces with the rest of the design. The device can be programmed to include supporting devices and peripherals as needed for your specific application, and as with traditional FPGAs, the pinout can be optimized for board routing, reducing the number of parts on the board and simplifying interconnect paths.

It doesn’t take much to carry this concept over to an application where each device in the design can be configured to interface with the other devices. This then requires only simple, direct electrical interconnections and efficient plugging of the devices together—perhaps even more direct.

When taken to this logical extreme, board design reverts to implementing physical support for electronics and mechanical components. The number of electrical paths on the board will be few and far between, and its properties and appearance will be determined entirely by mechanical considerations. Future "circuit" boards may be easily designed in MCAD space.

Other developments in the future will certainly drive the demise of the traditional view of a PCB with lots of connections. Electronic components such as LCD screens, buttons embedded in product housings, configurable conductive plastics, and even dedicated programmable devices that do all the wiring work will likely reduce the importance of "pure" circuit board design.

Dare to embrace change

You can see where this is all heading. Circuit boards in future products will take all sorts of strange forms, may eliminate a lot of connections, but their development will certainly be fundamentally influenced by, or even dominated by, other fields.

The shift to programmable logic has simplified board design, leaving the board's form factor to the product's mechanical design and the electrical configuration to be defined by software development. The physical electronic hardware is becoming increasingly simple and no longer determines the unique and differentiating factors of product design. Instead, the application software and the hardware and software that runs the application software will define the core of current and future designs (unique IP).

In general, as design disciplines interpenetrate and merge, highly specialized, isolated electronic product designers are rapidly adopting extremely simple, general-purpose design methods. Note the emphasis here on "isolated." The skills of professionals are highly valuable, but they can no longer exist as isolated islands in electronic development. Electronic design is no longer evolving along this path.

So will PCB design itself cease to exist? Of course not. However, it will change radically as programmable parts become more widespread and outside influences continue to dominate circuit board design. The future of designers who specialize in PCB design and treat it as a separate craft and a field of their own is not guaranteed.

As traditional boundaries within the design field blur and the nature of product development changes, board-level design should be viewed as part of an integrated, holistic process rather than a standalone entity. Efficient, transparent design collaboration between disciplines is important today, but will soon become essential as electronic design moves from fragmentation to integration. This means engineers need the skills and ability to explore and influence unfamiliar parts of the design process, considering what the end-user experience should be from the outset.

The road to the future

So, as a board-level engineer, do I need to undergo extensive training in arcane hardware description languages (HDLs) to work with programmable hardware in my designs? Of course not. Retraining in new skills and moving into other design disciplines can seem daunting and unrealistic, but only if you look at these disciplines in the traditional sense as highly specialized, separate crafts.

The key to the answer lies in the use of design solutions that can abstract the design process to a new level while automatically handling the underlying complexity. When these systems become part of an integrated design environment that uses unified design data, entering other design areas will become a reality.

Design engineers can then leverage their existing skills to work as system designers rather than as self-contained experts. For example, advanced design flows using schematic input or graphical signal flow can help engineers use their existing hardware skills to develop or modify embedded hardware and software. This is another step in the evolution of collaborative processes such as FPGA pin reassignment in the entire PCB-FPGA space.

In addition, high-level design systems can further expand the collaboration and impact of application software developers. If the design system can provide a software application layer and drivers for handling the complex underlying hardware embedded in the FPGA, software developers can use ordinary hardware design skills to create a complete SoC system that runs their application.

The main idea here is: when advanced high-level design processes exist in a unified product development environment, all engineers can expand their existing skills and easily collaborate and work in design areas that they were not familiar with in the past. Then they can fully utilize and develop their existing engineering talents, helping them to continue to move towards the design of electronic products based on integrated systems.

To achieve this goal, the key is that the design environment must fundamentally cover all design domains and use a unified model for all design data. It is worth noting that this is fundamentally different from the "integrated" design application approach that is only connected by passing data to each other.

Using conventional methods, higher levels of design abstraction may make design in a specific domain more acceptable, but when transferring specialized data to other domains, it only increases the complexity of the overall design. Therefore, advanced design systems will only become practical when unified design data is used and can be used throughout the entire design process.

In short, with the right design system, all hardware-level engineers have a bright future, including those who are currently specializing in PCB design. However, this "but" is important, and it will only be so if the changes in the field of electronic product design are recognized and accepted. These changes indicate a fundamental change in the direction of design with "soft" as the center, the reduction of the importance of physical (compared with programmable) hardware, and the significant increase in the interactivity of the so-called traditional design field.

By adopting systems that raise the level of abstraction in the design process within a single design environment, engineers can extend their existing skills to collaborate with other engineers and even work in their domain.

At the very least, the results suggest that a truly collaborative design environment can maximize engineering talent and enhance design capabilities. In a broad sense, it can enable professional designers to innovate beyond their traditional silos. It is this ability to enable innovation, the freedom to “seek productivity” as part of an innovative design process, that will secure the future of traditional PCB design professionals.

懒猫爱飞

Teamwork