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February 20-22, 2007 |
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Chapter Reports
The Orange County chapter continues to grow in size and excitement as our February 28th meeting held at Mentor Graphics in Irvine, CA had record-setting turnout with 85 in attendance! As the training room at Mentor only holds about 60 people, we had to break the large group into a breakfast session and a lunch session in order to accommodate all attendees. Our topic was Designing with BGAs which was presented by Wayne Pulliam of Advanced Micro Devices. His presentation included 80+ terrific slides, chock full of useful information about placing and routing of BGAs and calculating layer requirements for BGAs based on package information and design rules. He also covered footprint construction, land pattern creation, BGA package escape fundamentals, bypass capacitor strategy and general design concerns and pitfalls to avoid. Wayne is a very passionate designer and all in attendance enjoyed his excellent educational lecture. We also honored three of our chapter members for achieving their IPC Certifications. Each was awarded a personalized IPC logo shirt for their achievement:
Michiko, who took the Advanced Certification exam during the IPC Apex Show in Anaheim was also awarded the “Top Dog” coffee mug for earning the highest test score in her class. Also, James Patten was recognized for his leadership for taking the initiative to secure budget funding from the management at Northrop Grumman to hold an “in house” IPC Designer Certification class this May to train all 12 of his designers. Our March event was a big success with 25 people attending the "Back to Basics" presentation by Debbie Nygaard, Engineering Manager at Honeywell and current President of the Cascade DC Chapter. This was a great opportunity for the new designer or for the non-designer (managers, commodities, mechanical, HR recruiters, etc) to review the history of PCB creation from A to Z. Topics covered included Industry Standards, Materials, Mechanical, Components, Documentation, Testing, and the all important Teamwork. Methods for creating the bare board and attaching the components were also covered. We signed up 11 new members at this event! Welcome! Our next event will be our bi-monthly board meeting on April 12 at 5:30 pm at Intel Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro. All are welcome and encouraged to join us as we continue to shape the educational opportunities for this next year. RSVP is required. April also features our CID workshop and exam for certification scheduled for April 19-21 in Beaveton, Oregon. To sign up, please see the following link: http://dc.ipc.org/education/eduhome.htm On May 12, Suzy Webb will be joining us to present her popular class "Designing With your Thumbs". This presentation for layout designers, as well as design engineers, will go through some experience-based 'rules of thumb' for board designing. Suzy will be our mentor for a day and will give us general guidelines for routing, planes, stack up, high speed, EMI and more. You will not want to miss this class! This will be an all-day class held at the Hawthorne Farms Athletic Club in Hillsboro, Oregon. For up-to-date information and to view details for our current and future events, please visit our website. We look forward to serving our members! The RTP Chapter held its March meeting at the Plexus facility on North Carolina State’s Centennial Campus on March 15. The meeting was attended by 21 people and dinner was sponsored by Adiva.
Our last meeting was held January 25th, 2006 at Hallmark Circuits where 27 guests attended a lecture on the topic "Controlled Impedance, from the Fabricator's Point-of-View" presented by Hallmark Circuits' Rick Norfolk. Rick presented a detailed view of the issues with Layer Stack up and controlled impedance boards which generated a lively discussion amongst the designers and guests. Our next meeting is scheduled to be held at the Del Mar Electronics show April 26th, 2006 at 12:00 Noon in room D. Tom Hausherr of PCB Libraries and Mike Creeden of San Diego Circuits are teaming up to present "The Cad Library in the Design Environment". We will be running booth 124 at the Del Mar Electronics show again this year April 26th and 27th along with Palomar College promoting the Designers Council and the electronics design educational opportunities at Palomar Community College in San Marcos, California... Make sure to stop by and visit with your fellow designers while attending the show and conferences.
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