Is there an emerging technology that will demand a fundamental change to PCB design or manufacturing?
Intercept: There are a great many drivers, in many industries. Rather than one big shakeup in the design/manufacturing process, we’ll see a proliferation of many specialized processes. We’re already seeing it, with RF designs being accomplished more often in the intelligent tools, rather than the old CAD drawing packages. The same is happening with hybrid designs, where people are trying to customize CAD packages to be smarter, and spending tremendous overhead to do so. Altium: The next disruptive change to hit the PCB design community, and it’s already under way, is in the area of programmable technologies such as FPGAs. FPGAs do for PCB designers what microprocessors did for digital designers 30 years ago. While the traditional use of FPGAs has been in the areas of bleeding edge designs that are one step short of ASICs, the reality is that each new generation of FPGA device brings us higher levels of capability for even lower cost. On another level, true 3-D editing capabilities in r
