Signal Integrity, Thermal & DFM: PCB West Preview with Keven

Join Zach Peterson as he sits down with Keven Coates, Senior Electrical Engineer at Novium Designs, for an in-depth preview of his upcoming PCB West presentations. This conversation covers essential topics every PCB designer needs to master, from signal integrity fundamentals to thermal management and design for manufacturing best practices.

Discover why silicon company data sheets shouldn't be taken as gospel, learn about common assembly pitfalls that can kill first-run yields, and understand the critical importance of working with your fabrication and assembly partners early in the design process. Keven shares decades of experience from his time at Texas Instruments and offers practical insights that can save you months of rework and costly mistakes.

Watch the Episode:

More Resources:

• Connect with Keven
• Learn more about PCB West

Transcript:

Zach Peterson 

Hello everyone, welcome to the Altium On Track podcast. I'm your host, Zach Peterson. As you can see, I am still in our temporary podcast recording studio as we make the move to a new podcast recording studio. So I hope you will bear with me for a couple of episodes. Today, I'm going to be talking with Kevin Coates, Senior Electrical Engineer at Novium Designs.

I met Kevin, I think four or five years ago at PCB West. And for those of you who have attended PCB West, you have probably recognized Kevin's face. So I'm very happy to talk to Kevin today because he has some very interesting topics coming up at this year's PCB West. Kevin, thanks so much for being here today.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, thanks for having me. This is going to be great.

Zach Peterson

Absolutely, yeah. I feel like I should have had you on earlier, but better late than never,

Keven Coates 

Right.

Zach Peterson 

So if you could, since you are a new guest, just give us a bit of an overview about your background and how you got started in electronics.

Keven Coates 

Sure. Yeah, you know, I'm one of those people who I've been around, well, I've been around for a while, but I got started early. Excuse me. I started at a young age. I have always been a builder. Now they call them makers, which I think is awesome. I love the maker movement. Man, I wish that would have been a thing when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I think they just called me weird. But I loved...

building things, even as an eight and nine year old, I love to build little model cars and stuff like that. And I wanted to make them remote control and, I wanted to do mechanical things, but I didn't really have the cool tools to do the mechanical stuff. My father was a, excuse me, a mechanical engineer and, but he also knew electronics. taught himself electronics and he introduced me to electronics. And so while I didn't have the cool tools, I had a soldering iron. So.

I thought, hey, all I need is a soldering iron. can make my own circuit boards with just a copper clad and some ferric ammonium citrate and a Sharpie marker. That's the way we do it back in the old days. And it worked out pretty well. So I started building circuits and got into audio a little bit, modified some car stereos, did stuff like that. And then got into, when I was in, I guess I was starting college when microcontrollers

came cheap and available. You probably remember the Motorola HT11. that thing, was a long time ago. Maybe it's before your time, but it was a neat little board and it was $80, which was pretty cheap for a board like that, even though it was a lot of money back then. And that's when my embedded processor kind of love started to take off. I started realizing, hey, we can actually...

measure real world stuff and control real world stuff with this kind of electronics. So that's been kind of my staples since man 31 years ago. It's all been embedded microcontroller. I was with TI for 20 years, got into digital signal processing, some memory stuff, some battery stuff, and that's been kind of my path.

Zach Peterson 

So you used to work at Texas Instruments. Were you actually doing chip design? Were you just doing the eval board design? What were you doing over at Texas Instruments?

Keven Coates 

Yes. Well, it's funny because I think it's kind of true at most tech companies. When you have a job at a tech company, it changes a lot because tech changes a lot. So I moved jobs about every five years with NTi, sometimes every two years. I started out in flash memory, actually, back when flash memory was a new thing, non-volatile memory, the precursor to SD cards, and then...

Then I got into the more interesting stuff, got into portable audio, is MP3 back when that was new. And then I did portable audio and video, and then I got into auto-infotainment and stuff like that. So I was doing a tiny bit of chip design, a lot more package design, because TI, as a lot of silicon companies, don't really understand the PCB. They only make chips and they make

really nice chips and they want to make them as small and as cheap as possible for both you and for them. But they don't understand that a 0.4 millimeter pitch BGA isn't going to make anybody happy except for the cell phone people. So I was kind of the liaison between package design and PCB knowledge for our customers. In fact, I did a ton of example layouts. I pioneered something called the via channel that TI still uses on some of their big processors.

And that enabled us to do like huge chips, 1,031 pins on 0.65 millimeter pitch. And we were able to escape that in only two signal layers because there was depopulated balls, you know, kind of a radial pattern. So I did a lot of that. I did a ton of eval boards. That was really my bread and butter, the package design and eval boards. So I did a ton of systems, mostly a jack of all trades kind of. This is a new chip and this is everything it can do.

Ha ha ha.

Zach Peterson 

Now, you mentioned something that I think older folks, or more experienced folks, I should say, in the industry are well aware of, which is that silicon companies aren't always the best at printed circuit board design. I think I'm being nice here when I say that. I've used much harsher comments in some of my seminars, so I'm very aware of that.

Keven Coates 

I

Zach Peterson 

I still see young people seeing application notes or seeing the dev board or seeing a layout example in a data sheet and kind of taking it as gospel. What would you say is the problem with that?

Keven Coates 

Yeah.

my gosh, I could go on. Yeah.

Zach Peterson

I have my own thoughts, but as the guy who used to work for the Silicon Company, I really want to hear what you say.

Keven Coates 

Well, let me tell you, one of my first writing jobs at TI was data sheets. And I could write pretty much whatever I wanted to. And it was reviewed by the technical writers and by a few technical people, but not as much as you'd think. And PCBs were, know, it's, silicon companies, really concentrate on the silicon. They do not.

They do not understand PCBs. do not understand copper features, copper spaces, traces. They don't understand what drives cost. In fact, that was a huge part of my job as in the later years, I went to Taiwan actually many times to talk to the tier one, two and three PCB makers, ask them what really drove cost in the non-HDI designs. And so I learned that early on and I told that to TI, said, hey, you can't just expect everybody to do

HDI design. A lot of people don't like that. It's going to double the cost of their boards. And, they really had no understanding of that at all. So, and then later on I got on the committee for packages because they weren't even designing. shouldn't, I might get in trouble with TI here, but I don't work for them anymore. They were, they didn't understand IPC. They didn't understand ball pad sizing. So they were actually putting out white papers that were wrong. So.

They had just completely incorrect information. And so while they did do some tests for BGA board adhesion, they did the screwdriver test, you know, later on on some packages, most of them were kind of untested. And so they formed a committee and I was part of the committee and they had to update like 20,000 footprints. And I think there's still the process of that to try and get them to comply with the IPC specs. So, you know, as Rick Hartley would say, don't trust

the data sheet in terms of PCV layout unless it is proven and it is rarely proven.

Zach Peterson 

Now, I agree with you. should always be a little skeptical of the data sheet. I see some interesting practices that sometimes don't have a justification explained in the data sheet. Sometimes the justification is in the data sheet. And then sometimes they just take the dev board layout and they're just like, here's your layout. This is what you should do. And I think when you do the dev board,

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Zach Peterson 

A lot of times it's fine, especially like with power products, because you're probably testing it with a DC load, right? It's a dev board, right? Does the circuit work?

Keven Coates 

could tell you, because I did dozens of eval boards, I mean dozens, and that was my job. so let me tell you how those layouts, they come up with those layouts by going to the PCB shop that we generally go to, know, was Spectrum Digital back in the day and some of the others, and saying, here, lay this out. The TI people don't lay it out. When the silicon companies don't lay it out, they...

They don't have the understanding to do that in general. So they have somebody else do it. Now, of course it's different if you're doing something like an AMD processor, you know, they get really into their layout, like with Dan Beaker, but for the most part for like, LDOs and you know, BGAs that are just simple processors and things. They don't do that. And that's why they do a bunch of things. Like you said, people take them as gospel and they took my available words as gospel all the time. And I'm, I'm telling them, I'm like, this board has not been FCC tested.

this board has not been in a product, I don't know if this is a great design or not, it's an example. That's what it's meant to be an example, it's not meant to be gospel.

Zach Peterson

Sure, sure, yeah. And then this is where you get people kind of copying and pasting, whether it's a recommendation or the layout directly out of the data sheet into their design software. And they're like, yeah, I got it. We took it from the data sheet. There shouldn't be a problem. But I guess the caveat to that is if you were to do something different from the data sheet, can the Silicon company guarantee that it won't work? And if the answer is no,

Keven Coates 

Yeah.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Keven Coates 

Mm. Mm.

Zach Peterson 

then you're free to do what you need to do with that component rather than just blindly following the data sheet.

Keven Coates 

yeah. You know, we had for a while as in voice band modems, which tells you how long ago that was, but we had customers like Logitech and best data and Cardinal and Hayes and all those. And we had customers that really wanted to make the PCV as cheap as possible. And we told them, I said, we really need four layers for this design. There needs to be a ground plane needs to be a power plane, two signal layers at minimum. And they said, you know, we think we can do it in two.

And we told them, no, I don't think you can. You don't understand this is analog electronics. It's very sensitive. And they said, we think we can. And so they tried it. I think it was Cardinal. don't think they're in business anymore. And they said, man, we're really having trouble with this design. Can we ship it to you? And so they did. And our tech actually put a foil layer on me outside of the PCB and grounded it and everything worked.

We told you you needed four layers for this. This proves it.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, yeah, it's always simple stuff like that, right? I feel like a lot of the PCB changes that are needed to get a design like that working, 80 % of the problems are solved by relatively simple changes if you have enough experience to see it.

Keven Coates 

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, going to PCB West is a great example of if you get that kind of knowledge, you get a gut level feel for the signal integrity, how those return paths flow, then you're going to be better than most of, you know, for example, in the TI data sheets, they always show that they separate the digital analog grounds. And a lot of people think that's because they have to or because it's a good practice.

Well, it is because they have to and they have to because people demand it because there's a lot of people who think that analog and digital ground should be separated and they won't buy a product unless it is. But when I was designing the PCB in the later time, when I knew enough about doing it, I would just connect them directly on the same plane. And people were like, well, why didn't you separate them? Like, because it's not a good idea to separate the analog and digital grounds in most instances. You know, there's tons of YouTube videos about that.

Brickheartly and a bunch of others, you've probably done one too. So that's a good example why you see these things done in the data sheet and sometimes they're done in the data sheet because people demand that it's a possibility. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, that's funny because I had a discussion with Dan Beaker while I was trying to walk up to my hotel room at PCB West and he was sitting down there in the lobby having a drink, I think. And of course he and I got into this conversation. But you mentioned that they show the pins separated to different names, right? Like primary ground and secondary ground or analog ground and D ground. And I have actually seen this on

Keven Coates 

Thank

Keven Coates 

Right.

huh.

Zach Peterson 

Texas Instruments ADCs, and yeah, they do name the pins differently. One reason for doing that is, for example, testing. But on the very next page, after you see the pin diagram, they say right there in one sentence, connect the pins with a single plane, and people still don't follow it.

Keven Coates 

all the time and it's the data sheet. There's a lot of really great things in the data sheet, but sometimes it's in the really fine print and it takes a long time to get into that. you know, for example, the other day I had a guy who said, really, know, this LDO is a great design and it handles this much power. And then we ran this much, you know, it says a hundred milliamps and I'm saying, okay, that comes with a lot of caveats. It says a hundred milliamps, it's this big.

If you're dropping 12 volts to five volts, it's not gonna do 100 milliamps. It's gonna do 100 milliamps from five and a half volts to five volts. So, those are the caveats you find out if you learn how to read the data sheet well enough, man, sometimes it's so critical, these little details.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah. Yeah.

Zach Peterson 

Absolutely, absolutely. So I think we've found a good time to segue into PCBWES because we've both brought up something about the conference. Obviously, PCBWES coming up this year, end of September, beginning of October. You're going to be there. I'm going to be there. Rick Hartley, you mentioned, is going to be there. Susie Webb. We've got some other folks who are there every year.

I wanted to talk to you because I think you have some interesting topics that you're going to be talking about at PCB West. So if you could, can you run over the topics that you're going to be talking about during the conference?

Keven Coates 

Absolutely. I would love to. Yeah. So I'm teaching four classes this year. Uh, kind of a light load, but I've got a half day of Signal Integrity Basics, uh, with some examples in PCB layout. It's a beginner's class. It's kind of a Signal Integrity 101. It's a great refresher course if you haven't had one for a while. I don't know about you, but you know, I took Signal Integrity the first time back in the Howard Johnson's days. So that was way back in the day and he was great.

But I had to take it, man, I don't know, five times at least, just to get an idea of how it all worked together. Because you have these, it's like drinking from a fire hose at first. You have these thoughts, where do these thoughts fit in? How do I get these things together? And so in my opinion, you really have to take these 101 classes over and over until you have a gut level feel for how it all goes together. Because otherwise, you just don't know. And so this class is kind of a top from a different perspective.

You've got Rick Hartley's classes, which are fantastic. And, you know, he and I are teaching the same thing just from a different angle. And I think it takes a couple of different angles to try and kind of see the thing. You know, when you look at something from one angle, it helps to see it from another angle as well.

Zach Peterson 

I would, if I could jump in, I would absolutely agree with that because it makes me think back to my university days, right? And you would get introduced to same or similar topics from different professors, but because they're coming at it from, you know, these slightly different perspectives, you can actually see where the mesh happens. And then you get a lot of context on the stuff that they're talking about rather than just taking, you know, what the one guy said as, as gospel and just repeating it. So.

Keven Coates 

Yes.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Zach Peterson

I advocate for exactly what you said, which is to get it from a couple different angles and it'll really help you understand it at a deep level.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, it's really true. I took every one-on-one class I could take. I took it from Rick, from Howard Johnson a bunch of times. I must have sat in every one of Rick's classes five or six times. And it just helps. It really helps to hear it over and over and hear it from different perspectives. And people's perspective changes over years and years too, so that's helpful.

Zach Peterson 

So you have a couple other topics as well. I know signal integrity is of course, you know, a popular one. You also have something on thermal, if I'm correct.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, the half day class on PCB heat management, talk about man, everything from LEDs to MOSFETs, fans, heat sinking, heat pipes, thermal interface material, basic thermal modeling. It goes through a lot of things. The nice thing about thermal modeling is it's really not as hard as people think it is. And you can really gain a lot of insight from just a few simple equations. I wouldn't even call them equations, more like algebra. Then we talked about things like tools, thermal imagers, which is

They're fantastic. But there are some caveats on that. You you can't, you can't shoot shiny metal or just basically tells you the reflection temperature, even if it's 700 degrees. Some things about airflow measurement. It's a beginner's class, but it's super helpful because heat management is just widely misunderstood.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, and it's kind of a product level thing too because you can have a hot circuit board, but if you design the strategy around the hot circuit board and you design the enclosure appropriately, it's actually possible to get a product that is not going to burn itself alive.

Keven Coates 

Right, exactly. Yeah, it's all about spreading the heat out. mean, that's just, that's thermal management in a nutshell. In one sentence, it's spreading the heat out. Because if you have one part putting out half a watt and it's one millimeter by one millimeter, that thing is going to turn into a fiery fireball. But if you have half a watt spread over a couple of square inches, no big deal. It's not a problem at all.

Zach Peterson 

I see, yeah, that's a good point. Do you also go into, I you mentioned thermal interface material, so I'm gonna assume you go into like heat sinking, whether it's with like an extruded heat sink or possibly even using the enclosure as a heat sink.

Keven Coates 

Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. And I talk about different ways to model that and different ways to test that. Heat syncing, how to choose heat sinks, whether you need a fan, whether you don't need a fan, and basically all the simple equations that go along with that stuff.

Zach Peterson 

So if someone's going to be designing something they know it's going to have a high thermal load, and I've had to do several of these designs, if they know they're going to have that kind high thermal load, they probably have to put it through some kind of testing, like long-term reliability testing, right? Not just measure the temperature once and call it a day. Do you talk about that at all?

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

little bit. So basically, everything is about temperature, right? So every 10 degrees C reduction in temperature doubles the life of a product in general. And that's, you know, that's not a hard and fast rule, but it's kind of a rule of thumb. So it's based on a certain equation, chemistry, and so forth, because you don't really know how every chip is going to or how every capacitor is going to degrade. But in general, from a chemistry perspective, that's how things degrade. So it's great to know that

And you can actually talk to semiconductor companies like in my class, I talk about TI DSPs are in fuel pumps. So when you go pump gas, you got that color screen and the color screen showing commercials and stuff like that. Long ago, Gil Barco came and said, Hey, we want this DSP to last for 70,000 hours. What temperature do we need to hit to make that happen? And they went and did some calculations and they said, okay.

If you keep this processor at 70 degrees C or lower, it should last 70,000 hours. So it's pretty amazing. I talk a little bit about L10 and half life kind of thing. What's that? I can't remember the term right away, but we cover that real briefly. But yeah, it's all about keeping things cool.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, yeah, I would agree. Some of the other stuff that you'll be talking about in different seminars. As I recall, there's also something on DFM, DFA.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

I've got a two hour class on avoiding assembly pitfalls. It's funny because there's so much to cover on DFM and DFA and everybody approaches it from a circuit board perspective and that's great. But I approach it from a kind of an overall perspective, kind of how do you work with your assembly house to get the first run yields up? And I've heard it say that 60 % yield on a first run prototype is acceptable.

And I've had that experience too, and it's terrible, but how can we do better? We can do better by addressing things that we know are going to be a problem before they come up. So that's what this class talks about. It talks about how you can choose an assembly shop. It talks about how they're going to do certain things like washing, if your product needs washing, and things that are going to affect whether it works the first time or not, and how you can make that better.

Zach Peterson 

So what are some of the DFM, DFA common mistakes that you've seen over your time, let's say working at Texas Instruments or possibly working at Nobium Designs?

Keven Coates 

Yeah, actually, I was liaison from the engineering to the assembly shop in a company called GeoSpace Technologies I worked for for seven years. But that was my biggest eye opener, think, there, because I had an in-house assembly shop, and I was the guy who talked to them. And the biggest problem that I had there, and actually, I think back in the TI days as well, was diodes. They were always putting those things in backwards. And you look at the footprints, and you're like,

Well, is it clear because these assembly people are not gonna go look at the schematic. They're not gonna see, well, this connects to this. They're gonna look at that footprint and they're gonna see where's the bar? Where's the dot? Where's the little diode symbol? How am I gonna put that on there? And if it's not clear, then they may make a mistake. And you get into things like LEDs and it's way worse. And the through hole LEDs are the worst because some of them are just round. And the only thing that...

polarizes them as the length of the leads. And if they were not smart and they cut off all the leads before they put them on the PCB, well, 50 % of those things are gonna be wrong. diodes are the worst thing, I think, in general. But another thing is putting components too close to the edge of the board is a big deal, especially in v-scored boards. Because when you have that v-score,

That big knife is going to come along that roller and it's going to roll right through that V score and it puts an immense amount of strain on the edge of that board. If you put big 1206 capacitors or something like that on the edge of that board, 1210, they're going to crack and they're going to short and they're going to be open or something that's going to be really bad. I've there, done that back when I was younger and dumber.

Zach Peterson 

I think you just came up with a new DFX acronym which is DFDP, Design for Depanelization.

Keven Coates 

That's true. Yeah. And that's a huge one. my gosh. I can't even, I can't even remember how many problems I had with depanelization because the vScore thing is best case it's a lot of stress. If you get that wheel just a little bit offset, it's a ton of stress and that wheel gets offset a lot because those assembly people are not over there going, they're doing, mean, they want that thing depanelized and they want to depanelize now.

They're paid by the hour,

Zach Peterson 

Well, they've got the kind of boards to run through, so of course they're gonna, you know, they're not gonna dilly-dally.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, exactly. They're there for speed and accuracy. They're like, if this thing cuts, I'm good. And I've seen them cut right through capacitors.

Zach Peterson 

Oh wow. Yeah, I guess you wouldn't assume that someone would do that with a V-Score knife, I guess, right? Because the descriptions I've heard of V-Score knives, and I've never used one, but the descriptions I've heard is that they're like pizza rollers.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

They are, but they have immense pressure and ceramic things crack really easy.

Zach Peterson 

Sure, sure. I guess you don't assume a pizza roller to produce that level of stress, but it makes total sense.

Keven Coates 

Yeah. They're like a pizza roller with about 2,000 pounds of forks.

Zach Peterson

Yeah, yeah, that's more than enough to crack faster for sure. So what about mouse bites though? What about mouse bites near components?

Keven Coates 

Those are significantly better. And of course, if you do it, if you route it, that's better too. If you can route as much as possible, if you can get an assembly shop that does laser, that's even better because then there's no stress. So that's fantastic. But there, that's a new thing and not a lot of assembly shops had that yet.

Zach Peterson 

I see. see. So then what about some of the DFM problems, like for example from the fabrication perspective?

Keven Coates 

Yeah, yeah, let's see, fabrication. You're talking about depanelization, stuff like that?

Zach Peterson 

Well, more like, you know, component placement, routing, those kinds of issues, because I think people will design something with a certain idea in their mind of what the constraints can be with their manufacturer. And then all of a sudden they get no bid and they're not sure why.

Keven Coates 

Alright.

Keven Coates 

That sounds like the last product I just worked on. And it's sad because I've been telling them what you need to do is you set up your Altium so that you have default clearances. And to get those default clearances, you should be working with your assembly shop because they're the ones, the PCB fabricators, they're the ones who are going to be saying, is a 10-mill drill going to be used? Is a 12-mill drill going to be used? What is your finished hole size? What is your clearance? How is your registration going to work?

Zach Peterson 

Yeah.

Keven Coates 

All that stuff is up to your assembly shop. And when you talk about North American assembly shops, they're all very different because they all have their niche that they do. So it's not like if you go to a tier one shop in Taiwan, they're all pretty much the same. They all do kind of the same clearances in general, but the ones in America are not like that. So if you're trying to get prototypes built here, you really need to work with your assembly shop upfront. You need to have your clearances in Altium before you start the design because it is.

Next to impossible, go back and fix it after you're done.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, yeah, think you can, well, it's possible, how long of a design rule error list do you have to work through to do it? I think is another question you have to ask.

Keven Coates 

It's forever.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm. Exactly. Last designer worked on had vias that were just a little too small, and they said, okay, you really need that annular ring to be a little bit bigger. Well, dang, to put another two mils on the annular ring in every area? my gosh. It's gonna take me 100 hours.

Zach Peterson

Yeah, yeah. And then on top of that, and this is actually something I've seen in designs that were going to be intended for class three. And of course, the client didn't say anything until the very end. So we design it class two and pretty aggressive on the clearances. But then they say, no, we want to do this class three. So you need to beef up the via pad so that there's enough annular ring. Well, what happens there? Clearance violations, right, all over the place.

Keven Coates 

Yeah.

my God. You might as well just start again. I mean, it's probably better to start again because, you know, sadly, I think every class three shop does the same thing. They're like, we want a class three design, but we don't want to pay for it in clearances or density. It's impossible. So I don't know if I've ever seen a true class three design.

Zach Peterson 

That's really interesting too. And for those that are listening, Class 3 is of course, military, aerospace, those kinds of things where a failure could potentially cost human life. And so there are these little things that we do in the PCB to make sure that we ensure just that little bit of additional reliability. And then of course, it all has to get qualified in fab and assembly. With Class 3,

Keven Coates 

Yeah.

Keven Coates 

Mm-hmm.

Zach Peterson 

Another thing that with high density is if you do mess up or nobody tells you that it's going to be class three until the very end and then you have these vias, you know the other solution that I'm going to bring up, which is, well, can't we just reduce the via diameter?

Zach Peterson 

Sometimes it's no, right? mean, if you start with a 10 mil via, yeah, okay, you can go to an eight mil via, but going from eight to six, what's the problem there?

Keven Coates 

Yeah.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, and the board shops always, you know, if you want to stack the boards, which every board shop wants to stack the boards to reduce their assembly time, because time is money, right? So if you want to stack the boards, you don't expect an eight-mill drill. That's not going to happen. It's going to be a 10-mill drill or a 12-mill drill, which means your annual ring's got to be bigger. Yeah, so every time you try and address these things, when you're done with the layout, it's going to be time, or it's going to be money, or it's going to be both.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, yeah. So I think everyone that is listening right now and is interested in some of these topics, they should go to PCBWest.com. They can see the schedule. Just Control-F, Kevin Coates, and you'll be able to skip through, skip past all the other people and go to the stuff that's important. But of course, one of the reasons that I think we all go to PCBWest, especially for folks like yourself who are speaking, and I go there and speak too.

is not just to hear ourselves talk, but also because we want to see both the show floor as well as other people who are going to be there. So my question to you is, what are you looking forward to seeing at PCBWES this year?

Keven Coates 

yeah, you hit it on the head there. love to see, you know, you really need to stay current in your job because tech changes all the time. And I will say, you know, PCB clearances and things don't change as much as I wish they would, but you know, you always have new materials, new stuff, like you have that UHDi class. love the HDI classes. UHDi is especially interesting because there's a lot of neat stuff happening in that area.

I love to see, you know, Rick Hartley is always awesome, Susie Webb, Dan Beaker, got Thomas Chester, all sorts of awesome classes, Terry and yeah, there's so many great teachers. I keep telling the people, you know, because my work has to pay for, I mean, you know, it'd be nice if they paid, I've gone myself before, but to sell the trip to my company, I'm like, well, there had been so many times that I have gone to PCV West.

And it has given me this little bit of information that was crucial to make this project work. And it was right in time before I got this project done too. So, you know, for example, I was working on a power supply and I had done so much signal integrity layout, but not as much power layout. And so they said, you know, here's how to make power layouts work. You know, I took a bunch of power supply classes from Rick Hartley and so forth. And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense now. And so I go back.

I changed that thing and it made the project work. was building this 160 watt power supply and like now it works. Now it does right. And now I wish I had known this the first time it would have saved me two months of work.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Keven Coates 

But yeah, that's what I love. I love to see the board shops and I love to see the embedded capacitor people. And yeah, there's some great companies down there too, to see what's new in soldering and stuff like that.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, yeah. Going to the show floor is always so much fun because it's, mean, yeah, of course, you you're seeing the manufacturers and the material suppliers and those kinds of folks. And, you know, it's always nice to talk to some of those companies. you know, sometimes you run into a company that might just, you know, service you on your next project. But I think one thing that's really cool is it's such a great place for networking. And I can't tell you how many times I've run into somebody on the show floor.

Keven Coates 

yeah.

Zach Peterson 

just randomly and it's like, hey, you know, and you get to, you know, re, you know, catch up with people that you know and haven't seen for a long time and meet some other great people there who you probably should know.

Keven Coates 

Yeah, and it's awesome because they're so reachable. I mean, I don't know any teacher. The first time I went to PCB, let's see, I went to PCB Austin, which is forever ago. I don't think they've had one since then. And then I went to PCB East in Boston. And that was a really small one because of some weird conference stuff that was happening at the time. It was long before COVID. And...

The nice thing was since it was so small, I got Rick and Susie to myself and Gary Ferrari and man, I had lunch and dinner with them so many times and it was just so great. All the teachers are so reachable and they're happy to sit down with you and solve a few issues here and there if you need that. It's so great. The people are just so friendly and everything.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, 100 % agree. I guess that's kind of the benefit of being in like a smaller, I don't want to say niche industry because PCBs are in everything, but definitely smaller industry like the one we're in because like you say, the important people or the people you learn from, you can literally walk right up to them and ask them questions.

Keven Coates 

Right. Yeah, I have people ask me questions after every class and I love that because it's like, well, that means what I have taught them is something they needed. And it also means they have extra questions, which I love to answer because it just makes me feel valuable. Like my class is really useful. I personally enjoy it better when people come up to me after the class than if they just all take off. Sometimes there's lunch and stuff, but I understand that it's...

It's like, wow, I just feel so much more useful if the class was something they actually needed to hear. So, it's nice.

Zach Peterson 

Yeah, Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. Well, we're getting up here on time, but I want to thank you so much for being here today. Like I said earlier, we should have done this earlier, haven't had a chance to do it. But I thank you very much for coming on here and talking about your upcoming sessions at PCB West.

Keven Coates 

What?

Keven Coates 

Yeah, happy to do it. Great to be here.

Zach Peterson

Absolutely. And we'll have you back on again in the future. For everyone that's out there listening, we've been talking with Kevin Coates, senior electrical engineer at Novium Designs. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button, hit the like button. You'll be able to keep up with all of our podcast episodes and tutorials as they come out. And last but not least, don't stop learning, stay on track and we'll see you next time. And hopefully we will all see you at PCB West. Thanks for watching everybody.

Keven Coates 

Awesome.