Podcasts about Mentor Graphics

Shawn Edwards is Bloomberg's Chief Technology Officer. Based in New York, he oversees the development of Bloomberg's global technology strategy. In 2017, Shawn was named in the top ten of the Institutional Investor Tech 40 – an annual ranking of financial industry technology leaders. Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2003, Shawn worked for Bear Stearns & Co. where he was a managing director in the company's fixed income trading group. He has also held positions at Mentor Graphics and IBM. This podcast covers philosophy around tech innovation, product and infrastructure strategy, adapting to cloud, mobile and API-first, and much more.    Follow us here for more amazing insights: https://macrohive.com/home-prime/ https://twitter.com/Macro_Hive https://www.linkedin.com/company/macro-hive

After receiving a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1992 and a PhD for CFD research in 1996 from Brunel University in the UK, Robin joined Flomerics as a Simcenter Flotherm support and application engineer. By the time of the acquisition of Flomerics by Mentor Graphics in 2008 he was the Product Marketing Manager for Flotherm. Since the acquisition of Mentor Graphics by Siemens in 2017 he is a Senior Key Expert in the Simulation and Test Solution division. With over 25 years' experience in the field of electronics thermal simulation, he has published over 30 journal and conference papers and has had 7 patents granted. ONLINE PRESENCE ================

Transform your understanding of semiconductor design and testing with the latest episode of Advantest Talks Semi. We are thrilled to introduce our new co-host, Don Ong, and welcome Ron Press, and Mark Hutner,  from Siemens as they share groundbreaking insights into Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Ron Press is the Senior Director for Technology Enablement at Siemens, where he leads a team dedicated to ensuring the successful implementation and use of Siemens' Tessent DFT and test product capabilities. His responsibilities include enabling application engineers, developing reference flows, and supporting customers in utilizing Siemens' released products effectively.Ron began his career at Raytheon, working on AI and neural networks, and in 1993, he co-authored a paper on using neural networks to address built-in self-test (BIST) false alarms, highlighting his early contributions to AI in semiconductor testing. He worked as a Design for Test (DFT) architect at Raytheon before moving to Harris RF, where he focused on communication systems. Ron later joined Mentor Graphics, which was subsequently acquired by Siemens. Throughout his career, he has integrated AI and machine learning into semiconductor testing and design, significantly advancing the field.Marc Hutner is the Director of Product Management for Yield Learning Products at Siemens. In his role, Marc focuses on yield learning and silicon debugging, aiming to identify yield limiters and improve semiconductor testing processes.Marc joined Siemens over a year ago, bringing more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor test industry. Before joining Siemens, he spent two years at proteanTecs as the Senior Director of Product Marketing for IP and Analytics for silicon health. Marc's background includes working as an architect for test equipment and developing innovative concepts in semiconductor testing. His extensive experience positions him as a key figure in advancing Siemens' yield learning and debug capabilities.Don Ong is the Director and Head of Innovation for the Advantest Field Service Business Group, a division of Advantest Inc. In his role, Don is responsible for driving the strategic development and implementation of innovative solutions that enhance Advantest's Field Service business and operations. His responsibilities include identifying emerging technologies, leading cross-functional innovation projects, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement to optimize service efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business growth. Don works closely with internal teams and external partners, including startups, universities, and third parties, to ensure the successful integration of new technologies that meet the evolving needs of the semiconductor industry.With over 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, Don has held multiple roles, including program management, product, application, and test engineering in both Silicon Valley and Asia. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a Master's of Studies from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.In this episode we will discover how scan technology and automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) have revolutionized the testing process, significantly boosting defect detection rates. Mark delves into digital twins, explaining their pivotal role in creating virtual representations for real-time system optimization.Thanks for tuning in to "Advantest Talks Semi"! If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you! Please take a moment to leave a rating on Apple Podcast. Your feedback helps us improve and reach new listeners. Don't forget to subscribe and share with your friends. We appreciate your support!

Shawn Edwards is Bloomberg's Chief Technology Officer. Based in New York, he oversees the development of Bloomberg's global technology strategy. In 2017, Shawn was named in the top ten of the Institutional Investor Tech 40 – an annual ranking of financial industry technology leaders. Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2003, Shawn worked for Bear Stearns & Co. where he was a managing director in the company's fixed income trading group. He has also held positions at Mentor Graphics and IBM. This podcast covers philosophy around tech innovation, product and infrastructure strategy, adapting to cloud, mobile and API-first, and much more.    Follow us here for more amazing insights: https://macrohive.com/home-prime/ https://twitter.com/Macro_Hive https://www.linkedin.com/company/macro-hive

Chip Stock Investors Nick and Kasey discuss Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) in today's video, the #2 player in the electronic design automation (EDA) oligopoly behind Synopsys (SNPS) and ahead of Siemens EDA (formerly Mentor Graphics). They talk about Cadence's impressive performance in 2023, which has steadily propelled the “top AI stock” to new heights. Cadence Design Systems has had a successful organic developer of new tech, and its collaborations (such as with Nvidia), and its impact on AI and accelerated computing systems, has put it in position for excellent growth prospects going forward. Its hardware division is also a good indicator of the overall semiconductor market, acting as a proxy for more good times to come. Watch this video to learn more about Cadence Design Systems, and how Chip Stock Investor is handling this investment in their own portfolio. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Overview of Cadence Design Systems 01:54 Review of Cadence Design Systems' Recent Performance 04:41 Understanding Cadence's Business Model and Growth Strategy 09:00 The Role of AI in Cadence Design Systems' Future 13:45 Analyzing Cadence's Valuation and Future Prospects

Wally Rhines, the former chairman of Mentor Graphics and now spokesperson for the ESD Alliance, updates us on the latest PCB design software and semiconductor market trends (spoiler alert: sales were up again), and addresses why ECAD companies are hiring even in the face of layoffs among Big Tech. He is joined by Merlyn Brunken, director of marketing strategic planning at Siemens Digital Industries Software to provide the quarterly report, which showed gains across a number of sectors and geographies.  

DAC-Cast hosts are joined by Dr. Walden "Wally" Rhines for this episode leading up to his keynote presentation at #60DAC. Wally is widely recognized as an expert in business value creation and technology for the semiconductor and electronic design automation (EDA) industries. He was CEO of Mentor Graphics (a “Big Three” EDA company with $1.3B+ revenue) for 24 years, has served on the boards of five public companies, managed the semiconductor business of Texas Instruments (TI), and is a spokesperson, writer and highly-sought-after speaker for the high-tech industry. Dr. Rhines currently serves as President and CEO of Cornami, Inc., consults for investors, corporations and the U.S. government on strategic directions, value creation and technology and serves on public and private boards.

On this episode of PCB Chat we discuss the third quarter 2022 printed circuit design software market data from the ESD Alliance, which were released Jan. 23, 2023. Our guests are Wally Rhines, who spent more than 45 years in in semiconductor and PCB design as an executive with Mentor Graphics and before that, TI; and Merlyn Brunken, whose is the longtime market intelligence director with Siemens Digital Industries, formerly Mentor.   This podcast is brought to you by PCB East, the original conference for the #electronics #design, #manufacturing and #assembly industry on the East Coast. Coming to Boxborough, MA, on May 9-12, with the one-day exhibition and a day's worth of free technical sessions on May 10. Visit pcbeast.com for details.

Dan is joined by Dr. Walden Rhines, former CEO of Mentor Graphics, which is now Siemens EDA, and current CEO of Cornami. Wally is also the Executive Sponsor of the SEMI Electronic Design Market Data Report, which is the topic of this podcast. The current market report for Q2, 2022 documents continued strong performance, with some… Read More

Our guest for the show is Mike Schuricht , Mike is the VP of Product Management at Forcepoint. Prior to that, he was the SVP of Product Management at Bitglass. He has a background in the development of innovative enterprise security products, with expertise in configuration management and user-interface design. Season 4 KickOff episode with Chase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWB05cb7XRQ&feature=youtu.be Demo: https://www.forcepoint.com/videos/forcepoint-remote-browser-isolation-rbi-demo-performance-and-security Whitepaper: https://www.forcepoint.com/product/forcepoint-one About Mike: Mike Schuricht is the VP of Product Management at Forcepoint. Prior to that, he was the SVP of Product Management at Bitglass. He has a background in the development of innovative enterprise security products, with expertise in configuration management and user-interface design. Mike joined Bitglass from Palo Alto Networks where he was responsible for security management and user-interface strategy for both Panorama and PAN-OS. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, Mike held technical marketing and engineering roles at Mentor Graphics for the Advanced Mixed-Signal product line. Mike holds an MS and BS in Computer Engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara. About Forcepoint: Forcepoint is the global cybersecurity leader for user and data protection. Forcepoint's behavior-based solutions adapt to risk in real-time and are delivered through a converged security platform that protects network users and cloud access, prevents confidential data from leaving the corporate network, and eliminates breaches caused by insiders. Based in Austin, Texas, Forcepoint creates safe, trusted environments for thousands of enterprise and government customers and their employees in more than 150 countries.

On this episode of PCB Chat we discuss the fourth quarter 2021 market numbers from the ESD Alliance, which were released the week of April 4, 2022. Our guests are Wally Rhines, who spent more than 45 years in in semiconductor and PCB design as an executive with Mentor Graphics and before that, TI; and Merlyn Brunken, whose is the longtime market intelligence director with Siemens Digital Industries, formerly Mentor.   This podcast is brought to you by PCB East, the original conference for the #electronics #design, #manufacturing and #assembly industry on the East Coast. Coming to Marlboro, MA, on April 11-13, with the one-day exhibition and a day's worth of free technical sessions on April 12. Visit pcbeast.com for details.

In this episode, Pankaj Mitra (Director & India Head @Cisco Investments), joins our host Digjay, to talk about his path to corporate VC, Cisco's mandate in India, the symbiotic relationship with its portfolio companies, learnings from other enterprise tech ecosystems like US & Israel, difference between Corporate & traditional VC and how Cisco collaborates with & invests in other VC funds. Cisco has a portfolio of ~10 start-ups including - Whatfix, Videonetics, Mobikwik, Mobstac and CloudCherry - that it has already invested in directly or through investment partnerships with VC funds. Cisco is also an LP in VC funds like Aavishkaar, Stellaris Venture Partners & Chiratae Ventures. Prior to joining Cisco Investments in 2018, Pankaj was formerly at Infosys Corporate Development, where he helped enable early stage investments for Infosys' $500M innovation fund. A UC Berkeley and IIT Kharagpur alum, Pankaj started his career with Delsoft (acq. by Mentor Graphics) & later worked at companies like VMware & Deloitte. You can connect with him here on Linkedin ---- Show notes – (01:46) Pankaj's background & path leading up to Cisco India (04:07) Cisco's mandate & sector focus in India; Key portfolio companies (06:47) The symbiotic relationship between Cisco & its portfolio startups (11:33) Learnings from other enterprise tech ecosystems like US & Israel (15:49) How Cisco differentiates itself from other corporate VCs; Cisco's Launchpad program for early stage startups (18:58) Difference between a Corporate VC & traditional VC (22:08) How Cisco collaborates with & invests (as a LP) in other VC funds (29:29) Learnings from working closely with startups & VCs over the past decade (33:20) Rapid fire and closing remarks ---- If you liked our episode, you can subscribe to our podcast on any podcast platforms of your choice (like Spotify & Apple iTunes). We would appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple iTunes. This helps others discover the podcast. You can visit thevcpreneur.com and follow us on Twitter @thevcpreneur_ & Instagram @thevcpreneur for more episodes and interesting insights on the startup ecosystem. You can also follow our host Digjay here on Linkedin & Twitter

I'm your host, Conor Peick, Head Marketing Communications Writer at Mentor Graphics. In this episode, I welcome back Nand Kochhar to talk about electric vehicles. Nand is the Vice President at Siemens Automotive and Transportation Industry and offers a unique perspective on the EV field. We chat about the environmental factors driving the EV revolution, the challenges traditional fueling station infrastructures face, and the concept of customization regarding EVs. Nand and I also explore what the rise of electric vehicles means for the autonomous vehicle field and much more. Some Questions I Ask:What are the main factors pushing EV innovation? (2:04)What are the most pressing engineering and design challenges facing EVs? (5:20)How can the industry make charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations? (10:48)Will the availability of EV service infrastructure limit their geographical reach? (18:40)What are companies doing to address the challenge of end-of-life recycling? (28:30)What impact does the societal trend toward the electrification of public transport have on EV adoption? (33:57)What do you see as the relationship between EVs and autonomous vehicles? (36:36)In This Episode You Will Learn:The challenges that play into mass customization of EVs (7:10)How EVs will change the concept of auto upgrades (9:00)Whether Tesla is the leader of the pack in regards to EV battery technology (21:49)What other leading automotive companies are doing to catch up to Tesla (24:27)About the safety concerns involving rapid charging (25:25)The environmental implications of creating EV batteries (29:54)Let's Connect!LinkedInMentor Graphic WebsiteConnect With Nand Kochhar:LinkedInEmail: nand.kochhar@gmail.com Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Ramon Nuñez talks about his journey from picking strawberries to a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Ramon and I met when he hired me to work at my last startup, MetaLINCS, an e-discovery software company. Ramon oversaw the company's sale to Seagate Technology. He was also the CEO of IKOS Systems which was acquired by Mentor Graphics. Ramon shares tips on launching your startup, putting together a leadership team, and the difference between starting a company today vs in years past. Ramon is the OG of startup founders! Ramon Nuñez LinkedIn Aspira Consulting Information

This Season is dedicated to SASE ZTNA, our guest for the show is Mike. Mike Schuricht has been leading the product management and techpubs teams since he joined Bitglass in Nov 2013. He has a background in the development of innovative enterprise security products, Bitglass private access is a surgical way of allowing particular access for a particular user to the particular application as opposed to exposing the entire network. We are focusing on one part of SASE related to ZTNA/Remote Access In the Season 2 Kick-off episode, we introduced the topic with Dr. Chase Cunningham(Episode #11) For slides and please refer to our website and watch the video episode The question we ask the vendors: 1. What's the name of the offering/product addressing the remote access. 2. Describe your overall architecture at a high level (ideally with a picture) - POPs, HA, bandwidth requirements or restrictions. 3. How do you license your product? (seats, devices, concurrent connections, bandwidth). 4. How do you tie back to the User Identity and MFA? 5. Describe end-user access options, clientless/client (People relying these days on their browser for performing their day to day job activities, what are the options you provide to such users). 6. What kind of protocols your remote solution supports; VOIP, FileShare, Printing, SSCM, Password changes. 7. How would your solution work on slow networks or when the user is roaming between networks? 8. Educate us more about your product’s reporting and alerting options (including UBA). Whitepaper: https://www.bitglass.com/zero-trust-network-access Demo/POC: https://pages.bitglass.com/Bitglass_CASB_Demo.html Mike Bio https://www.linkedin.com/in/mschuricht/ Mike has been leading the product management and techpubs teams since he joined Bitglass in Nov 2013. He has a background in the development of innovative enterprise security products, with expertise in configuration management, user-interface design, networking, and enterprise software. Prior to joining Bitglass, Mike was a PM at Palo Alto Networks leading management software and user-interface strategy for both Panorama and PAN-OS. Before that, he held technical marketing and engineering roles at Mentor Graphics for the Advanced Mixed-Signal business unit. Mike earned an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Company Description "Bitglass, the Next-Gen Cloud Security company, is based in Silicon Valley with offices worldwide. The company's cloud security solutions deliver zero-day, agentless, data and threat protection for any app, any device, anywhere. Bitglass is backed by Tier 1 investors and was founded in 2013 by a team of industry veterans with a proven track record of innovation and execution To promote our work and support the podcast, please review us here https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/security-architecture-podcast-1313281

Whitepaper: https://www.jsof-tech.com/ripple20/ [blog] Build your own custom TCP/IP stack: https://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-1-ethernet-arp/ Another custom TCP/IP stack: https://github.com/tass-belgium/picotcp RIPPLE 20 Whitepaper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d3NNVCRPVFk0-V0HUO5CxWWVn9pYIvmF/view?usp=sharing  Agenda: Part 1: Background on the report Why is it called RIPPLE20? What’s the RIPPLE about?  Communications with Treck (and it’s Japanese counterpart) Were you surprised about the reaction? Positive or negative? Types of systems affected? IoT Embedded systems SCADA What precipitated the research? What difficulties did you face in finding these vulns? Deadlines?  What tools were used for analysis? (I think you mentioned Forescout --brbr) What kind of extensibility are we talking about? TCP sizes?  What did JSOF gain by doing this?  What were the initial benefits of using the TCP/IP stack? Speed? Size? Do these vulns affect other TCP/IP stacks?  Did Treck give you access to source? Any specific requirements set by Treck? Any items that were off-limits?  Updates since the report was released? Are your vulns such that they can be detected online? Part 2: Supply chain issues What should companies do when they don’t know what’s in their own tech stack? https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Supply-Chain-Risk-Management/documents/briefings/Workshop-Brief-on-Cyber-Supply-Chain-Best-Practices.pdf   Software bill of materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bill_of_materials PicoTCP link above does not release all code, because they use binary blobs that make proper code review next to impossible “Unfortunately we can't release all the code, a.o. because some parts depend on code or binaries that aren't GPL compatible, some parts were developed under a commercial contract, and some consist of very rough proof-of-concept code. If you want to know more about the availability under the commercial license, or the possibility of using our expert services for porting or driver development, feel free to contact us at picotcp@altran.com.” BLoBs = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_device_driver Vendor Contact How many organizations are affected by these vulnerabilities?  Are some devices and systems more vulnerable than others?  How many are you still investigating to see if they are affected?   What’s the initial email look like when you tell a company “you’re vulnerable to X”? Who are you dealing with initially? What is your delivery when you’re routed to non-technical people? How did you tailor your initial response when you learned of the position of the person? Lessons Learned: What would you have done differently next time? Any additional tooling that you’d have used? BlackHat talk: 05 August What should companies do to reduce or mitigate the chances of the types of vulnerabilities found by your org? https://cambridgewirelessblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/supply-chain-security-and-compliance-for-embedded-devices-iot/   https://blog.shi.com/solutions/embedded-hardware-supply-chain-attacks-embedded-system-attacks-how-to-stay-safe/   http://www.intrinsic-id.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2016-A-Platform-Solution-for-Secure-Supply-Chain-and-Chip-Cycle-Management-Computer-Volume-49-Issue-8-Aug.-2016-Joseph-P.-Skudlarek-Tom-Katsioulas-Michael-Chen-%E2%80%93-Mentor-Graphics..pdf https://www.supplychainservices.com/blog/major-security-risks-windows-embedded-users https://www.bbc.com/news/business-32716802#:~:text=Japanese%20car%20giants%20Toyota%20and,March%202003%20and%20November%202007.   Check out our Store on Teepub! https://brakesec.com/store Join us on our #Slack Channel! Send a request to @brakesec on Twitter or email bds.podcast@gmail.com #Brakesec Store!:https://www.teepublic.com/user/bdspodcast #Spotify: https://brakesec.com/spotifyBDS #Pandora: https://pandora.app.link/p9AvwdTpT3 #RSS: https://brakesec.com/BrakesecRSS #Youtube Channel:  http://www.youtube.com/c/BDSPodcast #iTunes Store Link: https://brakesec.com/BDSiTunes #Google Play Store: https://brakesec.com/BDS-GooglePlay Our main site:  https://brakesec.com/bdswebsite #iHeartRadio App:  https://brakesec.com/iHeartBrakesec #SoundCloud: https://brakesec.com/SoundcloudBrakesec Comments, Questions, Feedback: bds.podcast@gmail.com Support Brakeing Down Security Podcast by using our #Paypal: https://brakesec.com/PaypalBDS OR our #Patreon https://brakesec.com/BDSPatreon #Twitter: @brakesec @boettcherpwned @bryanbrake @infosystir #Player.FM : https://brakesec.com/BDS-PlayerFM #Stitcher Network: https://brakesec.com/BrakeSecStitcher #TuneIn Radio App: https://brakesec.com/TuneInBrakesec

Whitepaper: https://www.jsof-tech.com/ripple20/ [blog] Build your own custom TCP/IP stack: https://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-1-ethernet-arp/ Another custom TCP/IP stack: https://github.com/tass-belgium/picotcp RIPPLE 20 Whitepaper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d3NNVCRPVFk0-V0HUO5CxWWVn9pYIvmF/view?usp=sharing  Agenda: Part 1: Background on the report Why is it called RIPPLE20? What’s the RIPPLE about?  Communications with Treck (and it’s Japanese counterpart) Were you surprised about the reaction? Positive or negative? Types of systems affected? IoT Embedded systems SCADA What precipitated the research? What difficulties did you face in finding these vulns? Deadlines?  What tools were used for analysis? (I think you mentioned Forescout --brbr) What kind of extensibility are we talking about? TCP sizes?  What did JSOF gain by doing this?  What were the initial benefits of using the TCP/IP stack? Speed? Size? Do these vulns affect other TCP/IP stacks?  Did Treck give you access to source? Any specific requirements set by Treck? Any items that were off-limits?  Updates since the report was released? Are your vulns such that they can be detected online? Part 2: Supply chain issues What should companies do when they don’t know what’s in their own tech stack? https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Supply-Chain-Risk-Management/documents/briefings/Workshop-Brief-on-Cyber-Supply-Chain-Best-Practices.pdf   Software bill of materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bill_of_materials PicoTCP link above does not release all code, because they use binary blobs that make proper code review next to impossible “Unfortunately we can't release all the code, a.o. because some parts depend on code or binaries that aren't GPL compatible, some parts were developed under a commercial contract, and some consist of very rough proof-of-concept code. If you want to know more about the availability under the commercial license, or the possibility of using our expert services for porting or driver development, feel free to contact us at picotcp@altran.com.” BLoBs = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_device_driver Vendor Contact How many organizations are affected by these vulnerabilities?  Are some devices and systems more vulnerable than others?  How many are you still investigating to see if they are affected?   What’s the initial email look like when you tell a company “you’re vulnerable to X”? Who are you dealing with initially? What is your delivery when you’re routed to non-technical people? How did you tailor your initial response when you learned of the position of the person? Lessons Learned: What would you have done differently next time? Any additional tooling that you’d have used? BlackHat talk: 05 August What should companies do to reduce or mitigate the chances of the types of vulnerabilities found by your org? https://cambridgewirelessblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/supply-chain-security-and-compliance-for-embedded-devices-iot/   https://blog.shi.com/solutions/embedded-hardware-supply-chain-attacks-embedded-system-attacks-how-to-stay-safe/   http://www.intrinsic-id.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2016-A-Platform-Solution-for-Secure-Supply-Chain-and-Chip-Cycle-Management-Computer-Volume-49-Issue-8-Aug.-2016-Joseph-P.-Skudlarek-Tom-Katsioulas-Michael-Chen-%E2%80%93-Mentor-Graphics..pdf https://www.supplychainservices.com/blog/major-security-risks-windows-embedded-users https://www.bbc.com/news/business-32716802#:~:text=Japanese%20car%20giants%20Toyota%20and,March%202003%20and%20November%202007.   Check out our Store on Teepub! https://brakesec.com/store Join us on our #Slack Channel! Send a request to @brakesec on Twitter or email bds.podcast@gmail.com #Brakesec Store!:https://www.teepublic.com/user/bdspodcast #Spotify: https://brakesec.com/spotifyBDS #Pandora: https://pandora.app.link/p9AvwdTpT3 #RSS: https://brakesec.com/BrakesecRSS #Youtube Channel:  http://www.youtube.com/c/BDSPodcast #iTunes Store Link: https://brakesec.com/BDSiTunes #Google Play Store: https://brakesec.com/BDS-GooglePlay Our main site:  https://brakesec.com/bdswebsite #iHeartRadio App:  https://brakesec.com/iHeartBrakesec #SoundCloud: https://brakesec.com/SoundcloudBrakesec Comments, Questions, Feedback: bds.podcast@gmail.com Support Brakeing Down Security Podcast by using our #Paypal: https://brakesec.com/PaypalBDS OR our #Patreon https://brakesec.com/BDSPatreon #Twitter: @brakesec @boettcherpwned @bryanbrake @infosystir #Player.FM : https://brakesec.com/BDS-PlayerFM #Stitcher Network: https://brakesec.com/BrakeSecStitcher #TuneIn Radio App: https://brakesec.com/TuneInBrakesec    

This Season is dedicated to SASE. Our guest for the show is Mike Schuricht (VP Product Management), Mike has been leading the product management and techpubs teams since he joined Bitglass in Nov 2013. We are focusing on s small part of SASE related to user browsing and access resources on the internet. In Kick off the episode, we introduce the topic with Anton Chuvakin You can check the questions we ask our vendors. To promote our work and support the podcast, please review us here https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/security-architecture-podcast-1313281 For slides and please refer to our website and watch the video episode About Bitglass: "Bitglass, the Next-Gen Cloud Security company, is based in Silicon Valley with offices worldwide. The company's cloud security solutions deliver zero-day, agentless, data and threat protection for any app, any device, anywhere. Bitglass is backed by Tier 1 investors and was founded in 2013 by a team of industry veterans with a proven track record of innovation and execution". AS part of Bitglass innovation, they announced their support and availability of Smart Edge Secure Webgate earlier in 2020. Links to more information about Bitglass Whitepaper: Bitglass SASE architecture Request a Demo -Bitglass Technical Brief: SmartEdge Secure Web Gateway More about Mike: Mike has been leading the product management and techpubs teams since he joined Bitglass in Nov 2013. He has a background in the development of innovative enterprise security products, with expertise in configuration management, user-interface design, networking, and enterprise software. Prior to joining Bitglass, Mike was a PM at Palo Alto Networks leading management software and user-interface strategy for both Panorama and PAN-OS. Before that, he held technical marketing and engineering roles at Mentor Graphics for the Advanced Mixed-Signal business unit. Mike earned an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

As MPT [1] reports, Samsung just announced a new security chip for mobile phones [3], or -- as Cointelegraph refers to it [2] -- a "new chip to secure crypto transactions". In this episode I am talking with Ken Tindell about what this chip does and why it matters for (security) tokens and their custody. 1. https://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/news/samsung-upgrades-security-chip-solution-for-mobile/ 2. https://cointelegraph.com/news/samsungs-new-chip-to-secure-crypto-transactions-on-mobile-devices 3. https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-elevates-data-protection-for-mobile-devices-with-new-security-chip-solution **Dr Ken Tindell, CTO, Canis Automotive Labs.** Ken is a technologist and entrepreneur. He holds a doctorate in real-time systems from the University of York and in the past has been the CTO of several startups. In the late 1990s he founded LiveDevices to develop embedded software for automotive applications and what we now call Internet-of-Things, and was subsequently acquired by Bosch. He also co-founded Volcano Communications Technologies, a joint venture with Volvo Cars and Motorola, that developed communications software for CAN bus and developed the LIN protocol, and was acquired by Mentor Graphics. He currently is the CTO of Canis Automotive Labs, a hardware IP company focused on securing communications and computation in automotive systems. 1. https://linkedin.com/in/kentindell 2. https://twitter.com/kentindell (@kentindell) 3. https://kentindell.github.io

In this episode, Stacey Champagne sits down with Candace Worley to discuss her rise through the ranks at McAfee and her perspective on how owning your role will and career path will allow you to reach your potential, regardless of whether you are male or female.Guest: Candace WorleyCandace Worley is the Vice President and Chief Technical Strategist for McAfee. There she managed a worldwide team of Technical Strategists responsible for driving thought leadership and advancing technical innovation in McAfee security solutions.Prior to this role, Candace served as Vice President of Enterprise Endpoint Security for the Intel Security Group at Intel Corporation. She had worldwide responsibility for all facets of product and vertical marketing for the complete corporate products solutions set.Worley joined McAfee in 2000 and has held a number of technology leadership positions in her McAfee career including, five and a half years as the SVP and General Manager of the Enterprise Endpoint Security business. Prior to joining McAfee in 2000, she spent seven years with Mentor Graphics, where she led a team of product managers responsible for electronic design automation and electronic component software.Worley holds a bachelor's degree in management from Oregon State University and an MBA degree from Marylhurst University.Host: Stacey ChampagneSupport the show (https://www.ewf-usa.com/)

In this podcast, Dr. Darbari talks to Harry Foster, Chief Scientist at Mentor Graphics about all things verification. Harry talks about ATPG, the origin of assertion languages, property checking, equivalence checking, and FPGAs. He shares insights about his association with Accellera and contributions to the Verification Academy. We talk about 5 tips that all verification engineers & managers will find useful to get productive with verification.

Simberian makes a physics-based 3D field solver tool that helps measure not only the traces on your board but also the materials. Altium recently entered into a formal partnership with Simberian, and Roger Paje - VP of Global Marketing, discusses with us how this impacted Altium Designer® 19 and 20, and what’s we’ll see going into Altium Designer 21 and beyond.   See What's New in Altium Designer Watch the video, click here. Show Highlights: Roger started his career in EDA at a startup in the signal integrity and timing space, called Quad Design, which was eventually acquired into Mentor Graphics. He left EDA for the telecom market and worked on embedded designs for a while. He’s now back in EDA, and the last two companies he worked with used Altium Designer.  According to Roger, Altium’s recent partnership with Simberian embodies the synergistic principle that in the business world, “one plus one equals five”.  Given Simberian’s background and its contributions to the field since its founding in 2006—its contributions to electromagnetic theory, its multiple case-studies, its rich history of exercises with partners on algorithm validation, and its large library—it is apparent that Simberian is heavily focused on electromagnetic analysis and getting it correct. According to Roger, marrying the above “to a PCB tool with a bunch of users… just seems like an extremely logical decision”. Altium Designer 19 saw the first inclusion of Simberian features, starting with their field solver in the stackup manager. This ensured more accurate impedance calculations on the different layers. While Altium Designer 19 was just a starting point for these features, 80% of users were able to use the field solution and impedance calculations to their benefit. The field solver is extremely accurate and essential for the frequencies that users are now moving toward, and the material loss parameters are included in Altium Designer 20. Material measurements are becoming more important with high-speed design.  Considering roughness factors and the characteristics of dielectrics; once you get into higher frequencies, 3 GBps is the inflection point at which loss characteristics of the materials come into play—if those aren’t modelled properly, it introduces simulation inaccuracies. If board manufacturers do not provide characterization and data, both in pre- and post-manufactured cases, analysis becomes almost impossible.  The current collaboration of EDA vendors with designers and material manufacturers makes the industry more complicated than a couple of years ago.  With the Altium Designer 20 release comes more robust geometries for those moving into more exotic materials and geometries. There are also a few algorithmic enhancements. Some characterization exercises revealed that the impedance numbers coming out were measurable. Most of our regular users are in the realm of transition, moving toward DDR-3, DDR-4 and onward, or any of the surreal interfaces, PCI Express, Gen 2 or -3, moving up to Gen 4.   The practical impact and importance of Altium Designer 20 to PCB designers will be, accurate impedance and delay calculations. Even at DDR-3 skew is a big deal and as you go higher, even more so. As designers move toward high speeds, proper impedance modelling is important and we have a lot of confidence in Altium Designer 20 for that with the field solver. Designers will always benefit from knowing their Electrical Design Rules. The layout tool itself is able to find things that impact signal integrity. Some of the design rule checks in Altium Designer 20, particularly the return path checking, will ease the job of analysis. Designers will need less hard-core training to read modeling results and know how to interpret them with the more intuitive nature of Altium Designer 20. The future of the Simberian/Altium partnership already has a couple of philosophies in place, one of them is making the analysis easier. There are also plans for a trace checker, similar to a word processor’s spell checker.              Links and Resources: Introduction of Simbeor® Electromagnetic Signal Integrity in Altium Designer 20 (in Altium Designer 20 User Manual) Visit Simberian Website   See What's New in Altium Designer

Sarala Paliwal is today’s guest. She is Senior Engineering Director at Mentor Graphics, A Siemens Business, and manages a worldwide group of software engineers and a worldwide group of quality software engineers.   Sarala also volunteers with Girls, Inc., and is on the Advisory Board that helps with their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) program for young girls.   Join us as we cover technology education for young women, the gaps in education and what needs to be changed, and much more!     Show Highlights:   Many people think of engineers as just being analytical and not creative, but you will often that find engineers are both. Sarala believes that educating girls in the sciences should not even be  a topic, but rather an expectation of it being part of the course material for everyone that they would take up to a certain level. It’s important that you be very good at the fundamentals, and confident in the domain. When this happens, that is going to come through. Attacking the problems, researching them, and understanding them is the key to confidence in complex issues. Sarala often sees young women (and some men) who get frustrated and want to give up on a project if they don’t understand everything about it.  Knowledge is power, and gives a sense of confidence during public speaking, such as meetings. If the fundamentals are not given more focus in the education system, there will be less people going in to the sciences. Strong core curriculums are necessary for a better education system. Investing in training for teachers and using teachers who are specialized in their fields is very important. Having a good attitude makes learning a little easier and a lot more fun. When volunteering your time in the education field, teacher training exposure to industry and bringing that in to school should be advocated. What would happen if we trained our students in science and technology as well as we train them in sports? What if parents were as involved with academics as much as they are with the sports programs? Sarala explains the programs at Girls, Inc., and her role on the Advisory Board. Sarala is seeing a lot more intersection in varying fields.           Links & Resources: Email Website   SUBSCRIBE & SHARE! Podcast   Sarala’s Suggested Podcasts Freakonomics: http://freakonomics.com/hours/ Hidden Brain: https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain Throughline: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline

Mike Herrick is the SVP of Product & Engineering at Urban Airship and is responsible for developing, operating, supporting, and sustaining UrbanAirship’s products. He joined the company in 2010.   Prior to Urban Airship, Mike was the Vice President of Products for Collaborative Software Initiative. In that role, he was responsible for product management, product development, technical support, and hosted operations. Prior to Collaborative Software Initiative, Mike built a broad background in the software business with management and individual contributor roles at Liberty Mutual, C-bridge/eXcelon (now Progress Software), Mentor Graphics, and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).   Mike holds a BS in Management Information Systems from the University of Dayton.   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeherrick/

Making and checking parts is the most frustrating aspect of PCB design. Find out how Zak Homuth set out to change that and what is next for Upverter, EE Concierge and the future of PCB design in a browser-based setting. Show Highlights: Why the Upverter parts library? Verified parts at scale, in a high-quality way. Verified parts - free to use for everybody coming soon! Verifying Datasheets, it’s a lot of work and at the heart of design frustrations. I wanted to take the magic of Github and Google Docs and create something for hardware designers. From concept to manufacturing in 20 hours. This is a conduit for bringing ideas to life.   Links and Resources: Verified Parts on Upverter A note about Verified Parts coming soon to Octopart Upverter EE Concierge Zak’s Linkedin Zak’s Twitter Indestructible pantyhose + Funny Video   Hey everybody, it's Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Welcome back, we have another amazing guest for you today but before we get started, please follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot of things for engineers and PCB designers and I'd love to connect with you, and on Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is also on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So please give us a follow.   Well today I have a really extra special treat for you.   Zak, I think I'm gonna destroy your last name so I can say Zak?   Yeah.   Your last name is?   Homuth.   Homuth - see I would have killed it. So, this is Zak Homuth, he is one of the - are you a co-founder of  Upverter correct?   Yes.   So Altium acquired Upverter and EE Concierge in August of 2017. So a lot of people have asked me why Upverter, what was Altium's interest in Upverter, because it seems like sort of out of our lane. So I thought I'd bring Zak in today and let you hear straight from the horse's mouth. So start out by - if you would Zak - just telling us about what is Upverter, and what is EE Concierge, and what you were trying to create when you launched that company?   Yeah sure, so Upverter is cloud-based, schematic capture and PCB layout. And what cloud-based means is, it runs in the web browser. You type Upverter.com into Google Chrome, it shows up and you can do your schematics, your layouts right there you know, order the boards for manufacturing right from your web browser. You don't need to download anything, it's collaborative, which was kind of our big superpower for a really long time. Which is that a bunch of users can work on the same schematic, in the same layout, at the same time, in a very Google Docs kind of way. That's Upverter, and then EE Concierge came out of an experiment we ran back in 2015, trying to figure out what was the most frustrating part of doing a PCB design. And it turned out it was making and checking parts. And Upverter - until that point - had a shared global parts library and what that meant was every time I added a part, those parts were available for the community but without somebody checking those parts…   Yeah, that could be a nightmare.   -Yeah it was - it was really scary for people, they were spending a lot of time checking parts, they were spending a lot of time making their own copy of a part that was already in the library, a lot of that you know, wasted duplicates...   You can not have a messy library.   -Yeah and so EE Concierge grew out of that. It was our attempt to clean up and verify and guarantee the quality of the parts inside of Upverter, and so we built a small army of Electrical Engineers all over the world. They work in an uber-like model where they can kind of log on, make a couple of parts, check a couple of parts, log off again. They can do it full-time, they can do it twenty hours a day, they can do it an hour a day you know, or an hour a week if that's what they want to do. And we built a machine intelligence to check all the work that they were doing to make sure that we had the best possible parts in the world inside the Upverter parts library and then, EE Concierge was born out of realizing that that's probably not specific to Upverter - probably every engineer has the problem.   Yeah there's that.   -so we built a plug-in for Altium Designer so that Altium users could leverage these verified parts which inevitably caught the eye of Altium and one thing led to another but - that you know that's EE Concierge. It was this idea of verified parts at scale, and then kind of outsourcing at scale, for electrical engineering. But in like a high quality way.   Right so, how many parts are in the library now? Yeah so there's about a million-and-a-half parts...   Holy cow!   -in the Upverter library of those million and a half, about 275,000 are verified these days. And to different levels of verified, some of them just have verified symbols, some have verified footprints. It depends on kind of what era of EE Concierge they were made in. But it but we've got about 25,000 like really, really rock-solid ones and they're the 25,000 that most people use.   That's awesome. So what's the plan kind of going forward, to get the rest of them? You said you have some kind of machine learning to help you verify that. Like what's the path going forward to get the rest or - you know million parts like you said - not everybody's using a million parts right? There's infrequent wonky ones in there?     Yeah there's kind of two answers to that. So how we make this maximally useful to the most engineers is similar to what Altium and Octopart did, after Octopart was acquired we worked really, really hard to make sure that Octopart was for everybody. It wasn't just you know Octopart for Altium, it wasn't just parts for Altium, it was Octopart for everybody, or CAD, you know Mentor, everybody. So we're trying to do the same thing with the EE Concierge, we want verified parts for everyone. So in the next couple weeks we're gonna launch verified parts on Octopart, so we're taking that 250,000 parts and we're putting them on Octopart free for everybody to use. And you can download them in EAGLE, Altium, Upverter. We're working on Mentor, I think we've got Cadence or CAD as part of that, so like in any format, free. Just find them, download them, use them. That's what we want so that's kind of one avenue for the EE Concierge. And then the other is - this is a little bit more kind of futurist and out there answer -   That's okay.   But if you were gonna build an AI that could read data sheets, first thing you would do is have a huge number of people read data sheets and enter that information very reliably into a piece of software, so that you can check it all. And so the kind of like dot, dot, dot - is we think if we get good enough at doing EE Concierge, and we do it for long enough, potentially we can read data sheets with a computer, kind of our self-driving car version of the Uber model.   Like and then part of me goes; and you're assuming the data sheets are correct?   Yes it's a real problem and so we had to do a lot of stuff at EE Concierge to catch like, if TI ships a datasheet, and the datasheet has a problem, they'll rev the datasheet and then they'll rev the datasheet, and then not only that, but they'll reuse packages and they'll reuse symbols and the reuse bits and pieces of that datasheet across other parts that they make. We had to build a ton of stuff to be able to catch when they made an update to one datasheet and apply those changes to all the other parts to use the same bits and pieces of the datasheet. It's an ongoing thing - it's a hard problem for us but yeah it's a real - it's a real issue.   Well it's like amazing to me that we're here like...   -at all [laughter]   I mean just from being in like - I started in the industry way back in the 80s - and like everything was done by hand and all that, so just that we could possibly even get to that point - it's just so sci-fi to me - but it's amazing, it's so great. So tell us a little bit about how did you get it, tell us about your personal history and how you went down the Upverter rabbit hole and popped up here.   Yeah sure yes, so I was kind of into software and computers before that was a cool thing I was on the internet pretty early, I was I think five or six when my dad brought home you know our first computer and you know I tore it apart and tried to figure all that kind of stuff out. I was building video games when I was seven, and...   -of course you were [laughter]   -all that but I studied Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada and Computer Engineering is a little bit of Software Engineering, a little bit of Electrical Engineering, and then you know all the physics, and boring, normal engineering stuff that you have to do [laughter]   Waterloo is a co-op University and so every four months you'd go to school, and then every four months you'd go get a job, and so I got a bunch of these cool jobs, kind of all over the world, I used it as an excuse to travel. And so I worked in Canada's capital Ottawa, for the insurance company that insures the majority of Canadian doctors, and so they had some really interesting data. And I built a search engine and a database for them to to be able to search when  wrong-side surgeries happen right, you know when they operate on the wrong lung or whatever. I built a search engine so that doctors could figure out the root cause of some of this error because that was important for the insurance company to try to prevent this from happening. So I did that, I worked in Germany for IBM, I worked in India for Infosys, and then I got a job in Waterloo working for a company called Sandvine and Sandvine build what are called deep packet inspection - telecommunications service. And so ISPs would install these in their network and it would sit between their subscribers - the people who use the Internet and the rest of the internet - and it would look at all the traffic that flowed through the box to try to figure out how much is Skype, and how much is YouTube, and how much is pornography and Facebook and everything else. Because if you think about it,  ISPs are kind of like the water utility. They know that they sold so much water but they don't really know what the water was used for, how much is watering lawns right, and so we were giving ISPs that kind of intelligence. Anyways, I started off as a lab tech, I tore the boxes apart, tried to figure out why they weren't working, put them back together and made them work and I kind of worked my way up to actually designing the box. So I designed two of them for Sandvine before quitting, and I quit because I was really frustrated that on our side of the cubicle wall there were ten of us working on the hardware that was so essential for this company to exist - but on the other side of the wall there were 300 software guys who had Git, and they had version control, and they had collaborative tools, and they could test their code by pushing a button on their computer. I had to carry a 120 pound server around a building, and use screwdrivers and shit to like - and that's, that's part of hardware - I never wanted to take that away from hardware but it felt like it could be easier and you know. We were using Mentor Graphics’ tools and I was frustrated by the archaic kind of 80s feel of it all you know?   -yeah.     I used a Mac at home - I couldn't use the software on my own computer if I wanted to, and I was trying to build stuff at home and this was kind of before IoT was like a thing. This is right before Arduino, before all that stuff. But I wanted to do that stuff at home and it was just so hard to do any of that you know from my Mac, from home, without a huge budget - it's an endless amount of time and at the time we were seeing cloud tools like Gmail and Google Docs and Github, kind of emerging and so I left, because I was pretty frustrated that if this is like the state-of-the-art, if like one of the most complicated telecommunications servers that anybody had built today, was built by some punk kid in this office in Waterloo, working mostly alone, using tools that felt kind of clunky and out of date, like there has to be something better than there and and so we left to build it and it was really no more complicated than: can we take some of the magic of Github, and some of the magic of Google Docs, and build a tool like that for hardware engineers and maybe it takes forever to disrupt Mentor, or Cadence, or Altium, or any of the big guys that have been at this for decades. But we assumed there were enough people like us that just wanted to spend two hours on a Saturday afternoon designing a piece of hardware. There must be something we can build for them - a little bit like Google Docs right, it doesn't have all the features, you can't make fancy tables, you can't do it all, but it's slowly taking over the world and we wanted to do the same thing for hardware.   Well I think you point out something that I really noticed. It seems like there's a block of people that are like my age, the old 80s people and we've kinda just built upon old... and then there's the next generation that were five, okay I was 20 when I got my first computer, you guys kind of grew up with these things in your hands, and it I think it's kind of hardwired in your brain. So I think, there's more efficient, better ways to do things and we are building on old Legacy stuff, so sometimes we just can't see it.  And so I think it's really very exciting because I think people are gonna be: oh thank god, somebody's built something modern you know, on the cloud that thinks, and operates you know, which I think was the big draw actually for Altium, which we can talk about that a little bit later so - so the Upverter I was going to ask you, but you've answered it partially, is why Upverter? Out of the various other things you could do, why didn't you go into - I don't know -  you have a very entrepreneurial spirit, so there's lots of things you could have done. Like why did you pick this one thing?   Yeah, so when we started Upverter, I quit my job before I knew what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to build something, I knew I wanted to start a company, I knew I was kind of done with working for the man, and I recruited two of my kind of college roommates. So these are guys that went to Waterloo with me. We lived in this terrible, decrepit, run-down house next to the  campus, near the engineering buildings. You know we lived together, we worked together, we did our co-op jobs together we - you know we were thick as thieves. But I called them up and I said you know, how do you feel about quitting your job and like doing something new? And they both quit like the next day and so we got together in this old decrepit student townhouse and we wrote down hundred ideas of things that we were excited about, things that we were passionate about, things that we believed needed to be fixed. I was shouting loudly in the corner that we needed to build this  - this hardware tool that was the Google Docs for hardware. That was my passion, that was what I was excited about. But Steve and Mike, they had some cool ideas of their own. There was a bunch of stuff that they wanted to build that a lot of it is actually been built, and a lot of it ended up being quite substantially large companies. So our second pick our kind of the front runners....   So what was on your cut list?   -Yeah so the second pick was, we wanted to build drones, and this was before drones were cool. We wanted to build very large-scale drones that would be towed behind container ships and provide a bigger radar footprint than the ship can have itself because it's so close to the water and you'd do this for a bunch of reasons. But the really burning reason at the time was Somalian pirates. If you could fly one of these drones above a container ship, you could get ten or a hundred times the radar footprints so you could really move the ship before anything bad happened. If you wanted to. Anyways, a company ended up doing this, and started right around the same time that we did and ended up being acquired for something on the order of two or three billion dollars and so we missed that one a little bit. But but we just - we just didn't even know where to start on it. But it was - it was the second pick.   That's crazy.   So we didn't really talk about this ahead of time, but you know I think I know around the time AltiumLive went down, there were people, kind of gurus in the industry, and they're like so - ultimately it was in October, so and Altium acquired you guys in August and I remember some people, like it was like all the buzz, like what are you guys doing? Why that customer? And so what I want to talk about is - who uses Upverter? I'm thinking makers, hackers, hobbyists and maybe EEs that want to be startups or do personal projects - like who do you think the Upverter audience is, and how's Upverter going to serve them, and how many people are on Upverter? Tell us about your ecosystem a little bit?   Yeah so it's the 'misfits' mostly, these are the guys...   The land of the misfit toys! I like these guys! It really is, these are the guys that are unserved by the eCad industry at large, they're using operating systems or tool sets, or computers that can't run traditional eCAD, they're in funny parts of the world, they're students, they don't have electrical engineering degrees. In lots of cases they're the weekend warriors that can't steal a copy of the eCad that they use at work and bring it home, they're makers and hobbyists and hackers yes, but they're also - you know we helped some Nigerian kids put their country's first satellite into orbit...   That's cool!   -and they couldn't have done it using traditional eCad tools.   That's cool I love that!   -Yeah we - some of the first augmented reality startups were built using Upverter. Like kind of odd stuff like that where you couldn't necessarily use a traditional eCAD tool, you couldn't necessarily iterate at the cycles that one of those tools would let you you iterate at. But also like children on the internet, and you know Mac users and all that kind of stuff where you just can't use a traditional eCAD tool.   Right.   But misfits mostly, we think of them as kind of an - not really the next generation of electrical engineers - but but very much a different breed, a different type of 'doer of electronics'. Well it is kind of grass roots though I think that we are gonna see more amazing things, like drones being dragged behind boats, that are gonna come up organically and kind of like you, I think you're the perfect sort of head of this brand, like 'yeah dropped out of school, this wasn't working, I don't like it whatever, so yeah I can see that happening over the next five, ten, twenty years. I think we're gonna see amazing stuff out of that space. So how many people, I don't know how you quantify that, have used Upverter, or use Upverter or actively log on a month?   Yeah-   So how do you do that?   At the time we were acquired by Altium, it was a little over 50,000 people used Upverter, they use it in a very 'bursty' way,  they'll show up - they'll work frantically for two days - ten days a month, and then they'll disappear and we won't see them for a long time ,and then they'll come back. And we correlate that with their kind of idea cycle right. They'll have an idea, looking very excited about the idea, they'll work on the idea, they'll do that thing, and then they'll go away you know, probably because they built the thing and they want to play with it. It could just be that their focus has moved and they're they're onto something new, and then we'll see them come back, six months a year you know, a couple of days later - depends on -how much time and energy they put into their ideas. But that's okay for us, like we we never aspired to be the daily tool like somebody like Altium is, like we aspired to be this conduit for people to bring their ideas to life and you can only be as useful as people have ideas right. So if you have an idea every day, we can be useful every day.   Most people don't - most people have inspiration quarterly, or a couple times a year and that's that's what that looks like. We have many thousands of monthly active users so thousands and thousands of people log on every month, to work on their ideas, and their little projects. And the average project is worked on for quite a small amount of time, relative to you know, what you would expect from other eCAD tools. We'll see products going from conception to manufacturing in like 20 hours or less. And so that's pretty amazing, if you consider that's two or three days of work.   That's unbelievable, so if - you said something earlier that I wanted to ask you about and that was - you mentioned that people can go into manufacturing. Do you have sources like fabrication, assembly sources that are related to Upverter?   Yeah, and we've had this in a couple of different forms over the years. We've had, what we like to call the print button, kind of refactored a couple of times inside of Upverter. We're currently refactoring it again right now, and part of that is as a result of the acquisition. We have another company we acquired, Siva, who does a lot of stuff in the manufacturing space, and we're refactoring our print button to use some of their technology and would be better linked up with Octopart, so it should be a better experience for our users as a result of doing it. But yeah, over the years, we've had a button, you click it, you give us your credit card number, and a couple days later something shows up in the mail which, which is what you designed.   Awesome.   -And we'll do that again in the very near future.   And it - was that assembled also,  or just the bare board?   -We used to just do bare boards, and then we experimented with assembly for a little while, the new - the newest, latest and greatest version - that we're working on right now will be fully assembled and it'll probably include whatever enclosure your device fits inside.   Oh my gosh, I mean I'm like ridiculously excited about this.   Yeah, it's gonna be pretty cool.   Okay so I always ask - I don't always ask this - but I wanna ask this now. Okay, are you a geek or a nerd?   I - - geek, but I don't know why. I don't know what the difference is really...   It's just your gut - open question.   Okay, geek.   -I think you're a geek cuz I don't think there's - I don't think - I think... whatever [laughter] It's something we ponder here on the OnTrack Podcast. What is a nerd and what is a geek, we've...   -big questions [laughter]   We've decided what geeks are cooler; nerds seem more like, at least to me, physics - like...   -okay   -children 'Coopers'   -oh Science...   -yes more deep on the science side but this has not been proven, so if anyone wants to comment below and tell us what you think a geek and a nerd is, we're all ears. So but you were geeking out there, this is why I stopped you.   -Okay -cuz I'm like, oh you are like totally geeking out and I'm tracking with you man, I'm like, oh this is like - we're having a geeking out moment right now [laughter].   So I was talking to our Head of Operations the other day, and I was just saying that during that AltiumLive, people were asking why would Altium, a professional e-tool, pick up Upverter, and basically I think Altium has a vision to kind of embrace every level of PCB designer and also embrace and serve those 'misfits', those marginalized, or that don't have access you know, those that can pay for Altium Designer and they do it professionally, well great...   -Yes   But that we want to serve the wider community. So I was asking Ted Pawela about it, and he was saying - and I just wanted to get you to chime in here - is that sort of what we were talking about earlier - is that cloud - I mean a lot of software programs are going to cloud-based.   You know there used to be security issues, but they've tightened those up - so technology is moving towards cloud based, and if we don't sort of pay attention and go that way too, I think will be sort of left behind and that, also the next generation, or the new, or the upcoming, or the grassroots, organically-grown innovators, I think are gonna - like you - are going to be cloud natives right, and are going to be frustrated, like you were when you were at Waterloo. And to also meet those people where they are, not expect them to cough up the money or fit into our model, but figure out where they're going, and what their model is, and what their needs are. And so that was - that's what I think Altium saw as very attractive - seeing Upverter as a huge enabler to serve that community. Would you agree with those?   Yeah - so when we were in the kind of acquisition process with Altium, I spent a lot of  time on the phone with Arum, our CEO, talking about kind of his vision for the future of Altium, and his vision for the future of electronics, and one of the things we talked a lot about was making Altium synonymous with PCB design. And part of that is, you can't just serve the tradespeople in the mainstream - there's a million people in their basements that have ideas, that want to invent stuff, and those things include electronics. You need to be there if you're gonna be synonymous with PCB design and so - so a big part of it was that. But then also a big part of it is like, the world's changing knowledge work's moving to the cloud, is becoming collaborative you know. The Windows operating system may or may not be the operating system of the future. You look at mobile, you look at tablets, you look at what's happening with Apple, and you know all of that. They're you know, there's a version of the world where Altium is constrained  to only serving a chunk of a market because of the way we built our technology, and so I don't know, Arum obviously hasn't said any of this, but there might be a little bit of this that it is an edge on   the future.   Well I can tell you that personally, it's a really exciting place to be, because I love that. I love that you know, I interact a lot with University students and that. But we've also gone to you know, I went to the New York City Maker Faire and to see what people are developing is so exciting. So to be able to serve that community, and see what they come up with, is just a blast. Like I love to see it, and especially like you had a start early with IoT like it's gonna explode what we can make. And like I said, they're gonna be making it in their garage, in their basement, or their shed...   -It has to - it has to explode. Like we're talking about you know billions of devices all over the world...   -billions like capital B.     -yeah like a hundred or two hundred thousand professional electrical engineers aren't gonna invent billions of devices; we need to include a bigger chunk of the world, in the design of these things and you know, and then   - that's not to say the tradespeople won't have their place, like of course they will - but we need grassroots, we need people building stuff in their basement. And we need it at a scale that we've never needed it at, more than now.   I know, I'm really excited about what you're doing - I'm really excited what you guys developed, and I'm so excited that that you're part of our team. So sort of wrapping up here, I want to sort of segue into what I call 'designers after hours.'   Okay.   So, I don't think you have any after hours, you might get to have a beer after work once in a while. This guy's from Toronto and he's here an awful lot and I don't think you have any after hours right now, but if you did have after hours Zak, what would you do, or what do you like to do?   Yeah well my wife and I bought a house in the Canadian wilderness about 18 months ago, and so my after hours, for the last 18 months, has been turning this kind of run-down cabin into a home for my family and so I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos, and buying a lot of power tools, and trying to figure out how to do all that stuff. But when I'm - when I'm here in San Diego, and when I'm stuck here for the weekend, [whispers] I buy a couple videogames [Judy laughs] that's - that's kind of my thing.   Okay, and here's another super fun thing about Zak. I want you to share about - his wife is also an entrepreneur. So tell us about your wife's business cuz that's really fun. Yeah so my wife is a very successful entrepreneur, she started a company when she was quite young, that did eCommerce, and she sold that. And then she ran another company which was for angel investors, and she sold that. And then she did something with hair extensions, and her new thing is called Sheerly Genius, and Sheerly Genius makes indestructible pantyhose.   And you can  hang a human being from stuff with nothing more than a pair of pantyhose.   There is a video, we are going to share the link of Zak, hanging his wife... [Zak laughs] from a second-floor balcony with pantyhose - it is a real thing.   It is a is real thing.   Okay, so what are the materials?   Yeah so it's heavy molecular weight polyethylene, which is what the fiber is made out of, and it's special in that it's incredibly strong, but also a low denier - or denir - I'm not sure how you're supposed to say that word - but so it's a 30 denier fiber which is what you can make hosiery products out of, but it's incredibly strong. It's like the the strongest dental floss you could possibly imagine, and she found a way to weave this into pantyhose but also to like wrap lycra in it so that it's stretchy - but it's still sheer, but it's like incredibly and ridiculously strong, so it will never run.   -It's like 'superhero pantyhose' you guys really you're gonna have fun watching this video that we'll connect below, and we will also connect to Upverter, and EE Concierge and Zak's LinkedIn profile, if you'd like to connect with him, and any other things that we think that..   -Sounds good [laughter]   -you might want to connect to. So Zak, thanks again.   Thank you.     -I'm so looking forward to working with you and seeing what we kind of collaborate with and sort of reach  - reach to the grassroots-end of the design community.   -Me too .   I'm really excited about it so thank you so much for joining us.   Of course thanks for having me.   This has been Zak Homuth, is that close enough?   -Yeah.   Zak Homuth and Judy Warner with Upverter and Altium, and EE Concierge. And we will look forward to seeing you next time.   Until then, always stay on track.  

Polyup is the world's first “casual modding” digital platform. Designed for math teachers, in particular, the visual, self-paced environment allows for players to freely experiment with numbers and functions through gamified computational challenges that must be correctly modified before the players can advance to higher levels. The platform will soon scale to feature the ability to modify real-world objects using in-app augmented reality features.  I wanted to find out more about this free and open computational thinking playground and how it enables users to modify expressions, functions, and algorithms to discover the beauty of math. EdTech startup story with Shaya Zarkesh and Dr. Amir Zarkesh Today's guests CO-FOUNDER Shaya Zarkesh is currently a high school junior at the Harker School, a private school in San Jose. He has a passion for STEM and has won numerous awards for mathematics and science research. Shaya also participates in the USA Computing Olympiad at the platinum level. Outside of academia, Shaya regularly participates in Speech & Debate activities and specializes in Policy Debate. He is also an avid soccer player on a competitive team. CEO AND CO-FOUNDER Dr. Amir Zarkesh is also the CEO and Co-founder of Bluechip Systems. Before that, he co-founded iCelero, which spun off into three companies: Shoppin, Crunch and Bluechip Systems. Prior to that, he co-founded 3Plus1 Technology (acquired by a Private Equity), co-founded Transcendent Design (acquired by Mentor Graphics), and was a principal at Quad Design (acquired by Synopsys). Amir is the co-founder and the President of iBRIDGES a non-profit organization empowering young entrepreneurs. Amir received his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics and MSc in EE from UCLA.

Dan interviews Jeff Dyck of Mentor, a Siemens Company, and Jordan Dutchak of the tech incubator Co.Labs. Mentor (formerly Solido) was the largest tech acquisition in the history of their home province when they were acquired by one of the world's largest tech companies. Co.Labs is the provinces first tech incubator, taking startups from 1 to 1000. In this episode, they discuss the chicken and egg problem that all unestablished tech hubs face, and how Saskatoon is fighting the odds to build a vibrant, meaningful tech ecosystem thanks to continued involvement from the established veterans and small upstarts in the region.

Charles Pfeil and Judy take a look back on the days of manual design, before exploring today’s very different eCAD competitive landscape and the tools that take designers to the next level. Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Charles Pfeil for a conversation on PCB design, autorouters and the future of software design tools.   Show Highlights: Introducing the iconic and award-winning Charles Pfeil Tape ups and touch ups with red pen precision Artistry not OCD, PCB design for form and function Charles on joining Altium and Activeroute “You know we’re paid by the hour, right?!” Where are we going to be in 10 years?   Links and Resources: Charles Pfeil and Happy Holden at AltiumLive A lifetime designing PCBs: Surprising acquisition brings stability A lifetime designing PCBs: Focus on functional specs A lifetime deisgning PCBs: early design adventures Job Shopper to Service Bureau Changing Roles Switching to eCAD From Design to Software Merging Design and Fabrication An Excellent History of CAD Improving Autorouting and Design Software See all of Charles Pfeil’s articles on EDN here Hey everybody, Judy Warner here, Director of Community Engagement for Altium. Welcome to the OnTrack Podcast. If this is your first time listening, we're glad to have you. If you're returning, we're happy to have you back. The OnTrack podcast is produced every week, so please add the OnTrack podcast to your favorite RSS feeds or iTunes. You can also follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter @AltiumJudy, and be sure to follow Altium on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. So let's get into the show. Well, I have a treat for you today. I have a guest, Charles Pfeil, who is, he won't say it but I will, he's iconic in the industry and we're gonna talk a little bit about the history of routing. So, I want to tell you a little bit about Charles, forgive me for reading here for a moment. Charles has been in the PCB industry for over 50 years as a designer and owner of a service bureau and has worked in marketing and engineering management at Racal Redac, ASI, Cadence, PADS, VeriBest, and Mentor Graphics, so pretty much everybody, and now Altium. He was inducted into the PCB Design Hall of Fame through UP Media in 2013 for his contribution to PCB design software. Charles has been working at Altium since 2015 as a Senior Product Manager. So, welcome Charles, we always have a blast when we talk together, so thanks for doing this adventurous podcast with me. You're welcome, glad to be here. So, you are on the other side of the country from me right now. I'm here in La Jolla as you know and I get to see you sometimes once a month, and you and I have had some interesting conversations here in the office, kind of a shared belief that we're sort of losing some of the history, right? Of our industry, particularly design, sort of where we've come from and where we're going, and I really value people like you, Happy Holden, Lee Ritchie, these people in the industry really that carry this whole history inside of them, so I'm always happy to have a chance to sort of glean some of that from you and you've told me some great stories, so thank you again for doing this. So, how I met Charles was when I was a journalist from iConnect 007 and I interviewed him to learn about ActiveRoute, which was a new product for Altium at the time, and just sort of casually at the end of the conversation I mentioned to Charles "So, what's your history?" not knowing who Charles was and then, out he comes with the history of PCB design. So yeah. I felt like a knucklehead, but it ended up being a good article, so you were a good sport. So let's start talking about where at least you and I remember things which is tape-up. So, tell us about your earliest memories of doing tape-ups and what that was like and sort of what some of the problems were. Okay, well my first job, I worked inspecting Rubyliths, and at that time the way that people routed boards was to essentially cut away the things that they didn't want, so what was left was the routing. So there's a process in which they used an exacto knife and my job was to look for scratches on the Rubylith and patch them up, and I would have to say from that to what we do today is a tremendous change, and it went through an evolution where for manual design that the methods changed, the materials changed, and also the complexity of the design changed, and the same thing has happened once we started working with computers to design, right? The materials change in the sense of the board materials. The methods change in that there's constantly an evolution of how much the software is able to do to help the designer, but just a note on the manual design and where this term 'artwork' came from. That, the interconnect would be done by drawing it, right? Usually with red and blue pencils and most of the designs are two layers, and you would try and interconnect them and, you know, erase a line if it doesn't work out, but generally, you know, the type of components back then were DIP high C's if you had any at all, and it was, it was fairly simple and you could draw with red and blue pencils what you wanted and then you would either use black tape or red and blue tape in order to create an artwork that would be used in fabrication in order to get the design made. Well, there were many different styles when you get to the artwork side. Some people like to use the black tape and create curves and arcs on everything, and some would not care about concentric arts, others, like me, would be very OCD and want to make every single corner perfect and make it look like some kind of art. It's not really art, but it's just the implication is that the person who's doing it is really caring about how it looks. Absolutely, which by the way, one question I want ask you I know the answer to but I think the listeners will appreciate, what were you touching up that Rubylith with? Just a red pen. Yeah, a red pen. I would just, because I had a magnifying glass to find the scratches 'cause with an exacto knife they would be really small, you know nicks. Right. And, so I'd go through looking at it with a magnifying glass and then use a red pen to fill it in so that there's no place with the light to shine through, because the way they were doing it back then, if enough light shined through then there'd be a hole in the mask for etching the board. Yep. Which could, what would that- Well, you'd have a- -well, it could have an open, well you'll have an open if the scratch went all the way across, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anyways, continue on. I just- Yeah. It's okay. -it's just a funny thing, like, when I think of how much precision we have now, to think of us touching up artwork with red pens just cracks me up. Yeah, yeah, and when using black tape I think it was common to start out with arcs and you'd do that by kind of using the knife to create a little cinch in the corner, but eventually arcs became the less productive method, let's put it that way, and so you would start making 45-degree corners by just cutting maybe three quarters of the tape and folding it over to create a corner, and so then the art was to make sure that everything was right on the grid, and when you did a 45 it'd be perfectly 45, and it got kind of excessive, but when computers came. Yeah. That's where it changed, and I do have an experience in that area when my service bureau switched to computer design as opposed to manual design. So you were right in that transition then, you went on your service bureau right from Rubylith black tape right into computer-aided design. Yeah, from tape-ups in 1978, from tape-ups to computer design, and that was a Racal-Redec system, and I lost all my customers because the only customers who wanted the computer design were people who already had it themselves. Most people who didn't have computer systems, they didn't trust it. We would give them plotted artwork and they couldn't edit it, so as a service bureau, I had to go out and find customers who not only used computers but Racal-Redec computers. So was Racal-Redec's price point, was there a barrier to entry there, kind of for that kind of system for OEMs? Sure. So, I bought two used systems, you know with a basic vector graphics monitor, PDP1134 with the software. I bought two used systems for, I think, my memory is not great on this, but I think it was around $125,000. Holy cow, that's a lot. It was a lot. For used. It was an investment and it paid off over time. I did increase my price per IC by a factor of 10. Wow. -which helps, you know, because you gotta pay for the apartment, but that's what happened in the industry. So, routing in a computer system was different because with the computer of course you're effectively laying down the edge as you route as opposed to going through a stage and sketching the, you know, red and blue pencils Right. -but, so interactive routing was really, click-click click-click at every corner, okay? And if you wanted to make a change then you would either delete those and reroute it or some more sophisticated systems allows you to move the track around, and it was either that or autorouting and at that time autorouting, well it hasn't changed much but autorouting was primarily just an X&Y; exercise and adding a lot of vias. In a sense it was similar to the way that I see routing. I see routing doesn't care about vias and they just, whenever you got to make a change in direction you just pop a via and go, and with printed circuit board autorouters that's what they would do. They didn't care about how many vias you added and really vias, the only problem with vias back then was the cost of drilling them. Right. At that time there was, wasn't. Yeah, it was nominal. It, yeah, well the cost was still there, but in terms of vias affecting the high-speed behavior- Right, uh-huh. -there weren't high-speed designs. There were companies of course who were doing that, but vias didn't become a cost for signaling performance. Right. So, people still didn't like vias. They could see with their mind that, "Hey I could route that without vias" so they would rather just go ahead and route it without vias, and so even though autorouters, every company tried to come out with the ultimate autorouter, and it could never match what the designer was thinking or what the designer really wanted as a final result, and I'd say generally that's been the problem with autorouting. Too many vias, not really ending up with a route path that the designer had in his mind, and also the most common thing I hear is that it would take more time to clean it up than it would to just route it manually. Now I remember back in my early fabrication days knowing designers that would autoroute a portion, say 60% of the board they would autoroute, and then they'd do all the rest by hand. Was that because of what you're talking about or was that just the speed to design at the time? That would be a method. There's so many different ways of approaching it, but a method would be to route the critical signals first manually, and then just give it to the autorouter to finish everything else, because that would save time. Now, autorouters evolved. The early autorouters really didn't care about anything but is there an open channel and is there space for a via, right? Then it evolved over time where there is a recognition that, well what can we do to try and eliminate vias, and I say eliminate because they would route with vias and then they'd have a pass to remove vias if they can, right? So, but it really wasn't fundamentally in the algorithm of the router to try and route without vias. Now, a number of autorouters gave the designer control, like CCT with a DO file where you could, you could put costs on the router to try and minimize vias, but it was difficult. You really had to be an expert and I went to a number of companies where they had one person who was the router specialist and the designers would place the board and then send it to the router specialist who would do the automatic routing and that person would know how to set it up and it would be pretty good, but when it came back there still had to be a quite a bit of editing. Who was, who created the best sort of autorouter of that time, and what kind of time frame are we talking about now, as we're moving forward? Yeah, I would say, well it depends on who you talk to, okay, because- Everybody has their favorites, right? -everybody has their favorite. So I would say though, obviously the Cooper Chan Technology, CCT. Their autorouter was the favorite, especially among Mentor, Cadence, PADS. Those companies all had interfaces to it and relied upon to do their autorouting, but once CCT was bought by Cadence for a measly four hundred and thirty or four hundred and fifty million dollars- Whoa. -whoa. All the other companies, Mentor, Very Best, and also PADS felt "whoops we can't go down this road" because, as usually happens in a competitive environment, those who have a relationship with one of their competitors, it's possible that that relationship could diminish over time. Right of course, and we have to remind listeners right now that at that time PADS was not part of Mentor. Correct. Correct. Neither was Very Best. Very Best, right, so it was a whole different environment. So Very Best, they had autorouting capability and it was different. It was, it had some different data structures and different algorithms and actually that was one of the primary reasons why Mentor bought Very Best, was for that autorouting capability. Oh, okay interesting. See, I love, I mean, people that are around our ages know this but so many now that are, I don't know maybe 40 and under don't. You know that how, this used to be a, there used to be more than three or four players in this space, right? Sure, sure. And we kind of all, ate each other up until we have what we have today. I would say the 90's and early 2000's there were so many mergers and acquisitions. Yeah. Unbelievable-Unbelievable. -and you know, I went from Intergraph to PADS to Very Best to Mentor, right? And then now I'm at Altium, and looking at the evolution and the tools over that time the autorouter was a key thing, but realistically designers still preferred to route it just by themselves and manually, right? It's true. It's, it really has a lot to do with what the designer thinks about when they're placing the board. They know that a certain bus needs to go in a certain direction on a certain layer, and to set up those kind of controls and cost adjustments for an autorouter is a lot of work and it requires a lot of knowledge about the core capabilities. So, I think routing in general after, yeah after CCT was bought started turning in a different direction where rather than just autorouting, let's see what we can do to give the designer the kind of control with interactive routing that they want, and increase their performance. What can we do to increase the performance? Right, and is, tell me again now is this around the time that you joined Mentor's team? Yeah, I joined Mentor in 1998. Okay, so late 90's. Yeah, it was- And you helped, and you helped architect that vision right? Yeah, I was part of it. I mean- Part of it right, it's a team. -it's always a lot of people involved, and I was involved in it, and I always tried to put my designer perspective into it, right? And I think that's my contribution, is not only being able to work with the development people but to be able to communicate the knowledge and expectation of a designer so that the software that we develop is something that a designer would appreciate. Right, you had a designer- Not that.you had a designer brain so you knew, which by the way, as you, as you alluded to in the beginning, is an artistic brain, really. It's, there's a lot of creativity there and an appreciation for not only function but also aesthetics and to put things in really neat, tight patterns, or. Well, yeah- Yeah, you call it OCD but there's that. -there is that. You know, this is a topic that has come up quite a bit in the last 10 years and I like to say the following, that yeah there's that artistic side but ultimately I believe it's about efficiency. And in the context of CAD design, efficiency means that the routing is as direct as required, of course if you're doing some kind of, you know, tuning on it it's not going to be direct, you're adding lights to it, but you want it to be as direct as possible. You want to manage many more things than we had to manage, you know back in the 60's and 70's, right? Right, absolutely. Now you have to manage high-speed requirements, so you don't necessarily want to have everything tightly packed in parallel. I remember I was demonstrating some ActiveRoute capabilities to a high-speed product manager, probably a little over a year ago. And there was a bug in the routing where it was, it was kind of messy, you know and the high-speed engineer says, "Oh that's great!" Right? Because it would totally eliminate cross-talk, you know? Exactly. Yeah, so there has to be the balance and that fundamentally, that is the job of the designer. How do you figure out the compromises, right, to achieve the right balance where you fulfill manufacturing, you fulfill high-speed requirements, and ultimately the design works, right? And if it comes out looking where everything is nice and neat, that's a bonus because the next person who has to make edits on it - it'll be much easier, right? Right. And yeah, frankly most of time or many times if it's not a high-speed net, those geometries don't matter so much, but if it doesn't take any extra time to make it nice and neat what's the problem with it? Yeah, I get what you're saying, yeah. There's sort of some elegance about the design, and like you said, many boards go into respins and you're not always doing that on your own work, so that totally makes sense. So, you joined Altium what two years ago about, approximately? Yeah, in May of 2016, excuse me, 2015. 2015, and so you've been working on ActiveRoute here, so what, you know, you've always throughout your whole career been pushing for trying to make things better, what are you trying to accomplish sort of on the work you're working on now, on the ActiveRoute? Yeah, so it is one of a number of things that I have worked on, but I would say most of my time has been spent on ActiveRoute, and the intent of ActiveRoute is to give the designer another tool in their interactive tool set, okay? It's not for everything, but the intent is that when you have a group of signals that you want to route together, whether it be, you know, a bus or just individual nets that start and end in approximately the same place, I want to give the designer the ability to just, through a couple simple clicks, have those routes the way that he's thinking, okay? And what is the designer thinking? That's the key. But I would say that, you know, it, with most boards is pretty clear. You see the connections, that's where they start and end, and I'm looking for a tool that can allow that designer to just select those connections and have it route on the layers that he wants them on, ability to spread them out, ability to pack them together. These little techniques are there as options so that ultimately it looks like he would do manually. It's not a replacement for interactive routing, it's instead an accelerator. Oh, okay. By the way, along the lines of accelerator, I was talking to somebody, I have to share this story with you, I was talking to a designer and he was telling me that he was sitting in your session at AltiumLive where I think you were showing ActiveRoute, and he said someone in the room said, "You know we're paid by the hour, right?" because it was making it more efficient, so I think that's a compliment to you Charles, to the work you're doing. There is that trade-off, but that's been there forever, that designers fear being replaced by the computer, right? Right, so that's gonna be my next question, just, so get ready about, to talk to me about AI and designers being replaced. Okay, well, we can go there now. Okay, you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. So, I know there is this fear or I've heard there's fears of designers being replaced by AI or computers and all that. So, what say you, Charles Pfeil? Well, I say that it's going to be a while, all right? If you can imagine all the energy and all the time and talent that has been focused on auto routing over the years since, you know you have companies like ASI in the 60's, late 60's had automatic routing for IBM, okay on mainframes- Oh I didn't know that. - and, you know, programming it with punch cards. So, from there until now the ability to get autorouting to succeed has failed all right? And this is just- Or has it gotten us there since the 1960's, right? We're still not, you know. It's not there, and generally designers have rejected it and it's not because they're afraid they're going to lose their job. And, besides that, like I say usually, you don't sell these tools directly to the designer, you sell it to their manager, and if they can get the job done faster they're all for it okay? Right, right. But the problem is that it hasn't been adequate, the autorouting capability. It's a tough, tough problem. Every design is different, right? It's different. And- And it's very, and because of that it's such a complex brain task, really. Right, and there are standard circuits, of course you know, standard interfaces and memory circuits that need to be routed the same way, but then the placement's different, the board size is bigger or smaller or a different aspect ratio or it's flex or, you know, could be a lot of different variables. There's many, many more variables right now, too. So, to fully automate that is going to take a completely different perspective for design I believe, and it's going to take a huge investment, and the interesting thing is okay in ten years, let’s suppose somebody started on- You know, are you reading my mind? My next question was gonna be where are we gonna be in ten years Charles? So- Yeah, exactly. Let's suppose somebody started a project to use AI and that's in the, in the context of doing machine learning and analyzing databases and building decision trees, and even if you got that working over five of those ten years, a lot of the things will change. They'll evolve and this is one reason why software vendors can't keep up with the technology. There's always something new, always something new and on our list of enhancements to work on, it's always the latest technology, right? And there's only so much we can do so we have to pick and choose which technology we're gonna focus on with each release. Well, and, I was just talking to Ben Jordan here about this. Well, until I came here, since I came from the board and assembly side, I had no real appreciation for the time and discipline it takes for development and for coding that software. It takes a lot of time and a lot of discipline to put in all these new features and we're so, sort of instant gratification, we're just like "oh, well, put it in your next release." Not so easy. Yeah, it's just a fact of life, and our customers, they want these things and we want to give them to them, but it has to be an evolution. So if a company decides okay we're going to use AI to automate the design process, sure they could analyze all the different types of designs and understand them and how to use them, but then when they start with a new design, how could an AI decide on its own what the board size should be? What the stack up should be? Whether or not to use micro vias? What are the critical signals? I guess it would have to be able to read a data sheet, that is hard enough for humans to read. That aren't always accurate, may I add. Yeah, that's true. I mean, most of the time they are, but. I'm not saying it's not possible, it certainly is possible. But, it's going to be a long time. Yeah. And maybe, who knows, maybe MCM's will come back and we won't have printed circuit boards. There's always that possibility. Yeah, yeah. We just don't know, and the, even, you know, printing circuit boards - where is that technology going to be in 10 years? Exactly, yeah. 3D printing and there's, gosh, so much that they're grappling with, so who knows? Yeah, and the core problem is that a company is not going to design a product, let me rephrase that, a innovative company is not going to design a product that uses all these standards and circuit technology of the past. They have to have something new and different. Right. This is why Intel stays in business, and all the other chip manufacturers, because you know they need higher performance, they need more capabilities, and so it's a complete redesign except for like I say standard interface is a memory, that's not a redesign, until the next standard comes out, but those tend to last a couple years and then, you know, you look at memory DDR 2, 3 & 4 they just change over the years. And the interesting thing about, I wanted to comment here, about memory in terms of the PCB designer, the DDR2 circuit was the most difficult to route because of the T branching. Then the DDR3 came with the fly-by signal technology, that was much easier for the designer to work with as long as you have some kind of electrical signals, and DDR4 is really just a minor evolution, significant in terms of performance over the DDR3, so who knows where that's going next. Will the next phase be like the change between DDR2 and 3? I don't know. They have the specs for DDR5 and I'm just unfamiliar with them. But, so technology will continue to change. Maybe AI will be able to support a segment at a time, and I know that there's people in the industry who are talking about this and wanting to do something with it, but I'm unaware of a officially funded project to do it at this time. I'm with you there, and I would think you would hear about it from your connections, I don't know. Maybe, we don't know. And would a company you know like Cadence or Altium or Mentor fund a project that they know is going 2 to 3 years and maybe, maybe not work? It's a risk. A potential risk, so. Yeah, so I would say to all the designers who are concerned about losing their job, don't worry. But what will be extremely important is that they make sure that they continue to be educated and understand the latest technology and what requirements those bring to the design process. Then you have your value. Yep. And you won't lose your job. And I would say to that, that almost through the OnTrack newsletter and now podcast I hear that message over and over and over again from leaders saying, "the key to my success was I continued to learn and evolve" and so it's been great to talk with you Charles I always learn so much from you. I wanted to ask you one last question. I have this part of the podcast I like to call "Designer After Hours". I've just noticed a lot of designers have a creative bent and usually have some interesting hobby, so what are maybe one or two of your favorite hobbies? Well, I could list three, all right? Okay. One is playing golf. I love to play golf. Second would be, photography, taking pictures, mostly landscape pictures.You can see behind me a couple landscapes, but I like to say that I prefer landscapes because they don't move very much. I've tried to do a few weddings and it was a total disaster, so I'm just not that, but and then third I do write a lot and I've, you know, written poetry and I really enjoyed doing that, so those are the three things. Speaking of writing, I wanted to let our listeners know that Charles has written, which I'm delighted about my passion for history being preserved, how many parts are we now up to, ten? How many are we gonna finish at? Well, actually 8 of them have been published in EDN magazine. EDN Magazine, right, so there's a whole series of Charles' experience over all these years and goes into depth, so if you want to learn more please go to EDN.com and probably just search by Charles Pfeil and you'll find that. How many are you gonna, I know eight have been published, so how many- It'll be, eight have been published, I think it'll be twelve or thirteen in the end. Twelve total, okay. Okay, well thanks again Charles, we've gotta run, but I could, I'm never tired of talking to you. You're a dear and thank you so much for your contribution to the industry, and it's always great to talk to you. Well, that's all we have for today. Please remember to subscribe to the OnTrack podcast and follow us on social media, and remember to always stay OnTrack.

Embedded Computing Design's second Industrial IoT University conference occurred this week, with industry experts from Cisco, zigbee alliance, Digi International, LoRa Alliance, Trusted Computing Group, Renesas, Mentor Graphics, Wind River, Software Design Solutions, and Blue Ridge Advanced Design and Automation addressing networking and security challenges for an audience of more than 100 IoT engineers. Sessions on emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity technologies in particular piqued the interest of attendees, as Brent Nelson of Digi International outlined the LTE migration path for connected industrial devices while Vivek Mohan of Semtech explored possibilities enabled by the LoRaWAN protocol. In this week's Embedded Insider's podcast, Brandon Lewis, Embedded Computing Design Technology Editor, reviews some of the highlights from Industrial IoT University, as well as the neighboring Sensors Expo tradeshow.

The Embedded Insiders, Rich Nass and Brandon Lewis, both of Embedded Computing Design, drive into the Society of Automotive Engineer's (SAE's) six levels of autonomous driving. From full human driver control to complete autonomy, the two outline each of the levels, discuss where they believe we are on the autonomy spectrum today, and discuss a recently released offering from Mentor Graphics that can get manufacturers developing Level 5 Autonomous Driving systems today.

The lecture is being presented by George Fox’s Office of the President and College of Business, and is the first installment of the university’s Reiten Lecture on Leadership Development. Nair guides Cambia Health’s Innovation Force as it inspires ideas from a variety of sources, selecting execution-focused concepts and starting them on the path to new businesses or concepts. He joined the company in 2004 as executive vice president and chief marketing executive accountable for product development, brand management, consumer-directed health systems/e-business, business intelligence and corporate performance management/planning for all four company health plans. Nair was so captivated by computer science that he left his homeland, Singapore, to study at the University of Oregon, where he earned his BS and MS degrees in the field of computer and information science. In the 35 years since, Nair has served in various executive leadership roles at Intel, Mentor Graphics and as president of two startups. His experiences have taught him that the basis for all transformation is personal. Nair is known to some for his marketing mind, reflected by the acknowledgment by the Marketing Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board as a 2009 Marketing Thought Leader. Others know him as author of three books in cost and performance management. His most recent book is Strategic Business Transformation.

I managed to find another Robin to talk CFD with today. Robin Bornoff has been with Mentor Graphics (& Flomerics before that) for 20+ years, focussed on delivering “good science to engineers. We're talking all about democratisation & appification in CFD. We cover: • why calling niche CFD tools “apps” might be doing them a disservice & whether CFD tools will become commodified; • what the CFD industry has in common with the automotive industry, both in terms of it’s past & future; • how embedding CFD in an MCAD environment helped drive democratisation & why embedded CAD is more than just a user interface problem; Note, this episode was recorded before the announcement of Mentor Graphics’ acquisition by Siemens - we weren’t just ignoring it. LINKS Mentor Graphics (Mechanical Analysis Division) –https://www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/ Robin Bornoff's Blog – https://blogs.mentor.com/robinbornoff/ Social Profiles – https://twitter.com/FloRobin4CFD & https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-bornoff-5639b014

In this episode, I speak with special guest, David Wiens (Business Development Manager, System Design Division at Mentor Graphics) about PCB industry trends and the 26th annual Technology Leadership Awards (TLAs). The longest running competition of its kind, the TLAs recognize engineers and CAD designers who use innovative technology to address today’s complex PCB systems design challenges. Dave and I talk about various aspects of the competition as well as the trends that are revealed through the new submissions each year. So, listen in for details and then gather up your best designs from the past year. Oh, and tell your friends who you know created some impressive work too. A little healthy competition amongst friends is a good thing, right? Plus, there are some great prizes for the winners. Contest categories: Computers, blade and servers, memory systems Consumer electronics and handheld Industrial control, instrumentation, security and medical Military and aerospace Semiconductor packaging Telecom, network controllers, line cards Transportation and automotive Trust me, you don't want to don't talk yourself out of submitting your design(s) because you think they may not be technically complex enough to submit. The judging criteria spans beyond size and density. Who knows, you could be among the next set of winners! Where to go next: Learn more and watch the TLA video on the TLA page Start the entry process Check out the previous winners Read Vern Wnek’s blog posts about the TLAs Have questions, topics of interest, or a guest recommendation? Send them to pcb_techtalk@mentor.com so that we can feature them in future episodes. Guest Bio: David Wiens joined Mentor Graphics in 1999 through the acquisition of VeriBest. Over the past 25 years, he has held various engineering, marketing and management positions within the EDA industry. His focus areas have included advanced packaging, high-speed design, routing technology and integrated systems design. He holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Kansas.

Synopsis In this episode we ask the big question of "Can security be a part of the 'build/deploy faster!' culture?"  We discuss the need to separate out high/low risk code, understanding how to deploy dormant components of the applications, proper testing strategies and branching/merging in a world where faster isn't just an ask, it's a need to stay competitive. A huge thank you to all my guests for their time and expert insight.  The combined talent and experience of my 3 guests is something you should absolutely take a listen to, as these gentlemen really know what they're talking about - whether it's Information/Application Security, or DevOps ... this is a discussion that bridges both with expert precision. Guests Nick Galbreath - Nick's Linked-In profile says he's been at 5 early to very early startups, all sold, IPO'd or huge - all dealing with massive scaling in load and large data sets.  FaceBook now owns a half-dozen of his patents on social graphs, and Google is using some of his code in Chrome!  On top of that, he's written a book on cryptography too... when he's not out building start-ups, Nick's speaking/teaching or hacking away at code to find better, bigger exploits and fixes. James Wickett - James is an innovative thought leader in the DevOps and Information Security communities, and has a passion for helping big companies work like start-ups to deliver products in the cloud.  He got his start in technology when he ran a web startup company as a student, and James is currently employed as a Senior DevOps Engineer working on launching cloud-based products for the Embedded Software division of Mentor Graphics.  James' bio is linked here. Olivier Saudan - Olivier is a software security analyst with 10 yeras experience in operations (including Information Security) and a significant development background.  He keeps his identity and employer a mystery due to the nature of his work, and the need for discretion. Links: Recent podcast on DevOps with Gene Kim (part 1 [Episode 10], part 2 [Episode 20]) Nick Galbreath's "Client9" - http://www.client9.com James Wickett's blog - http://blog.wickett.me