I recently reflected upon the notion that this year marks my 50th year in the printed circuit industry. It was a bit of a shock when I looked at the calendar and realized that I have been kicking around this industry for a half-century. I was fortunate enough to find my way into the PCB industry through the analytical lab of a PCB company in Mountain View, California in the early days of Silicon Valley. The name of the company was Printex and it was one of the premier PCB fabricators in the United States.

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Data is omnipresent. At times it goes unnoticed, just waiting there for someone to collect, analyze, and make use of it to create value. Data that seemed irrelevant at the time might come in handy when you need to come up with a solution to a new challenge. When, for instance, you need a reliable quote that can accurately predict a product’s price, you need to base it on past actual operation machine time, raw materials cost, etc. Otherwise, guessing a new product’s price might result in unexpected spending, especially when it concerns sophisticated systems.

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“It’s all about managing your data.” That’s a refrain that we’ve been hearing from designers over the past few years—in surveys and conversations with designers and design engineers. When we started planning this issue, our most recent reader surveys pointed to data management as a perpetual problem for PCB designers. It’s no wonder: schematics, footprints, BOMs, netlists, fab notes, assembly notes—millions of petabits of data are used to design and engineer PCBs, and readers cite mismanaged data as a constant source of heartburn.

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