General > General Technical Chat
The End of Electrical Engineering Design?
CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: free_electron on July 13, 2022, 11:22:28 am ---
--- Quote from: Benta on July 13, 2022, 12:58:18 am ---I seem to have stepped on your toes. Why so aggressive?
And don't worry, I've seen plenty of PCBs. And designed them too...tedious job. In 95% of the cases it's draftmanship.
--- End quote ---
Because this is what i do : PCB design. It was the same thing when i was doing IC design. polygon-pushers ,p-cell placers , line drawers ... derogatory names for extremely complex work that the "electrical engineers" couldn't even do.
The same is in the PCB world "Draftsmen". Like we're sitting behind a large sheet of paper with a ruler and a set of rotring pens... drawing "lines" without understanding.
That stuff was true 50 years ago. Modern boards require highly complex analysis. Field solvers, thermal solvers, building a layerstack that works for all the impedance criteria , velocity is different for inner/outer, signal integrity , power delivery network analysis, signal integrity.
Many times we have to tell the "engineers" that their schematics suck. Proper termination , what to be placed where (spatially). proper routing , testpoint usage. half of the designs are not manufacturable. Place a part the "engineers" selected and it can't be routed: the voltage standoff needs 10mm clearance between two pins and they picked a ... 5mm pitch part.
Then there is the mechanical engineering involved. Boards are part of an assembly. Boards with embedded components. mating stuff with heatsinks , pressfit .
Design for manufacturing. You may have the most wonderful schematic design but if it can't be built ...(at an affordable price)
Optimisation for cost : reducing layers, faster assembly , fewer processing steps.
A board in a smartphone is a highly complex design done by highly specialized engineers.
What is the most often heard comment about the PCB design ?
Why does it take so long ? it's only lines from point a to b. we gave you the netlist.
How come these draftsmen need so much time to do that ? They have all these powerful computers and it still takes weeks. yeah, cause there are so many criteria it grinds even the most powerful computer to a halt trying to run the DRC with 15000 rules when moving a resistor.
engineers.. lol. They can design billion gate processors but if the fuse in their desklamp breaks they need to go ask the lab tech to replace it. And never, ever let them around a soldering iron, you will run out of burn cream in your first-aid kit before you can blink. I've had to apply the burn cream to those "engineers". Grabbed the iron by the hot end, and then complained to his manager "why do i have to do this lab work ? that's for the technicians". The boss agreed. It's too complicated and dangerous for the engineers to do, they are better off doing simple things behind their keyboard.
And that billion gate design ? big whoop.. They wrote 5 lines of verilog to glue some ip blocks together and they had a netlist. Work done. No, the synthesizer did it. Talk about menial work. So simple a computer program can translate it. You don't even need an AI. it's algoritmic. But trying to get that things to run timing wise, parasitic wise ? layout wise ? that's where the real engineering starts. It all looks good on paper and in theory. Designed with ideal components. Translating 5 lines of code to a netlist can be done mby machine, easily. placing and routing that netlist ? not so easy ...
And software writers ? lol. 5 lines of python (or whatever language du jour) and their 5 GHz 128 gigabyte 64 core dual xeon grinds to a halt due to sheer overhead. 32 kilobyte and 4MHz got us to land on the moon.
Software for PCB design ? even bigger lol. 50 years they have been yakking about how "soon" the "draftsman" would be replaced by software , soon .. as soon as those damn hardware jockeys can build us will have faster computers ... now excuse us while we do another round of heated debate on vi vs emacs , gnome vs kde , bsd vs linux vs mac vs windows, we're waiting for the machine to reboot after our latest build crashed it , again... must be all the comic radiation in this room.
Meanwhile the computer scientist go "coders ? you mean the keyboard pounding code monkeys right ?" ahh , those will be replaced by our "artificial intelligence" . when ? soon ... real soon , as soon as when the engineers can make a quantum processors and the code monkeys can implement our AI. But it seems everybody is waiting for the draftsmen to complete the damn layout.
Somewhere on a factory floor, there is a line operator going "effing ididots, the whole bunch of em, this part doesn't fit, and that one doesn't solder properly, and this goddamn AOI software keeps seeing ghosts".
Meanwhile a supply chain engineer goes "damn it, they specced another part that is unobtainium , obsolete , or nowhere in stock and without substitutes".
And the customers keep screaming : i need a better phone , with a better camera , and faster video call , so i can post clearer pictures on my facetwitgramterestblogtube so my followers can send me more likes and i will be the most followed person in the world ! People used to be paranoid and think they were being followed. They now actively seek followers !
So, yeah, it rubs the wrong way when someone talks down about something that isn't their field.
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I only disagree with you on one point. Regardless of your job title or training, you are what I call an engineer. So your polemics against engineers vs the board designers are weird. Now if we change the discussion to describing what good engineers do, I am totally on board. There are plenty of not so good engineers. Almost all are not so good early in their careers. Unfortunately quite a few don't improve much over time.
coppice:
--- Quote from: free_electron on July 12, 2022, 06:39:18 pm ---
--- Quote from: Benta on July 12, 2022, 05:43:36 pm ---Idiotic spin.
PCB design today is 5% of design effort and has very little to do with engineering. It's more in the Draftsman trade.
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You've probably never seen a real pcb.
Try a modern motherboard. or a high power inverter with embedded transformers. Maybe something with all kinds of controlled impedance, signal integrity, looptime compensation , 8 layers, embeddded heat medallions, embedded wires , stacked / dogboned laservias / vippo / elic ? something that has 0.5mm BGA's and 1000 ampere running through it and 800 volts busbars. Then you will understand how much engineering goes in the board. Without that engineering your nice schematic is SNOT. if the layout is not done properly , at switch-on time you'll end up with a smoldering crater where once was your lab bench.
The time where draftsmen made single layer hand taped stuff for through hole parts is over.
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So, why are only 5% of the engineers doing PCB layout in a typical design centre?
free_electron:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on July 13, 2022, 01:14:34 pm ---I only disagree with you on one point. Regardless of your job title or training, you are what I call an engineer. So your polemics against engineers vs the board designers are weird. Now if we change the discussion to describing what good engineers do, I am totally on board. There are plenty of not so good engineers. Almost all are not so good early in their careers. Unfortunately quite a few don't improve much over time.
--- End quote ---
Because it is all about the "attitude" ! The endless being looked down on because "you only draw lines, push polygons". In some schools this is spoon fed that they are better than board designers, lab techs , factory workers, reworks technicians, test technicians and anything else that is involved in getting a product to market. Just because they have a fancy paper on their wall. Sure, i won't deny they have done heavy studies with lots of maths. But does that make them good at actual work ?
I've seen it so many times in 30+ years in the industry. the theoretical scientists laugh at the experimental scientists , they all laugh at the engineers , who in turn laugh at the layouters, who laugh at the factory assemblers...
"it's 95% line drawing (draftsmen work)" ... yeah , no it ain't... and draftsmen produce far better drawings than 99% of the engineers. You should see some of the schematics that "engineering" produces.
it gets old after 30 years...
Siwastaja:
In my opinion, board design is an integral part of the design itself. It all interconnects starting from component selection ending to mechanical design.
If the target is to make good product, the team should be able to make changes all the way to component purchase order based on mechanical constraints from the enclosure.
For one-man show, this is all trivial, but for a team, tight communication is needed, where design changes can be requested in very quick cycle, from any design stage. Top-down flow "component choice" -> "schematic capture" -> "PCB layout" <- "mechanical design", with one way communications, will result in a product with inferior specifications, longer development time, and higher cost.
Being physically present in the office and discussing design over cup of coffee works best. One-man show can also work well, but that of course requires people with both wide and deep competence, and will put a limit on the total complexity of the project.
Benta:
Just to be precise on my point about "idiotic spin": that adressed the original article which made it sound like AI designing PCBs would make engineers obsolete... as if electronic design is only about laying out a PCB.
Total rubbish.
I'm not denigrating PCB design, but presenting it as "this is all the engineering needed" is patently ridiculous.
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