The wet plating process is not a new technology.

But is what they are designing getting more complicated?

We’ve often discussed the growing need for young PCB designers to fill gaps in an industry where it seems more than half of its workers will retire in the next decade. That much is clear now, so instead of focusing on what is already well-known, we can instead point to an alternative gleaned from the 2018 designers’ salary survey: the technologies they are asked to design.

The redesign of a power adapter, using thermal modeling software.

Much has been written about the benefits of moving thermal design activity higher up the product development workflow to reduce the amount of rework needed later and eliminate physical prototyping for thermal reasons. That said, thermal considerations are normally indicated as advice or constraints on the main electrical and mechanical design flows.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the printed circuit industry in Taiwan.