ATLANTA – When printed circuit board designers get together, the discussion will always come back to one thing: Do they feel supported by their vendors?

Like clockwork, it took about 15 minutes last week at the annual Designers Roundtable Meeting here for the topic to come up.

The session, organized by PCD&F founder Pete Waddell, attracted a small but hardy group of 10 designers and engineers representing multinational companies (Siemens, Cisco, NCR) and regional players (Prime Technological Services). The group met as part of the SMTA Atlanta trade show.

On the subject of CAD tools, those present seemed to agree that vendors don’t see designers’ problems as “real” problems. In most CAD systems, one veteran designer pointed out, the drill table symbol outputs are different than how they show on screen. For example, what might be circles on screen output as stars. Others noted that their preferred vendor’s tools aren’t unified, despite the vendor’s claims to the contrary.

The topic of simulation drew a mass chuckle. While vendors universally bemoan that designers don’t run simulation, the designers asserted that’s not a fair claim. “There’s no point in simulating the board if it’s missing the models,” one attendee said.

Data transfer was only touched upon briefly, but long enough for multiple attendees to point out that conversion tools generally don’t work as advertised, and need to be verified.

The notion that the outputs need to be consistently verified became a thread through the 90-minute conversation.

Asked about the array of free libraries coming on the market of late, one replied, “The problem is with trust. There are too many errors in (third party) footprints.” It takes longer, most agreed, to verify an externally written part outline and footprint than it would to develop that same footprint in-house. On the other hand, he added, if there were application notes for specific circuitry, “that could be great.”

One attendee noted that potential liability is a deterrent to using third-party libraries. “Because of all the licenses, it can be easier and faster to write the component myself. If the third party copied and pasted a protected part, we could be liable.”

Support was another sore spot. Despite a last year's annual PCD&F survey showing most designers feel positive about their vendors, the consensus at last week’s session was response time is too slow – two to 10 days – and insufficient for the user’s needs. As one designer pointed out, users care less about updates than they do about on-the-fly training. “It’s all online,” one said. “The vendor wants you to go figure it out on your own. CAD vendors don’t understand that we are paying for the help, not the updates.”

“YouTube is better than the actual companies for training,” another added.

Yet another participant felt duped by maintenance costs: “We get sucked in with low costs, then they jack up the prices.”

While those attending agreed the state of tools could be improved, they also agreed on how CAD tools could be improved. Most tools, they said, are developed by programmers, not designers. “Mentor and PCAD once did have PCB designers help design (the software) product,” one attendee said, adding that perhaps it’s time they returned to that approach.

Perhaps the state of tool development has gotten too far ahead of the users’ actual needs, and a return to simplicity is in order. As one designer at a major OEM indicated, “I just want a really good tool that catches shorts.”