Having returned from the IPC Apex trade show and listening to comments from stakeholders who are charged for volunteering their time to develop standards, one wonders if there is a better way.

Having spent four years of my career in standards development, I know the process well. Groups of engineers, often from competing companies, gather around tables to debate the ins and outs of everything from what an end-product should look like and how it should perform to the placement of commas and the meaning of “shall” versus “should.”

Typically, the acquisition of a software distributor isn’t big news.

But EMA Design Automation isn’t your ordinary distributor. And its purchase, by Cadence, isn’t your ordinary acquisition.

The EIPC Winter Conference in February was revealing for several reasons, not the least of which was that the view among the 125 primarily European electronics engineers and executives in attendance was their industry and governments had failed them by not acting more swiftly and vigorously to staunch the offshoring tide.

Analysis of artificial intelligence’s place in the world is as ubiquitous (and occasionally, insufferable) as those chatbots cluttering up many businesses’ websites. Not unironically, then, am I adding to the din.