So much of the focus of the past five years has been on artificial intelligence and its increasing role in society. Specific to electronics design and manufacturing, scores of companies are now involved in developing large language models and generative AI engines to power next-generation tools capable of synthesizing huge amounts of data and driving subsequent action.

According to Bloomberg, venture capitalists invested some $97 billion into artificial intelligence startups in the US alone in 2024. That’s about half of all the monies by US startups last year. Many of these technologies are unproven, however, and the companies’ founders have little or no track record of success bringing products to market or growing a profitable entity.

Does anyone feel like we are reliving the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s?

And it does make me wonder whether all the hype around AI is obfuscating other significant developments in the electronics space.

If you believe, as I do, that heterogeneous integrated packaging is where semiconductors are going, then you would likely agree there should be much more focus on interposers and package optimization. PCB efforts, by extension, should be tightly intertwined with chip design and packaging.

That’s one of the aspects that makes Synopsys’ imminent acquisition of Ansys so tantalizing. (The deal received approvals from various European regulatory bodies last month and is expected to close in the first half of 2025.) Synopsys holds the top position in semiconductor CAD tools, and coupled with Ansys’ simulation and analysis portfolio, it will be a formidable leader in the silicon to systems design space.

Likewise, Renesas’ pending acquisition of Altium will allow it not just access to a significant customer base of PCB designers but also much greater insight into the connection from transistor to transistor and everything in between. And when those transistors are 2nm or 3nm in size and then packaged into a 300mm BGA and soldered to the PCB, a range of interposers and boards will be involved, all with different sizes. Engineers will have to consider how to tackle the density scale equation that comes with those designs. As Geoffrey Leeds noted on a PCEA podcast that debuted in January, “If the circuit board could figure out how to improve that density and scale function, that would be a huge value to the overall industry stack.”

Still, there are places where AI and chip packaging are likely to intersect. One such area might be the invention of DeepSeek’s AI model. The Chinese startup turned heads around the world when it announced a powerful new algorithm capable of matching or besting many well-known and well-funded Western firms like OpenAI while using far fewer chips and resources.

China, of course, is restricted from using the most advanced US-based technology (read: Nvidia chips), so DeepSeek had to leverage a reportedly small inventory of parts to build its architecture. Per Wired, DeepSeek developed elegant chip-to-chip communication schemes and reduced the size of fields to preserve memory so effectively that it requires as little as 10% of the computing power of comparable AI models.

It’s too early to know yet, but over time we will certainly get a glimpse of how DeepSeek architected its system. And if everything it claims is true (for instance, the number of chips used was really as minimal as reported), it seems almost certain that DeepSeek has taken advantage of silicon to systems design in ways others have predicted but not realized.

Association updates. 2024 marked the first adoption of our Certified Printed Circuit Designer training program by a US university. That came about after countless hours of hands-on development and refining to tailor the CPCD program to the modern student. This year, we expect to leverage that effort with additional academic licensees, and even a prominent public-private consortium. If we want the next generation of engineers to choose electronics, we need to actively recruit them where they live and play.

In addition, we are adding to our traditional industry-leading events – PCB West and PCB East – a new technical conference on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit in June. It’s all part of our mission to help printed circuit engineers and professionals engage with their careers and each other.

Mike Buetow is president of PCEA (pcea.net); This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..