PCB Chat

Tomachie has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. Its eponymous platform provides AI-assisted analysis of PCB schematic data. It optimizes DfT and identifies the ideal locations for physical test point insertion. And it generates a 0-100 layout-readiness score, providing design teams with an objective, data-driven metric.

Tomachie is the brainchild of CJ Clark, a veteran test engineer with a background in JTAG and boundary scan techno...

What if your factory could predict failures before they happen, capture decades of human expertise, and make better decisions than ever before—without replacing the people who run it? Today’s guest sits right at the intersection of innovation and industry.  Bryan DeBois, director of industrial AI at RoviSys, is helping reshape what manufacturing looks like in the age of intelligent machines. From predictiv...

Nemanja Jokanovic is the executive leader of Breadboard, an AI-powered platform that he believes will revolutionize BOM management. In this interview with Andy Shaughnessy, Jokanovic, an Octopart alum, discusses the many sourcing challenges facing EMS companies today, and he explains how Breadboard optimizes BOM analysis and supply chain management. 

Stop by and chat with Jokanovic in person at PCB East 2026. Breadboard will b...

Wally Rhines is the spokesperson for the ESD Alliance, part of Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International. He joined Andy Shaughnessy to share details from the latest ESD Alliance report on sales of computer-aided engineering tools, semiconductor tools, PCB design software, related IP and services, and employment.

In this interview, Wally discusses the results for the fourth quarter of 2025, which marks the 20th consecutiv...

Karen Burnham feels your pain - the pain of EMC, that is. Karen is an EMC engineer, instructor, and founder of EMC United, a consulting company that aims to make EMC less painful for the rest of the PCB design engineering community. Karen joins Andy Shaughnessy to discuss some of the most common EMC challenges facing our industry today, a variety of solutions for these challenges, and design practices that can help you avoid EMC pr...

Scott Bright is co-founder and COO of Cadstrom IO, a new company that is coming up with tools for resolving some of the engineering problems that designers and engineers are encountering daily.

Bright has more than 35 years of technology and management experience, including three years at IoT company Jiva, where he was CEO, and 13 at the engineering firm Synapse, which he co-founded and was CEO.

Bright has designed hardware from ba...

In electronics manufacturing, defects don’t usually announce themselves. They happen in milliseconds, far faster than human perception, and often long before anyone realizes a process has drifted out of control. By the time failures show up in test, inspection, or worse, in the field, the root cause may be buried deep inside machine behavior that no one thought to question. When machines are assumed to be accurate ins...

Wally Rhines the spokesperson for the ESD Alliance, part of Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International. He joins Mike Buetow each quarter to share details from the latest ESD Alliance report on sales of computer-aided engineering tools, semiconductor tools, PCB design software, related IP and services, and employment.

We discuss:

• The latest PCB/MCB design tool market data
• The 19-quarter streak of year-over-year gains ...

Jon Urquhart is director of global applications engineering at Precision Valve and Automation — one of the world’s leading developers of dispensing, coating, and industrial motion-automation systems. Since joining PVA in 1993, Urquhart has become widely recognized for his expertise in fluid material processing, precision dispensing, and the engineering-to-manufacturing handoff that so often makes ...

Margaret (Maggie) Frachioni is a semiconductor hardware engineer at General Motors, where, armed with a bachelor’s in computer engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, she started out college as a software engineer in its automotive test lab. 

While at GM, she started work toward her master’s at Wayne State University in Detroit. Last year, she was part of the first PCEA Certified Printed Circuit Desig...

Mike Konrad continues a dive into the world of contract manufacturing—a vital piece of the electronics ecosystem. Joining him are two industry leaders who know this space inside and out. First, we have Daniel Stanphill, SMT process engineer at Aurora Boardworks, and alongside him, Sean Kincaid, president of K & F Electronics.  Both companies provide contract manufacturing services to a wide range of customers, ...