Speaker Bios
Daniel Beeker is technical director at NXP Semiconductor, where he provides applications support and special function development tools and instrumentation for NXP Automotive customers worldwide. He has more than 43 years’ experience in electronics system design and EMC. He also specializes in EMC and signal integrity design techniques for systems and PCBs. He has completed more than 200 PCB design evaluations for customers and internal NXP products. He teaches field-based design techniques at NXP and industry conferences worldwide, more than 100 sessions with more than 5,000 attendees since 2010. He is also involved with NXP IC package design and IC development tool teams to support improved EMC performance, working on more than 20 IC designs. His unique approach to EMC is the result of many years of collaboration with one of the fathers of the industry, Ralph Morrison.
Ralf Bruening is product manager and senior consultant at Zuken, a major EDA vendor. He holds a degree in computer science, electrical engineering and economics. He has more than 30 years of experience in electronics and EDA. He has longtime technical co-responsibility for the architecture of Zuken’s high-speed design, signal integrity, power integrity and EMI solutions. He is an active member of the IBIS Open Forum. Bruening represents Zuken as industrial coordinator in a research project with 18 partners from academia and industry, funded by the German government, focused on how AI/ML technologies can be utilized efficiently in various stages of PCB design (his area is SI/PI analysis with emphasis on data generation and suited AI algorithms). Part of his responsibility is to help customers in implementing signal- and power-integrity analysis in their PCB design flows, and his group also performs SI/PI project consulting.
Caleb Buck is an electrical engineer and PCB designer with 13 years’ experience as a PCB designer and nine years designing Li-Ion battery systems for military, aviation and aerospace applications. He has spent the past six years focusing on how to increase PCB assembly reliability in harsh environments and in this work he has found PCB cleanliness to be of critical importance for mission-critical and life-critical systems.
Stephen Chavez, CPCD-I is a senior printed circuit engineer with three decades’ experience. Chavez is recognized throughout the industry as a global subject matter expert in PCB design. He is currently a principal technical product marketing manager with Siemens. He coauthored and is an instructor of the PCEA Printed Circuit Engineering Professional curriculum and certification (CPCD). His focus is on continuous improvement for the PCB design profession by serving as chairman of the PCEA.
Tomas Chester, P.Eng., CPCD-I has over a decade of experience designing hardware products through all phases of its lifecycle. He has managed a variety of multifaceted, interdisciplinary projects, from simple interconnect interfaces to complex microprocessors. His creative designs utilize cutting-edge manufacturing techniques, while adhering to strict industry standards and specifications. Chester has extensive experience designing standalone single-sided circuit boards, as well as multi-board assemblies with mechanical integration. Chester is an instructor for Altium and the PCEA CPCD PCB engineering design courses. He has an engineering systems and computing degree from The University of Guelph.
Jaeho Choi has been a memory module PCB design engineer at Samsung Electronics since 2012. Choi graduated from SIPI EMC Lab with a master’s degree in 2021 from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, and wrote a master’s thesis on “Signal Integrity Enhancement in Dual-Strip Line by Employing Inhomogeneous Media Related by Crosstalk.”
Nathan Christensen is an electrical engineer for high-reliability electronics at Sparx Engineering, focusing on PCB design and test, simulation analysis, and electrical requirements development. At Sparx he specializes in sensor networks and data communications for safety-critical systems including aerospace, industrial, oil & gas, and semiconductor equipment, as well as high volume consumer electronics. He holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University.
Keven Coates’ career spans 31 years of embedded processor digital/analog systems, high-speed PCB layout/signal integrity, very-low-noise circuits, high-power circuits, thermal management, battery safety, battery management, and battery interface circuits for consumer, industrial and automotive designs. He’s currently a senior electrical engineer at OnwardAir working on two-person electric vertical takeoff aircraft. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Texas A&M University.
Paul Cooke has more than 30 years of experience in printed board (PWB) design and manufacturing. He has held senior positions in operations, quality, process engineering and field application engineering, at some of the top North American PCB manufacturers. He serves on a number of IPC technical committees and cochairs the task group for IPC-9121, Troubleshooting for Printed Circuit Boards. He is a member of the IPC Technical Program Committee. He has coauthored numerous technical papers and works with Tier 1 designers in the avionics and space industry to design and develop products that need to have extended life, focusing on PCB design and reliability. Cooke has provided design for manufacture (DfM) consulting services to the industry along with extensive training/educational presentations from PCB 101 through Enhanced Reliability. He is also the team leader on a number of HDPUG projects and a member of numerous projects.
Terrie Duffy is a senior printed circuit board designer at McCauley Design Group, and an adjunct professor at Austin Community College. She has a bachelor’s in computer science from Texas A&M.
Mark Finstad is director of engineering at Flexible Circuit Technologies. He co-chairs the IPC-2223, Flexible Circuit Design standard, sits on IPC-6013, IPC-4202, IPC-4203 and IPC-4204 committees, and has over 35 years of experience designing and manufacturing flexible circuits for commercial, medical, and military/avionics applications. He has authored articles in numerous trade magazines, and currently coauthors the “Ask the Flexperts” column for PCD&F magazine with Nick Koop.
Agnieszka Franczak, Ph.D., is team member of Elsyca, where she is responsible for the Surface Finishing Division related to the upfront assessment and optimization of the electrochemical surface finishing process performances. She has authored or coauthored scientific and industry-related papers, book chapters and industry standards; and is a conference speaker, participant of industrial R&D projects, and an enthusiast of surface finishing of additively manufactured components.
Ray Fugitt is technical sales manager at Downstream Technologies. He has 37 years’ printed circuit board experience, 11 at Hadco in product and CAM engineering. In 2002, he joined DownStream in technical marketing and later, technical sales positions, where he supports and provides training for the BluePrint PCB and CAM350 products.
Rick Hartley, a retired senior principal engineer at L-3 Avionics Systems, is principal of RHartley Enterprises, through which he consults and teaches internationally. His focus is on correct design of circuits and PC boards to prevent and/or resolve EMI, noise and signal integrity problems. He has consulted with major corporations in the US and 14 other countries. His career has focused on computers, telecommunications and aircraft avionics, as well as medical, automotive and appliances. He has taught seminars at numerous conferences, including the IEEE EMC Symposium, PCB West, IPC Apex Expo and others. He is on the board of directors of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association, a past member of the Editorial Review Board of Printed Circuit Design magazine and has written numerous technical papers and articles on methods to control noise, EMI and signal integrity.
Terry Hoffman is a technical leader Product Operations at Cisco Systems. He is cochair of the IPC 2-16 Digital Model Exchange (DPMX) subcommittee. He is also the chair of the IPC-2581 Consortium technical committee.
Severin Ibarluzea is founder of tscircuit, an open-source framework for building fully functional electronics using the Typescript programming language and AI. Ibarluzea uses the latest and most powerful models for writing autorouting algorithms, automatically generating footprints, and generating small circuit modules. Prior to founding tscircuit, he was founding CTO of Seam, the universal API for IoT devices.
Nick Koop is director of flex technology at TTM Technologies. He has developed and applied advanced PCB technologies to support a wide range of medical, military, and global security applications. He is vice chairman of the IPC Flexible Circuits Committee and co-chair for the IPC-6013 Qualification and Performance Specification for Flexible Printed Boards Subcommittee. Koop has over 35 years of experience in design, manufacture, and management in the flexible circuit industry. He coauthors the “Ask the Flexperts” column in PCD&F.
Dana Korf is senior consultant at Korf Consultancy focusing on design transfer improvements from PCB designers to fabricators. He is also the AME Standards Manager at Nano Dimension, chair of the IPC D-67 AME Standards subcommittee, and vice chair of the ASTM F42.06.07 Additive Manufacturing Electronics subcommittee.
Matthew Leary has been designing PCBs full-time since 1996. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in physics. He currently works at Newgrange Design, a Boston-area PCB design service bureau.
Dan Liu is a staff engineer at Alibaba. Prior to joining Alibaba in 2020, she worked at Intel for more than 10 years. She has been working on the research of cloud servers in immersion liquid cooling since 2017 and has issued conference publications at DesignCon, ECTC and other industry conferences.
Phil Marcoux has ventured into many areas during his long career in electronics. IC Designer and Product Engineer, author and lecturer, and ultimately CEO of three silicon valley based companies. He was named “Father of SMT” by the IPC and co-founded the company that invented chipscale packaging and chiplets.
His newest venture is leading the PCEA task group writing the AI Roadmap and AI Bill of Rights for the Electronics Industry.
Reddy Mallidi is a distinguished business executive and AI visionary with extensive leadership experience in technology, product development and operations. He has been at the forefront of implementing cutting-edge AI projects, including automated export compliance systems, waste elimination in manufacturing and predictive maintenance. Throughout his career, Mallidi drove initiatives and achieved top 1% results in cost savings, operational excellence, customer experience and digital transformation.
As an AI strategist, Mallidi guides leaders in leveraging AI across business functions to create value and drive innovation. His perspective combines deep business and technology leadership experience with a strong academic foundation, including an MBA from Columbia Business School and engineering degrees from Indian Institute of Technology and Oklahoma State University.
Mallidi is also the author of AI Unleashed: A Leader’s Playbook to Master AI for Business Excellence, and a companion workbook, How to Choose the Right AI Use Cases.
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Charlene McCauley has over 42 years’ experience as a PCB and mechanical designer, 21 as the founder and manager of two design service bureaus. For the past 13 years, she has led McCauley Design Group, where she has served 50+ customers in the server, semiconductor, space, military aircraft, radar, satellite, medical, simulator, oil field industries. She has eight years’ experience as an adjunct professor at Austin Community College teaching PCB design, electrical/electronic design, and technical drafting. She was employed at Dell for nine years as a senior PCB designer for the rack, tower, blade server, and storage systems, and now provides design services for Dell’s Precision laptop and server systems. She also provides Allegro/OrCAD training for her customers’ engineering departments.
Gerry Partida is vice president of technology for Summit Interconnect. He began his career in the printed circuit board industry in 1984 at Everett Charles Test Equipment and joined Optrotech/Orbotech in 1986. He was a member of the team that introduced CAM automation, net list compare, AOI/CAD reference to the PCB industry. His current position is focused on manufacturing cutting edge high-density interconnect, high-speed digital, flex/rigid-flex and RF/microwave PCBs for military and commercial applications. He is a subject matter expert on IPC-6012, and a member of the IPC-6012 and IPC-6018 review task groups. He recently has become a vice chair for IPC-6012/IPC-A-600 & IPC-V-TSL-MVIA Microvia Task Force.
Zachariah Peterson has an extensive technical background in academia and industry. He currently provides research, design, and marketing services to electronics companies. Prior to working in the PCB industry, he taught at Portland State University. His background in scientific research spans topics in nanoparticle lasers, electronic and optoelectronic semiconductor devices, environmental sensors, and stochastics. His work has been published in over a dozen peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has written hundreds of technical blogs on PCB design for a number of companies. He currently works with other companies in the electronics industry providing design, research, and marketing services. He is a member of IEEE Photonics Society, IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, American Physical Society, and the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA). He previously served as a voting member on the INCITS Quantum Computing Technical Advisory Committee and he currently serves on the IEEE P3186 Working Group
Ethan Pierce is director of hardware engineering at Pierce Design, working with global customers to build and deploy IoT solutions. An electrical engineer by trade, he has spent his career building consumer, medical, and defense connected products at leading hardware companies to leading IoT platforms. His specialty is maintaining holistic design intent from concept to mass production, producing successful IoT deployments at scale.
Lee Ritchey is president of Speeding Edge, a consulting company specializing in the design of high-performance PCBs and training of engineers and designers preparing to design high-performance PCBs. He has taught his signal integrity courses to more than 11,000 engineers and designers all over the world. He has participated in the design of more than 3,000 high-performance PCBs. He has been one of the speakers at PCB West since 1991.
Ramon Roche is a field application engineer for NCAB Group in the Southeast regional office. As a mechanical engineer, his career started in the industrial automation industry where he gained a breadth of knowledge in manufacturing process and equipment development. He brings experience supporting customers throughout the entire sales and production process. At NCAB, he specializes in sustainability and champions NCAB Group’s aggressive approach to tackling these important issues
Hemant Shah is the Consortium Chair for IPC-2581 Consortium. The former group director of product management for PCB products at Cadence, Shah led the effort to create an industry-wide consortium of design and supply chain companies to get IPC-2581 – the standard for transferring PCB design data to manufacturing – adopted. Earlier, Shah managed the Allegro signal and power integrity products for PCB and IC packaging.
Jonah Stephenson is a PCB and packaging professional with 25years of experience working in Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Analog Devices and Google. As a PCB designer, Stephenson specializes in HDI and miniaturization of PCBs for wearable devices in high-volume mass production. Currently he is managing the eCAD organization at Google, responsible for the teams that design the Pixel Phone, Pixel Watch and Pixel Buds. As an organization leader he is focused on reducing design cycle time and costs, while identifying areas for automation to improve time to market.
Mike Tucker is director of engineering and technology at Millennium Circuits (MCL). He has over 27 years; technical experience in PCB manufacturing (rigid/rigid-flex/HDI/flex/MPCB). He has been responsible for the development and implementation of manufacturing processes and methodologies to drive the company’s technology curve, capabilities, and competitiveness. He is an expert in front-end engineering, CAM tools, automation of CAM tooling, integration of CAM tools with MRP/ERP/shop-floor operations and software development of shop-floor software operations. He works closely with engineers, designers, program managers and OEMs to build mission critical parts from concept to prototype to production.
Ben Voigt is an embedded engineer at Sparx Engineering. He has 23 years of experience co-developing hardware, embedded firmware and desktop software. His main interests are design and implementation of medical equipment, software reliability, real-time networking, and optimal signal recovery. Prior to Sparx, he worked for the Life Sciences Branch of NASA, working on EKG processing and integration of networked real-time systems. Voigt has a Ph.D. in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and is a licensed professional engineer in Texas.
Wayne Wang is data center product director for R&D at Shennan Circuits, where he has worked for 13 years and leads a team to explore advanced PCB technology and support customers to provide solutions with PCB layout design, process control, reliability, cost and signal integrity. He has a bachelor’s in detection guidance and control technology from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2011.
Syed Ubaid Ali Warsi is a seasoned IPC CID senior PCB designer with 20 years of diverse experience, His journey encompasses guiding boards from the initial design phase through prototyping, board bring-up, EMC compliance, and finally to full-scale production. Specializing in high-speed PCB design and EMC compliance, he navigates cutting-edge technologies like Intel’s Agilex and Stratix series, PCIe Gen3/4, 56Gbps PAM4, and 28Gbps NRZ interfaces. A notable HDI technology expert, Syed contributes to breakthroughs in 0.2mm CSP multi-lamination breakout boards. Beyond his individual accomplishments, his mentorship has shaped the next generation of PCB designers. Through his mentorship, several professionals are now thriving at renowned companies like Intel, Xilinx, R&D Altanova, Hitek Systems, among others. As owner of Wavetroniks, his commitment to excellence and innovation drives success in the dynamic field of PCB and hardware design, serving clients across North America.
John Watson has a career spanning over 44 years in electronics, with 24 working in the PCB design/engineering field. He has worked with several top companies including Teledyne API, Emerson Computer Power, Legrand Corp., and served in the US Army in the military intelligence field. Presently, he works as a technical expert with Altium, where he trains and mentors new customers on Altium tools and the PCB process, working alongside companies to better their proficiency with ECAD tools and the overall quality of the PCB design process. Furthermore, Watson is a college professor at Palomar San Marcos, teaching basic and advanced PCB design. He is a highly sought-after author and writer for various blogs and white papers and author of two library and data management books
Susy Webb, CID, is a senior PCB designer with 40 years of experience. Her career includes experience in coastal and oceanographic oil exploration and monitoring equipment, point-to-point microwave network systems, and CPCI and ATX computer motherboards. Webb is a regular speaker at PCB East and PCB West, and international design conferences, and consults for individual companies and PCEA chapters. Her presentations discuss practical implementation of complex engineering concepts into board layout and methods to improve the overall design and flow of printed circuit boards. She is CID certified, a former writer/columnist for PCD&F, a chapter writer for Clyde Coombs’ Printed Circuits Handbook, and one of the judges for the annual TLA competition. Webb is also an active member of the PCEA Executive Board and education committee and is a member and past president of the Houston Chapter of the Designers Council.
David Wiens has held various engineering, marketing and management positions within the EDA industry over the past 35+ years. His focus areas have included advanced packaging, high-speed design, routing technology and integrated systems design. He is currently the product manager for the Xpedition Enterprise portfolio of products for electronics systems design. He holds a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Kansas.
Paul Yang is senior marketing manager and field applications engineer expert at JOVE PCB.
