SPEAKER BIOS

Daniel Beeker 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.

Ralf Bruening is product manager and senior consultant at the Zuken EMC Technology Center in Paderborn, Germany. Part of his responsibility is to help customers implement signal- and power-integrity analysis in PCB design flows and concrete project consulting and technology development. He holds degrees in computer science, electrical engineering and economics from the University of Paderborn. He has more than 30 years of experience in electronics and EDA. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and is involved in European Union-funded technology research and standardization activities (e.g. IBIS Open Forum).

Elizabeth Bustamante is an electronics engineer, PCB designer and active IPC committee member. As the engineering program manager at SnapEDA, she is responsible for leading a team of engineers in the creation of PCB libraries, ensuring the team is constantly evaluating and improving its quality, processes, and efficiency. She has a bachelor’s in electronics engineering from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana.

Robert Carter is vice president of marketing, business development, and technology for Oak-Mitsui’s FaradFlex embedded capacitance materials and support of advanced technology VSP copper. He has 32 years’ experience in printed circuits, advanced electronic materials, MEMs, RF modules, and chip packaging. He directs engineering, marketing, and sales worldwide. Carter initiated the startup of two major PCB factories in China, and led engineering, development, and applications organizations at companies such as Xerox, Toppan, Multi-Fineline Electronix, Rogers, Flex2Chip, and Panasonic Electronic Materials. He has studied chemical and materials engineering and business management at California Polytechnic and Grand Canyon University.

Keven Coates has been a development engineer at Geospace Technologies for seven years, where he designs low-noise seismic recording devices, industrial battery testers/chargers, and battery interface circuits. His work concentrates on embedded processors, very low-noise circuits, high-power circuits, thermal design, battery safety, and battery management. He spent the previous 20 years working for Texas Instruments, specializing in high-speed PCB layout/signal integrity, BGA layout, thermal issues, and PCB-friendly BGA packaging for consumer and automotive applications. He holds a bachelor’s from Texas A&M.

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 recently joined AGC-Nelco Taconic as director of field application engineering and technical sales, where he focuses on working with designers in the avionics and space industry to design and develop products. He has served on a number of IPC technical committees to develop industry standards and received an award for contributions to IPC-9121, “Troubleshooting for Printed Circuit Boards.”

John Coonrod is technical marketing manager for Rogers, Advanced Connectivity Solutions Division. He has 33 years of experience in the OCB industry. About half of this time was spent in the flexible circuit industry, regarding circuit design, applications, processing and materials engineering. The past 18 years have been spent supporting high-frequency circuit materials involving circuit fabrication, providing application support and conducting electrical characterization studies. Coonrod is chair for the IPC-D24C High Frequency Test Methods task group and holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Arizona State University.

Michael Creeden, CID+, has over 43 years of industry experience as an educator, PCB designer, applications engineer and business owner. As technical director design education at Insulectro, he helps OEMs and fabricators achieve design success for best material utilization. He is a Master Instructor for the CID+ IPC Designer Certification program, was a primary contributor for the CID+ curriculum, and teaches IPC CID/CID+ courses through EPTAC. He founded San Diego PCB Design.

Gary Ferrari has extensive experience in electronic packaging with an emphasis on printed board (PWB) design and manufacturing. He has held senior operations, quality and engineering positions in OEM and supplier environments, and served as executive director and cofounder of the IPC Designers Council. He has served on a number of IPC technical committees, including the IPC-2221/2222 Design subcommittee, and chaired the IPC Technical Activities Executive Committee. He has written numerous technical articles and provided design for manufacture (DfM) consulting services to the industry. Ferrari spearheaded IPC’s highly successful PWB Designers Certification Program, which has trained and recognized over 6,000 designers to date. He received the IPC President’s Award in 1990 and the IPC Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame Award in 2015, recognizing his contributions to the electronic interconnection industry and the association.

Mark Finstad is senior application engineer 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.

Michael Ford is senior director of emerging industry strategy at Aegis Software. Starting his career with Sony, including eight years working in Japan, he has been instrumental in creating and evolving revolutionary software solutions for assembly manufacturing. Today, he is an established thought leader for Industry 4.0 and digital smart factories, an active contributor to IPC industry standards, including the Connected Factory Exchange (CFX), traceability and secure supply-chain. In 2020, he received the IPC President’s Award for contributions to several standards that together now are leading to the formation of the new IPC Digital Twin standard. Michael also regularly contributes articles, columns and blogs in several leading industry publications.

Bill Hargin is founder of Z-zero, a manufacturer of software for PCB stackup planning, material selection and characterization. He has authored multiple articles on signal integrity, is a regular columnist for PCD&F, and more than 10,000 engineers and PCB designers worldwide have taken Hargin’s workshops on high-speed PCB design. With 25 years of experience dealing with PCB signal integrity, Hargin served as director of marketing for Mentor Graphics’ HyperLynx SI software and director of North American marketing for Nan Ya Plastic’s PCB laminate division.

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.

Mark Hughes is research director at Royal Circuit Solutions. Prior to Royal Circuit, he was technical editor for AllAboutCircuits.com and taught physics for 14 years. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Ben Jordan, CID+, is director of technical marketing at Altium, where he has worked since 2004 in R&D, technical support, and now as a marketing product and subject matter expert. He has over 20 years of experience in embedded systems, FPGA and PCB design. In his spare time, he loves to experiment with board-level electronics and microcontrollers, as well as play guitar.

Nick Koop is director of application engineer 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, 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.

Phil Marcoux has been involved with heterogeneous and related product design and manufacturing for over 40 years. He continues as a mentor for companies exploring new methods. The first company he founded suffered the consequences of poor heterogeneous product construction and only managed to survive by becoming one of the first full-service SMT design and manufacturing facilities in the US. After successfully selling that company, Marcoux went on to found one of the first chip-scale and wafer-level packaging companies. This company was responsible for the creation of some of the early component bonding, wafer-plated, and through-silicon structures and methods enabling many heterogeneous products. That second company, ChipScale, was awarded over 40 patents for these. Virtually every cellphone has licensed and utilized the structures covered by these patents.

Atar Mittal is an electrical engineer who manages Sierra Circuits’ design and assembly divisions. Passionate about high-speed designs, he loves to write about signal integrity, controlled impedance, etc. He recently gathered all his notes for an e-book on PCB transmission lines and differential pairs in PCB transmission lines.

Jamie Pacamarra, CID, is a designer at Analog Devices, where she has created a range of designs for various applications and disciplines, while doing thermal, signal integrity, and mechanical management and analysis of boards using simulations and 3-D modeling. She has presented at local and global Analog Devices conferences. She has a bachelor’s in electronics engineering.

Lee Ritchey is president of Speeding Edge and has been designing PCBs for more than 40 years, which have been aimed at the high-performance computing and video game market. He has designed more than 5,000 PCB stackups ranging from 4-layer video game PCBs to 36-layer backplanes. He has also taught more than 11,000 engineers and designers his seminars on signal integrity and PCB design. He has helped numerous fabricators learn to manufacture high-layer-count PCBs and backplanes. He was one of the original speakers at PCB West when it started in 1991.

Hemant Shah is group director of product management for PCB products at Cadence and is the Consortium Chair for IPC-2581 Consortium. Hemant 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, Hemant managed the Allegro signal and power integrity products for PCB and IC packaging.

Daniel Smith, IPC CID+, has more than 35 years’ experience in all roles of the PCB design process (concept through manufacturing/destruction). He has two US patents for EDA-related inventions and has programmed in a variety of software languages. He has taught a variety of PCB design courses, including HDI and other topics.

Vern Solberg is an independent consultant specializing in SMT and microelectronics design and manufacturing technology. He has served the industry for more than 30 years in areas related to commercial and aerospace electronic products and is active as an author and educator. He holds several patents for IC packaging innovations, including the folded-flex 3-D package technology, is author of Design Guidelines for Surface Mount and Fine-Pitch Technology, and is a speaker and instructor supporting several industry organization technical programs, including IPC and SMTA.

Mike Vinson is president and COO of Averatek. He has over 35 years of experience in product development and marketing in electronics. He has been responsible for all aspects of product and process development activities and manufacturing operations. Today, he is responsible for the commercialization of the Averatek precursor catalytic ink, nanomaterials, and ink blocking materials. Prior to this, he served as program manager, Products and Services Group at SRI International. He has held management-level positions in business development, engineering and applied R&D for a range of companies, including Universal Instruments, Kulicke & Soffa, and TI. Vinson holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School and a bachelor’s in civil engineering from Texas Tech.

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 the PCB, IPC and international design conferences and consults for individual companies and PCEA chapters as well. 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.