PCEA

08/05/2026

05/04/2026

There’s been a lot of talk about agentic AI in our industry lately. But what is the path to achieving true agentic AI? In the May issue of PCDF/CIRCUITSASSEMBLY, Charles Pfeil breaks it all down in his feature article “Why Agentic AI Requires Design Methodology.”

As Pfeil says, capturing design intent is critical for AI to function as a true partner in PCB design.

For the past several years, the discussion around artificial intelligence in PCB design has largely focused on capability. How fast can AI route? How many rules can it process? How well can it replicate known good designs? These are reasonable questions, but they are increasingly the wrong ones.

We are now entering a phase where AI can do many of these things quite well. It can generate layouts, evaluate electrical performance and explore solution spaces at a speed no human designer can match. That part is no longer theoretical. What remains unresolved is something far more fundamental, and it has little to do with model intelligence.
The limitation is methodology.

To read this entire article, click here: https://tinyurl.com/4pjptcmb

02/16/2026

It's still cold outside, but our conference speakers will be covering some hot topics at PCB East! If you're involved in high-speed PCB design, make plans to be in Worcester, Massachusetts from April 28 - May 1 and attend these classes by the top PCB design instructors in the world. These topics are so hot that the fire marshal is standing by! Click here to register: https://tinyurl.com/bdp99a4c

02/13/2026

You're not hallucinating, but AI might be. Check out Sean Patterson's February cover story, "AI ‘Hallucinates.’ Why That’s Actually Good News."

As Sean points out, without the right context, AI can provide answers that sound right but can quietly derail manufacturing decisions. AI might provide us with a statistically plausible answer based on patterns in its training data. But without specific context, even the best AI becomes a very expensive guess. https://tinyurl.com/4v88uzaj

02/13/2026

Please help us welcome TLT Manufacturing and Parter, two of our newest exhibitors who are headed to the show floor for PCB East 2026. TLT is busy opening giant state-of-the-art PCB manufacturing facilities in Europe, and Parter is finding new ways to harness AI to help hardware teams streamline their supply chain management processes. Register for PCB East today, and sign up for our Free One-Day Expo Pass. It's free, gratis, gratuit, and kostenlos! bit.ly/4r15T0k

02/11/2026

Peter Bigelow digs deep in his February digital column, “The Next Great Technology Challenge: Designing without Rare Earths.”

As demand for AI and advanced electronics grows, the industry faces mounting pressure to reduce its reliance on scarce rare earth materials. Rare earths are front-page news today, but regrettably the focus is more toward geopolitical wrangling among countries that have them and those that do not. But all the saber-rattling among competitors fails to address the root challenge: how can new technologies be developed that perform the functions we want while using far less – or no – rare earths? bit.ly/45W2yqS