SPEAKER BIOS

Syed Ubaid Ali is an IPC CID senior PCB designer with 18 years of diversified design experience, taking boards from design, to prototyping, board bring-up, EMC compliance, and final production. His major area of expertise is high-speed PCB design and dealing with EMC-related issues. He has worked on the industry’s latest high-speed FPGAs, such as Intel’s Agilex and Stratix series. He has also worked on PCIe Gen3/4, 56Gbps PAM4 and 28Gbps NRZ interfaces. Ali is an HDI technology expert who has worked on 0.2mm CSP multi-lamination break-out boards. During this tenure he has trained many PCB designers now working at Intel, Xilinx, R&D Altanova, Hitek Systems, etc. Ali currently owns a Canadian-based company, Wavetroniks, serving clients in the US and Canada.

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.

Caleb Buck is an electrical engineer and PCB designer with 12+ years’ experience as a PCB designer and 8+ years designing Li-Ion battery system for military, aviation and aerospace applications. He has spent more than five years focusing on how to increase PCB assembly reliability in harsh environments and in this work he has found PCB cleanliness of critical importance for mission-critical and life-critical systems.

Stephen Chavez 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 and is coauthor of the PCE-EDU curriculum. He is chairman of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA).

Tomas Chester, P.Eng., CPCD, has designed over 100 circuit boards through all phases of the product lifecycle, and managed a variety of multifaceted, interdisciplinary projects, from simple interconnect designs to complex microprocessors. His designs are created using cutting-edge manufacturing techniques and adhering to strict industry standards and specifications, with experience designing standalone single-sided creations to multi-board assemblies with mechanical integration. He has a degree in engineering systems and computing from The University of Guelph.

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.

Mike Creeden, CID+, has over 44 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 vice chairman of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA), and cowrote and teaches the PCE-EDU Printed Circuit Engineering Professional workshop. He was a Master Instructor for the CID+ IPC Designer Certification program, for which he was a primary contributor. He founded San Diego PCB Design, a nationally recognized design center he sold in 2016.

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.

Ray Fugitt has 35+ years of printed circuit board experience, 15 on the manufacturing side, primarily with Hadco. Joining Advanced CAM Technologies as an application engineer, he supported the CAM350 product through the PADS and Innoveda mergers. In 2002, he joined Downstream Technologies in technical marketing and later technical sales. He continues to support and train for the BluePrint PCB and CAM350 products.

Dave Hoover is a senior field application engineer at TTM Technologies, supporting some of its top telecom customers. He has 40+ years’ experience in printed circuit board fabrication and has been involved with the development of HDI, microvias, and other leading high-speed technologies. His career includes some large PCB fabrication companies such as Hadco/Sanmina, Data Circuits, Litronic Industries, and Multek.

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.

Ryan Miller is a field applications engineer at NCAB Group, with decades of experience in PCB manufacturing and DfM analysis. He graduated from DeVry University with a bachelor’s in electronics engineering technology. In his free time, Ryan likes to spend time with his wife and daughter. In addition, he likes fly fishing and reading technical articles.

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. He conducted his physics M.S. research on chemisorptive gas sensors and his applied physics Ph.D. research on random laser theory and stability. 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 and the American Physical Society, and he currently serves on the INCITS Quantum Computing Technical Advisory Committee.

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 original speakers at PCB West since 1991.

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.