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North American PCB Orders Fall
Online Staff -- Electronic News, 12/30/2004

For the first time since April 2003, the North American PCB industry’s book-to-bill ratio fell below parity to 0.96 for November, according to electronics industry organization IPC.

The Bannockburn, Ill.-based trade group collects PCB industry data each month on both rigid PCB and flexible circuit producers. The book-to-bill ratios in November for rigid PCBs were 0.88 and 1.28 for flexible circuits.

For rigid PCBs and flexible circuits combined, revenue shipments in November increased 4.1 percent from November 2003, but orders booked decreased 27 percent from November 2003. Compared to 2003, shipments of PCBs were up 28.5 percent year-to-date, while bookings of PCBs were up 24.8 percent year-to-date. Combined industry shipments for November were up 5.2 percent over the previous month, and bookings were down 23.3 percent over the previous month.

The ratios and growth rates for rigid PCBs and flexible circuits combined are heavily affected by the rigid PCB segment, which represents more than 80 percent of the current PCB market in North America, IPC said. The influence of flexible circuits is growing, however, as flexible circuit shipments have shown stronger growth than rigid PCBs over the past year.

Rigid PCB shipments were down 9.6 percent and bookings were down 27.9 percent in November from November 2003. Year-to-date, rigid PCB shipments increased 17.8 percent and bookings increased 8.0 percent compared to the same period in 2003. Rigid PCB shipments from the survey sample increased 3.7 percent from the previous month and rigid bookings increased 1.8 percent from the previous month.

Flexible circuit shipments were up 58.8 percent and bookings down 37.2 percent in November compared to November 2003. Year-to-date, flexible circuit shipments grew 72.5 percent and bookings grew 88.7 percent compared to the same period in 2003. Compared to the previous month, flexible circuit shipments from the survey sample increased 10.7 percent and flex bookings decreased 71.6 percent.

Flexible circuit sales, which include some value-added services in addition to the bare flex circuits, represent about 18 percent of total PCB sales in IPC’s survey sample, which it considers to be representative of the industry. Since it is difficult for most flexible circuit manufacturers to break out value-added services, such as assembly, from their circuit sales, the amount of value-added services included in this industry segment’s sales is not known.

Ratios are calculated by dividing the value of orders booked over the past three months by the value of sales billed during the same period from the companies that IPC samples. A ratio of more than 1.00 suggests that current demand is ahead of supply, which indicates probable near-term growth, the group explained.

Cypress kits demo mixed-signal-array devices

Jeff Berman, News Editor -- EDN

2/15/2005 - Cypress Semiconductor subsidiary Cypress MicroSystems last week rolled out three development kits for the company's PSoC (programmable system-on-chip) mixed-signal arrays.

The company says the kits, the CY3215-DK, CY3210-PSoCEval1, and CY3210-MiniProg1, allow embedded board designers to design, emulate, debug, and test PSoC devices without designing a printed circuit board.

The kits aim to reduce the barrier-to-entry for the company's PSoC devices, according to Greg Verge, a Cypress senior applications engineer. "These kits provide everything you need to get up and running," Verge said.

The $599 CY3215-DK kit is a high-level design tool used to debug PSoC devices. It offers a small-footprint, high-speed, in-circuit USB 2.0-based emulator with a large trace buffer, which integrates with PSoC Designer and the user's development board.

"This [the 3215] gives users everything they need to get started," Verge said. "And it provides users with a powerful development environment that lets them see the details of a chip while a chip is running, such as breakpoints and trace buffers. The high-end equivalent of this kit costs more than $2000, and ours is about a third of that and equally powerful."

The $65 CY3210-PSoCEval1 includes an evaluation board and a mini-programming unit that supports all the devices in the company's PSoC CY82Cx product line. "This kit is for embedded designers, students, and hobbyists," Verge said. "The evaluation board lets users evaluate PSoC technology and see the benefits it provides for customer applications."

The $35 CY3210-MiniProg1 includes a mini-evaluation board that includes LEDs, a push-button switch, and a potentiometer, but no LCD module or breadboard prototyping space.

Flometrics releases enhanced PCB design software

EE Times

SAN FRANCISCO — 19 April 2005 - Flomerics has released a new version of its PCB design software that includes more than 25 improvements and enhancements designed to improve usability and tighten integration between electrical and mechanical design of printed circuit boards, the company said.

FLO/PCB v2.2 enhancements include automatic "Manhattan distance" calculation and constraint management, designed to enable the introduction of first order signal integrity requirements early in the design process.

Other key enhancements to the latest version of FLO/PCB include full integration with Flomerics' Flopack model generation product, styled display of interconnects depicting signal speed and quantity, support of Intermediate DataFormat-defined placement keep-out regions and annotation auto-sizing to improve readability of functional block and component placement diagrams.

According to Flomerics, (Marlborough, Mass.) FLO/PCB 2.2 promotes a conceptual design process that integrates electrical and mechanical design for printed circuit boards, enabling early resolution of component placement and thermal issues. The company said the product has received positive feedback from existing customers, including Agilent, BAE Systems, Cisco Systems, Rockwell International, Tellabs and Thales.

Other enhancements to the tool include specialized menus for rapid creation of functional block diagrams, automatic creation of physical layout and thermal model from the functional block diagram, 3D airflow and temperature prediction for both sides of the board and a fully-integrated library capability supporting JEDEC standards for component thermal models.

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