Finally Back to Live Events

After a pandemic break, this year’s FED Conference 2021 took place as a live event last week in Bamberg. The conference is a gathering for the German-speaking electronic and PCB-related industry for more than 25 years, circulating across various cities in Germany and stopping this year in the charming city of Bamberg.

For those of you not having heard about Bamberg – it’s a town that’s more than 1.000 years old located on the banks of the small river Regnitz just a bit north of Nuremberg in the state of Bavaria.

We shared a booth with our eCADSTAR reseller CSK, as we have done in the previous years and I also had the pleasure to give a presentation in the design track to explain the capabilities of our PI simulation tool to analyze PDN (power distribution network) structures (in particular PDN vias) efficiently. CR-8000 allows correct by construction with smart parametric study features for optimization purposes.

Electronic Engineering meets beer culture

Bamberg is well known for its old town spanning over an island of the river – a medieval town structure that remained untouched by any of the martial conflicts of the recent centuries. Furthermore, Bamberg is judged as the capital of beer due to the number of local breweries – depending on the judgment of what’s comprising a ‘real’ brewery (contrary to a pub making its own beer) there are around 10-12 local breweries in Bamberg, all offering more than just a single kind of beers, so an exhausting tasting may become a serious challenge.

And I have to mention that Bamberg knows a very special beer – a smoked one where they dry the grain before the brewing with smoke which then adds a very special taste to the beer – interesting but very special. Personally, I like it most when it’s part of a beer source for the different pork roasts they offer with dumplings and kraut.

With 250 attendees the event has seen a reduction of 40% to pre-pandemic times – but I have to admit that with the Covid rules changing on a nearly weekly basis and many companies with travel restrictions still in place I had expected even lower numbers. Around 40 exhibitors addressing the range from PCB manufacturing, prototyping, and test up to EDA software vendors have been looking forward to meeting the attendees.

All those being able to be at the conference have been excited to exchange on a face-to-face event, meeting old friends, doing business and technical talks, but as well chit-chatting and having beers together.
After the opening session on Thursday morning and the interesting keynote from Joey Kelly who spoke under the title ‘No Limits’ about how even advanced goals can be achieved the conference split into four technical tracks addressing different areas of PCB design and manufacturing.

Fast analysis of the current load of vias in the PDN

I had the pleasure to present the experiences from a project our group in Paderborn did a while ago. We investigated how currents will spread into via patterns within a power distribution network of a modern multilayer PCB (an application utilizing an Arria FPGA and DDR4 memory devices). These research results have been published in a recent article in PCD&F magazine.

Read Article

We have been able to show the process of how easily and on-the-fly such studies can be performed to interested attendees at our booth.

I’m looking forward to the FED conference 2022 – it will be the 30th anniversary conference then, planned to be held in Potsdam near Berlin.