As you may have picked up on this week, EE Times has purchased the DesignCon trade show and conference from the International Engineering Consortium.

This development is interesting to me for several reasons. One of the final projects I was involved in before spinning UP Media Group off from our former owner CMP was to open negotiations with the IEC about purchasing the event. Eight years later, they closed the deal (CMP owns EE Times).

I’m not sure how this will affect the PCB world. DesignCon has traditionally been a show for chip design and IP. In the past year or so, they added a PCB Summit to the event. I attended DesignCon in February for the first time in several years, and found that on the show floor, the PCB Summit seemed to be more focused on the manufacturing side. The conference sessions seemed to focus on PCB technologies and, with a few exceptions, were of the 40-minute, four-speaker variety. The whole thing seemed to be an attempt to reach engineers on an academic level vs. a practical level.

It will be interesting to see how EE Times focuses the event. The group also produces the Embedded Systems conference for programmers and companies involved in IP and high level systems design. At first glance I’d say this seems to be a synergistic marriage, one that fits the EE Times group very well. Let’s see how it shakes out between now and next February.