We really had an outstanding week at PCB West. Preshow registration rose to nearly 2,000 (!) and actual attendance was up more than 30% over last year.

Congratulations to Judy Warner and Michael Ingham, whose talk on RF/microwave design and fabrication drew more than 100 attendees, the most in the conference. Newcomer Jamin Taylor’s presentation on flex construction also drew more than 80 folks. Well done!

I also want to congratulate the winners of the PCD&F NPI Award for best new software tools of 2011. They include:

• Design Verification Tools: DfR Solutions (Sherlock Automated Design Analysis)
• Computer-aided Design (CAM) Tools: Downstream Technologies (CAM350)
• Documentation Tools: Polar Instruments (Professional HDI Stackup Design & Documentation)
• PCB Design Tools: Altium (Altium Designer 10)
• System Modeling and Simulation Tools: Sigrity (SystemSI – Parallel Bus Analysis)

We have posted the full announcements on PCD&F’s site. Thanks to all who attended!