Lauren Waslick and Kristen Aguiar discuss mentorship, visibility and the career few people know exists.

One of the PCB design community’s greatest talents is hiding in plain sight.

Ask a room full of high school students what they want to be when they grow up and you'll hear doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, maybe even influencer if we're being honest. In my own case, I wanted to be a writer. I simply failed to anticipate that the characters would be engineers.

Applying UHDI only where density and performance demands require it can reduce layer counts, improve yields and lower costs without sacrificing electrical performance.

One of the most common assumptions PCB designers make when investigating ultra HDI (UHDI) technology is that every layer must be built with ultra-fine geometries using semi-additive processing (SAP) or modified semi-additive (mSAP) processing. In practice, most UHDI stackups are a combination of conventional layers and UHDI layers. This approach – call it selective UHDI – places UHDI layers exactly where they deliver the most benefit and lets conventional layers handle the rest, resulting in a mixed-process stackup.