EchoStar's Les Beller Shares the PCB Design-to-Fab Process
Recently, I had the opportunity to meet and interview Les Beller of EchoStar Technologies. Beller’s career began in the early 1980s as a circuit board designer, eventually leading him to EchoStar, where he has managed the PWB ( Printed wiring board ) design group and spent time as a PCB quality engineer. He is now a manufacturing process engineer specializing in DFx. In this interview, Beller focuses on the many challenges printed circuit board designers face, strategies for bridging the gap between circuit design and fabrication, and the future of circuit designers. Barry Matties : Les, tell us about your history in the circuit board industry. How did you get started? Les Beller : I began by hand-drafting schematics and then went into tape and Mylar. That was in 1982 or so, when I was 18. That led into AutoCAD-based software tools for circuit board design and working for design agencies. I ended up selling Layout and fab work in a small prototype board shop using t...