Karen Burnham feels your pain - the pain of EMC, that is. Karen is an EMC engineer, instructor, and founder of EMC United, a consulting company that aims to make EMC less painful for the rest of the PCB design engineering community. Karen joins us to discuss some of the most common EMC challenges facing our industry today, a variety of solutions for these challenges, and design practices that can help you avoid EMC problems the first place. Karen also explains why EMC needs to become part of every high-speed PCB design cycle, and not an afterthought that's only addressed when a board fails FCC.

Karen will be speaking at PCB East 2026, and she offers a preview of what attendees can expect to learn in her class, "EMC 101 - Fundamentals," which takes place April 30 at the DCU Convention Center in Worcester, MA.

What does Cadence's acquisition of EMA Design Automation mean for the respective companies, and the market? Mike Buetow considers the issues related to the EDA giant's acquisition of its largest VAR.

Scott Bright is co-founder and COO of Cadstrom IO, a new company that is coming up with tools for resolving some of the engineering problems that designers and engineers are encountering daily.

Bright has more than 35 years of technology and management experience, including three years at IoT company Jiva, where he was CEO, and 13 at the engineering firm Synapse, which he co-founded and was CEO.

Bright has designed hardware from back of the envelope sketch to high volume manufacturing for everything from commercial to the highest-reliability applications. As a career hardware developer, he understands the software problems endemic to product development.

He discusses Cadstrom's new platform for catching errors the ERC flow misses with Andy Shaughnessy and Mike Buetow of PCEA.