A Pre-game Coverage of Samtec at DesignCon and The New Era of High-Speed Connectivity

So, how many presentations do you guys have viewed up? Eleventy billion, or at least that's what it feels like. Music.

Hi everyone, it's Judy Warner. Welcome back to the final podcast in our special DesignCon pregame series. Today I'm joined by my friends, or did I say clowns? These guys crack me up every time we end up busting up when I talk with Matt Burns and Scott McMorrow of Samtech. We talk all things DesignCon, amazing technology and innovation coming up, and you are going to be mind blown by what Scott McMorrow talks about with their recent integrations with ANSYS HFSS.

Also, just so you know, Samtech recently launched a new podcast called the Samtech Transmission Line Podcast. podcast. I put the link for you in the show notes below, as well as Sam Tech's DesignCon page. I hope to see you at DesignCon Boost 645. If not, I'll see you on the other side of DesignCon. Without further ado, let's jump into our conversation with Matt Burns and Scott McMorrow of Sam Tech.

Hi, Matt. Hi, Scott. So good to have you again. I can't wait to hear what you two guys are up to with DesignCon just around the corner. Hey, Judy, good to be with you again. Yeah, Yeah, good to be with you, Judy. It's nice to be on this podcast. Thank you. Well. Matt, I know you've always got, you both always have so much going, but I know as you go into arguably your biggest show of the year, I know you have a lot planned.

So I thought it'd be interesting for those that may be attending to hear about those things. So why don't you give us the 30,000 foot view and tell us a little bit about what you've got planned. Yeah, I would be happy to, Judy. And we appreciate you always inviting Scott and I on and other Samtech technology leaders as well on your podcast. It's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

DesignCon this year is just a continuation of our theme from the second half of 23, where we're really focused on what we're calling a new era of high-speed connectivity. connectivity.

That's a broad-based term that covers a number of technology trends that we see within data center, hyperscaler, AI ML, and other leading applications that are driving the need for higher speeds, smaller interconnects, and increased density within a system.

So when you look at, from Samtech's perspective, Judy, just to comment on that a little bit more, You know, artificial intelligence, you know, when ChatGPT came out about a year, year and a half ago, that was really an inflection point, at least in my mind, about how folks, you know, everyday people really understood what artificial intelligence was, right? And ChatGPT is not the largest language model out there. So AI models, AI processes continue to grow.

The amount of computing that you need to support AI continues to grow exponentially. And not only are we seeing one solution, GPUs, but we're seeing competing compute engines that are really driving AI as an AI ML adoption. Increasingly, we need faster data throughput. Data centers are continuing to grow. We're seeing increased demand for optical connectivity, data center hyperscale, or even in embedded applications.

What ties that all together at the system level, too, is also fabric technology.

So we see designs implementing PCI-5 at the system level right now. You're starting to see chipset designs using PCI-6, 64 giga transfer per second. PCI-SIG has already announced that they're going to be working on PCI-7 with the release of the first specification sometime in 2025, or at least that's the plan. And related to PCI Express, CXL, Compute Express Logic, which is really focused on cache coherent memory, driving disaggregated computing.

So there's all these, I could go on and on in terms of what's driving innovation within the industry, but these and other trends are really what's driving this next era, this new era in high-speed connectivity that Samtech's helping to drive within our industry. So we're really excited about that. With DesignCon coming up, up, we're going to be introducing new products that can support 224 gigabit per second on the channel level.

Earlier in 23, we launched our SciFly HD, which is a near-chip connector that uses our patented flyover technology to route high-speed data, you know, ASIC adjacent out to the front panel, ASIC adjacent to the backplane. You know, so we've shown some really good results with SciFly. And then we're looking at other solutions that leverage the SciFly contact contact system, both, you know, at the front panel, at the back plane, mezzanine-style connectors.

So you'll be seeing more information on that at DesignCon. So, you know, we're really excited about this new era of high-speed connectivity, and we're really excited to use DesignCon as a launch platform for additional solutions that we offer answering all these challenges. So how many presentations do you guys have viewed up?

$11 billion, or at least that's what it feels like. So, I mean, we're blessed at Samtech to have some of the leading companies, industry luminaries, you know, such as Scott, you know, who's on the call with me, Isvan Novak, Rich Mellitz, Gus Blando, and many more. So I think we're around 11 presentations or technical papers or workshops or, you know, doing some co-presentations with some of our partners, whether that's EDA or test and measurement or whatnot.

It's hard to list all of them because there's so much that's going on. Steve Krusewik is another one of our specialists. He's going to give some more detail on PCI-6, PCI-7 implementation. Scott obviously is going to comment on some of the things he's working on. So yeah, we're real excited about the opportunity. In addition to all the technical papers, obviously, I think we have on the order of between 12 or 13 demonstrations, product demonstrations, technology demonstrations.

Nine of those are going to be in the Samtech booth. I'd like to tell you about all of them right now, Judy, but then why go to DesignCon? So we're going to wait for the event to talk about those in detail. And then in addition, we'll have three or four demonstrations with some of our partners on the test and measurement side, some of the semiconductor partners that we have, and some of the EDA slash IP partners that we have. So design cons always is a big event.

It's getting harder and harder to go bigger than the year before, but we continue to meet that call, meet the answer. In addition to the technology papers and in addition to the product demonstrations, Samtech, I think this is the third or fourth year in a row that we're the sponsor for the opening reception. So we're always excited about that. I think we had something like 500 or 600 people attend that last year.

So it's a good time not only to enjoy some good food and a nice libation, but it's also a nice time to reconnect with old friends, reconnect with your colleagues. And really, I think it sets a nice foundation for the week that is designed. I could talk more and more, but Scott obviously is the star of this podcast,

so I'm going to turn it over to him because Scott, in all seriousness, we're really excited about some of the things that Scott is launching, and before I take any more of his thunder, I'll give it to him. Okay. Let her rip, Scott. What do you get up your sleeve this time of year? Well, thanks, Matt and Judy. Well, the first thing I've got to tell people, the main reason to come to DesignCon is to come to the Sam Tech booth and get a free tiger for your children.

That is the highlight of DesignCon for many, many people. Well, before, you know, I want to add on to that pitch. It's not just a little stuffed tiger. You can adopt a real tiger that are endangered, right? Exactly. It is the coolest thing. I got two of those little tigers and I gave one to a friend and I adopted one. So there's a good sort of social, if you're an animal lover, there's a good social purpose. Oh, exactly. And there you have one. Wonderful.

I can't have one. My little dog would tear it to shreds. So this year at design con we're you know as part of this transition into even higher speed on activity i've got a couple of initiatives first i just want to you know one of the foundations that i've been working on is we're in the process of finalizing our production design on our ice speed air cable and that's the cable that's going to be going into to these next-generation SciFly HD connectors.

It is the highest-performance in-box cable in the world. It is co-extruded. It is near-zero skew. It is flexible.

Its performance doesn't change. And that's a huge emphasis for Samtech at this design con is the fact that not only do we have cable, there are cable connectors and flyover systems. We have highly stable, highly repeatable, reliable cables, and that is different than a lot of people in the industry. If you move our cable, it doesn't change. If you bend our cable, the signal performance doesn't change.

So that's really important, and I'm really proud of what our Wilsonville cable plant has done and all the engineers involved that I've been involved with on that. On the other side, I've been involved in. Usability or designability. What we're finding as we go faster and faster, it becomes harder and harder to design things. And the most important thing to design in a printed circuit board, working with packages and connectors, is the printed circuit board launch.

That is the area where you take the signals from the connector or from the package and essentially transition it into traces in the Pernod circuit.

And I developed a tutorial that's two and a half hours long. It's in conjunction with ANSYS. And we're using an ANSYS tool, ANSYS Hive HMSS 3D layout, which is a high-performance planar tool that allows us to do three-dimensional simulations of boards, BIAS packages, and things like that.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach an entire methodology that demystifies the design of vias, demystifies the way that we build them, the way that we control them, and gives you basically step-by-step instructions on how to design and optimize them yourselves. But wait, wait, there's more. I built Python scripts that use the ANSYS software to automatically generate.

So I automatically generate them in various different configurations for specific Samtech connectors, also for a few things like one millimeter pitch VGAs that are ubiquitous in the industry. Everybody needs that. It will handle from four layer designs to 42 layer designs. It's programmable. Everything is documented. Every feature that's used for tuning is named with meaningful naming conventions, with meaningful documentation.

There are even some EDA kind of or fabrication design rules, like what the annulus around a via pad is, what the annulus is around an anti-pad is required, what minimum via-to-via spacings are.

And by doing this, we're taking the SI engineer from... Basically somebody that designs something that's really hard to design and can literally take weeks to just construct the three-dimensional model. It takes minutes. So we create it for them and then they'll now be able to actually use it, manipulate it, simulate it, and modify it. Then, since transitions aren't there by themselves, they don't exist singularly,

there are many of them. If I've got 100 differential pairs on a board, I have 100 separate transitions. I have a connector that can have, say, 72 different differential pairs on it and pins. So the software also creates arrays of the launches.

And we have a method to control that array, control the way that the vias are placed, whether they're via in pad or dog bone breakouts or angled breakouts, and the distances and the directions so that you can now go in and visualize where the routing room is. It's the hardest thing that people, that signal integrities engineers have to do is visualizing how their design is going to impact routing.

And so many good SI designs get thrown back by the layout department with the comment, we can't build this, we can't route this. So the idea is to be able to see it, visualize it, route it. Once you've done this, it's very simple to shoot DXF files for each layer in Vault. It's very simple to document the entire thing. Plus, for customers of ours with our connectors, we can co-design with them.

If the customer does not have the simulation bandwidth to do the numbers of simulations required for an optimization, optimization they can at least step help us set up the design and we can share parameter files simple parameter file back and forth they tell us which connector we want to use what the what what configuration they've decided looks like it's going to work better once we have once we've settled on that we can import their stack up into and their materials into the design

and complete the optimization and complete all the simulations, what that means for us as a company is we don't have to design every launch for every connector, for every customer's layers that buy our products. We do hundreds. We probably do a thousand designs a year in our organization. And they're all a little bit different. So what we're doing is unifying the nomenclature. As my father used to say, if you know the nomenclature, then you know a thing.

It's in the names. It's the names that are important. How important do they have? They have power. So by naming it, we drive the market. We drive the knowledge base in the industry. And we help our customer. We hope everybody uses Samtec products, but at least the methodology is something that anybody can use. They just would have to use it on their own connectors in their own ways. For us, we can literally design these transitions in one day.

When it used to take weeks, if not months, to do all of the what-ifs and the building and the making mistakes and having to rebuild it. It's all done. It's all within the tool. So it showcases our products. It showcases our superior engineering capability. And design and understanding of these high-performance design. And we're also showcasing the ANSYS product, which integrates HMSS into a 3D tool and shows the capacity of that tool for doing extremely complex design.

So I'm really excited about it. I've been teaching this methodology for a year and a half. And finally I broke down and we talked about, you know, Now, ChatGPT being the big driver, well, ChatGPT is how I learned to program in Python. Absolutely. Six months ago, I did not know Python, and I finally realized this stuff is so complex, I need to create a script to drive it. And between ChatTPT and Google Bard, they are my friends. They are the engineer I talked to. I'm so sorry, Scott.

No, yeah, absolutely. So they've helped you. they've helped you absolutely absolutely i would not have known half of the python commands that i use without asking questions querying and then badgering the tool you know badgering the software to give me the right answer you do have to be discerning with them yes and i i have engineering buddies like that do you know engineer every day all day and some of them are kind of content creators like me,

and they say the number one thing they love and use ChatGPT for is code. And over the last year or so, they've been kicking those tires to make sure it's right, and it's right, and it's really accurate. And they're like, this is saving us so much time. And so you're really echoing what I kind of hear anecdotally across the industry. It is.

I could have bought a few Python books, gone to a bunch of websites, but finding the particular function, the particular feature that I want would have just taken most of my time. And I wouldn't have found all the good, because I would generally settle on, okay, this works, I'll work around all my issues. But, you know, using AI and, of course, we're driving a lot of the AI tools with our interconnect. So it's just a wonderful synergy to be able to do this.

Then the other thing I'm doing at DesignCon is I'm on a panel discussion with a number of people from the industry, Kathy Liu, Al Lebs, Todd Westerhoff, on extreme confidence simulation for 400 and 800 gig signaling. So stepping back to that slow 112 gigabit per second design and talking about what you need to do to get it right, get it right all the time.

We take advantage of it at Samtech all the time because we correlate our simulation environment and our measurement environment together to our design practices. But so many people haven't yet. And so there's a lot of lessons to be learned from some other luminaries in the industry. That really is an all-star crew. Go ahead, Matt. Sorry, I was just thinking how meta this conversation is.

Scott's learned, no, serious, right? Scott's learned Python scripting of chat GPT to ease design of SAM type connectors that go into AI hardware that power chat GPT or Google BARD. Right? Exactly. Exactly. It's a virtuous circle of life. Two things before I let you guys go. I wanted to go back to, one, I think this is so exciting, Scott, where you're doing with ANSYS.

I had Giuliano Milani on the podcast a while ago and I found I have Giuliano on because I just geek out over his 3D eye candy puts on LinkedIn all the time. And it's like because it HFSS or, you know, they're so visual. It's like, oh, that's how it works. And to your point about vias. Yeah. If you're going to do a 42 layer circuit board with buried and blind vias and and there's via stubs, and there's diff pairs.

And it's like, to do that as a human being, you know, a signal integrity engineer, or a layout with one mill pitch, and it's just, to me, I just have nothing but compassions for today's engineers, but I'm really encouraged that companies like Ansys and Samtech are working together, and I see all teams doing that. I see Keysight doing that. Yeah, I think this trend towards these integrated partnerships is going to be really big in this next year. And I love hearing it.

Oh, absolutely. I will, the next thing that I have to do on my plate is to take the software I've written, give it to Giuliano and have him take him through the process. Because he can do all, he could do hundreds of different kinds of visualizations based on... Parameterization that I have, because he loves to do that. While I've given him the platform that all he has to do is perform the visualizations, he doesn't have to set everything up to do.

And I think you're right. We are, we're a huge village. And for so many years, we've treated, every company is very, has always been very parochial in terms of, you know, this is my domain, but not yours. So we do connectors, Keysight does, and Rohde and Schwartz do instruments. Yes. And we're starting to break, we're breaking down those boundaries in a lot of the stuff.

I mean, the papers and the work that Brandon Gore and Rich Mellitz have done with Keysight on measurement technology using our connectors is fantastic. And that's going to be a wonderful paper at DesignCon that's going to be presented by Brandon. So there's a lot. And we look for more and more of those sharing sessions with our partners like that. I would rather that and share it and basically teach everybody how to fish rather

than keeping it because the industry is just moving too fast and it's easy. easy. And, you know, at Samtech, we, you know, we've, we've got a, a soft spot for the little guy. We, we have a huge number of, of, of customers that there may be only one or two electrical engineers in the company, but they may be the next, you know, big thing in the industry. So we love working with them and helping them at teaching.

Well and they so often get overlooked right and and because we were like cheats we were all in our little silos and zero-sum game i think of what is that awful little creature's name from oh god of the rings golem yeah i feel like we were doing that for too long exactly exactly and so i anyways it's good what were you going to say matt sorry i just no i i i just wanted to add one more point to what Scott said.

And I apologize that you were going down a tangent with Lord of the Rings and I pulled you back to the real world. I'm so sorry. This always happens when we get together. I know. It's just, I don't know why. This need or this sense of collaboration is, it's necessary. You know, Scott's been doing some of the things he's been doing for decades. And he needs help from, no offense, Guy, I mean, you're really good at what you do, but we all need help, right?

And we've got this great partnership with ANSYS, with the work that we're doing for VIA Design and some of the 3DSi models that we're doing. And you know what, from Samtech's perspective, I guess two large trends, customers are demanding it, right? Customers don't want to come to Samtech and say, I need a connector.

They come to Samtech and say, fix my channel, right? And if we're going to fix the channel, that's working with the test and measurement companies, that's working with the semiconductor companies, that's working with the EDA companies, that's working with the laminate vendors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Plus, with speed getting so much faster, we really need that village that Scott mentioned.

So not only at the customer level, I think standards is another area where we're starting to see a tremendous amount of collaboration, especially 224. There's, you know, there's whispers of 448, which we can save for another, for another topic. But if you don't have the collaboration and if you don't have the partners, no one companies can be successful, right? The big hyperscaler companies, the big, the big Silicon Valley companies, they depend on their partners.

Even the, you know, I like how Scott mentioned, and he, we should mention, we should blare this from the mountaintops. Samtech does try to fight for the little guy. The little guy needs the same, the same resources just as much as the hyperscalers do. So the more we can collaborate, the more we can come up with these innovative solutions, the easier it is for the ecosystem. That's what we need, I think, is an ecosystem. I'm just saying with the double

E on the front. No pun intended, right? Yeah. I'm not selling the voting, dang it. You can send me a $50 check for that, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Enough about you. Let me talk about me. No, I, but I truly did name this the ecosystem because I've held that belief for so long. I could just never sell it because, you know, working for different individual companies who have very real goals to meet and products to sell, investors to deal and customers problems to solve.

But I've always believed that is not a zero sum game. And Matt, you taught me that the speeds are just too dang fast. So now we're being forced into it. However, I always thought it was a rule. And when people do it, I've seen the outcomes even in a more analog way. So to see this new era of high speed connectivity, right, and being done in a, you know, our, our electronics village, I think so, so exciting. Well, you guys have got me even more excited about DesignCon than I was.

So thank you for that. that. Where should I point folks to go find out more about what you're doing? Do you guys have a DesignCon page up? We do. It's very simple. Samtech.com slash DesignCon. And that provides all the details on Scott and our additional presentations, our demos, and our partnerships. Okay, great. Well, I'll make sure and send folks over there for our listeners. Make sure you go check out the show notes.

I'll put those links for you. And if you haven't yet registered for For DesignCon, or if you're a latecomer, you can use the Ecosystems promo code ECCO for 15% off. So you can go see Matt and Scott and the whole group from Samtech. So you guys, thank you so much for coming on. It's always a blast. And I always learn so much from you. Thank you for all you're doing and thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Judy. To our audience, we will see you at DesignCon. We'll be dark that week,

so we'll miss you that week. So, if you're there, come see me at booth 645. Matt, what booth are you guys in? The big one right in the middle. Okay. You can't miss it. Come through the front doors. We're right there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then I'm in the back of that aisle in the little corner, but I am along that same aisle. So, yeah, for our listeners who are coming, please come see all of us there at Sam Tech. Otherwise, we'll see you next week when we're live the week after Design Con.

Thanks for joining us today. remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. Music.