Judy Warner (00:01) Hi, Suzanne, thanks so much for joining the show today. I am delighted to have you back for the third year in a row of our DesignCon 2025 pregame tailgate party. Suzanne Deffree (00:11) Thanks for having me back, Judy, excited to be here. Judy Warner (00:14) Well, you you're my go-to gal to find out all things about DesignCon and tell us for our audience sake, tell us a little bit about you and Forma and your role at DesignCon this year. Suzanne Deffree (00:28) So Informa is the largest events producer in the world. And I specifically work within Informa Markets Engineering, which is focused on engineering, as you could have guessed by the name, as well as manufacturing. I've been with Informa for more than 20 years now, really excited about that. And a big part of my tenure has been spent on DesignCon, either on the media side, which is where I originated, or in the event management side. And now I get to be the person that kind of shepherds the event. I oversee all the little details and make sure everything is on track so that folks like Naomi, our conference producer or marketing department, they have what they need to make it a spectacular show. And of course to make sure that our attendees and exhibitors have everything they need to have a great experience. Judy Warner (01:13) Shepherding is such a nice way to put it and you do it with such grace smart like herding cats, but But you do it well and I appreciate your role there Suzanne So this year is kind of a big year for design con and you know that better than anyone with your tenure so talk to us a little bit about the anniversary and Maybe the themes and things that are kind of swirling around that anniversary as you plan this year's event Suzanne Deffree (01:42) Yeah, so it's our 30th anniversary, if you can believe it. We were founded in 1995, spun out of, it's a bit of a complicated story, but spun out of an HP event. And I don't know about you, but I can't believe first off that 1995 was 30 years ago, and in my head, it's still 10 years ago. But here we find ourselves and we're fortunate enough to find ourselves with a handful of attendees and exhibitors who have been with us the whole time. Judy Warner (01:58) No. Suzanne Deffree (02:10) and who really bring a lot of knowledge back to the show every year. And every year, of course, we welcome new wonderful attendees and new wonderful exhibitors, but we'll be celebrating everyone in that community this year at the show. And we have a lot planned. We have an amazing welcome reception coming together for Tuesday night, January 28th, sponsored by Mazer Electronics this year, and that'll be at the Santa Clara Hyatt. Very excited. Everyone is welcome to join us. We have our 30th anniversary lounge on the show floor and they'll be comfortable seating there for anyone that needs to take a meeting or excuse me, just needs to get off their feet for a few minutes, recharge their cell phone, that'll all be available there. But we've also put together this massive wall and it is a wall of achievements in tech or big moments in tech and engineering. It started off with about 300 entries. Judy Warner (03:06) you want, can stop and clear your throat and then we'll start with the wall. Because that would drive me crazy. I'm going to take a drink too. Suzanne Deffree (03:12) Okay, sorry. getting over a cold. Judy Warner (03:20) This happens to me all the time. If I'm not talking and I'm working at my desk and then I have to start talking again, I'm like, so anyways, go ahead. so just cover the lounge part and then the wall and I'll cut that other part out. Suzanne Deffree (03:22) Yeah. Yeah. And we have our 30th anniversary lounge on the show floor. And it has comfortable seating for anyone that needs to take a meeting or just get off their feet, maybe recharge your cell phone. But it's also going to have a lot of features in it, including this wall. It's a massive wall. And I do mean massive. We started off with 300 entries for this wall and developed it into a timeline. We had to trim it down because if I had put all 300 on there, would have covered the entire convention center. We've got about 80 entries on this wall of milestones or major things in tech and engineering over the last 30 years. And it's things like, you know, the founding of Tesla, which not everyone was involved with, but that was certainly a turn, the iPod, the power outage, there was a massive outage a few, guess it was more than a few years ago now on the East Coast that took all of the power, the electrics, electricity down for a couple of weeks. And I remember it being a discussion around chip makers, had they been using different types of chips in some of these systems, their power wouldn't have gone out because of power integrity and signal integrity and all that. So it's this really incredible feature that I hope people have time to stop by. We're also going to have the original show programs from the first few shows in that lounge. Istvan Novak of Samtech, yeah, he was very kind and he had them, he had kept all of them and he shipped them to me. And we're going to have those in a case. Yeah, we'll have a little selfie station over there. It's going to be a lot of fun. Judy Warner (04:46) Mm-hmm. Have fun. Suzanne Deffree (05:07) We also have some ribbons that folks can put on their badges showcasing how many years they've been with DesignCon from first timer all the way up to those who have been with us for 30 years. We're just having a lot of fun with the 30th anniversary. And like I said, we're using it as an opportunity to celebrate everyone in this community and what they've contributed. Judy Warner (05:27) Well, for our listeners, some of whom will have been able to attend, some that are thinking about it, some that won't. So let's talk about who should attend DesignCon, particularly when it comes to design engineers, who should attend, why they attend, what the value is and what they can expect to gain from this wonderful conference and community that is so open-armed really even if you're a newcomer you will feel like you have a new bunch of friends and you're right at home there so let's talk about that a bit. Suzanne Deffree (06:09) Yeah, thank you. So DesignCon is the premier high speed communications and systems design conference and expo here in the US. And what we try to do and what I think we succeed in doing is offering industry critical engineering education right in Silicon Valley. So we have about 75 educational sessions that are open to every pass type. And then we have about 200 that are open to our conference pass holders. And those are presented by about 220, 225 maybe now, speakers in the industry. Yeah, and folks come from around the world to come to this conference. We say we're in the heart of electronics, we're in Silicon Valley, but we do, see people from Australia, from the Netherlands, from China, Japan, Canada, of course, everyone from every country just about comes out to the show and we're really excited to welcome them every year. So it is a great place to network, to meet people that you may already know from down the street, but to find a new contact from across the globe. Judy Warner (07:13) And education, mean, talk about up leveling your skills. Know where you are in that high speed or communications ecosystem. You're going to learn something. then, Suzanne, how many white papers were accepted this year? Do know off the top of your head? I forgot to ask you about that. Suzanne Deffree (07:32) I don't know off the top of my head. No, I don't know off the top of my head, but we do have the 15 conference tracks and nearly all technical sessions within the conference tracks require a technical paper from our authors. So that is out there. We do have additional 45 sponsor led sessions, you know, to get information right from the ethanol, the key sites, the cadences of the world and even more companies. And they often accompany their sessions with a white paper. Judy Warner (07:39) Okay. Okay, good. That's helpful. Anyways, I wanted to emphasize the depth of technical content that's available to you there and it really has a giant impact. I know on hundreds of design engineers that I know that regularly attend the show. So that's why I am always an enthusiastic supporter of your show. You mentioned, is there anything else going on socially? You mentioned the welcome reception. You mentioned the anniversary thing. Is there anything else going on? Maybe just not socially, but outside of the things we've discussed besides the technical tracks, papers and things like that. Suzanne Deffree (08:46) We have a meetup that we're hosting for first time attendees where they can network with each other as well as some design con experts. We're excited about that. That'll be on Wednesday. We're hosting a Lunar New Year celebration because the first day of our expo falls over the first day of Lunar New Year. So we've worked with some local organizations to bring in lion dancers that are going to perform at the show. That'll be fun. We have our standard booth bar crawls on Wednesday and Thursday evening. We've also worked with IEEE EMC groups, Women in Engineering, and we've partnered with them to create some career growth sessions that we'll be hosting on Thursday afternoon accompanied with a reception. Judy Warner (09:31) I know one, Suzanne, you're having the, I think it's your second year, the 40 under 40 engineers. I've been seeing that chat going on LinkedIn. Suzanne Deffree (09:42) my gosh, the 40 under 40, we're so proud of this group. Amazing people applied this year and I'm gonna admit we have more than 40 that we accepted this year because they were all so fantastic. We didn't wanna turn them away, you We wanna support that growth in that community. And these folks, to qualify, you must be under 40 years old. So we're calling them next generation leaders and they are... Judy Warner (09:55) Yeah. Suzanne Deffree (10:08) You know, some of them work at very established companies that are already on our expo floor. Some of them are entrepreneurs. Some of them, I know one is traveling in from London to be at the show. So we're really excited about just offering this opportunity to them. And for those who don't know, the program provides these 40 or 40 plus next generation leaders with complimentary access to all of the education at our show. And they also have a networking breakfast where they can connect with each other. But then we pull in some well-known industry experts or rock stars, if you will, to be part of that and network with them. And just for me being in the room when that breakfast is happening, I feel like I'm looking at the, you know, really the next keynoters for this event, the folks that are really gonna change the world in the next few decades. It's incredible. Judy Warner (11:01) I love that you do that just so much, just based on my own experience of working with established and up and coming design engineers when I was with Altium. I think that's so beneficial to put the old guard and the new guard together and it just sparks fly, doesn't it? It does. Well, anything else you want to share before I let you go, Suzanne? I know you're a crazy busy lady right now. Suzanne Deffree (11:17) It does, it really does. As you probably mentioned, the keynotes, we have three spectacular keynotes planned. On Tuesday, we have a senior scientist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. He'll be talking about electronics in the future of, excuse me, electronics for future high energy particle colliders. So really incredible stuff there. And I think that has to do a lot to CERN's work. On Wednesday, we have an engineer from NVIDIA who's talking about transforming power Suzanne Deffree (11:56) for accelerated computing and AI. So we're excited about that one too. And on our closing keynote on Thursday, we've got an Amazon engineer from Project Kifer talking about enabling global connectivity with low earth orbit satellite technology. All really, really incredible stuff that again, keynotes are open to everybody. Judy Warner (12:20) That's amazing. What great gets this year, right? They sound really good. I mean, they always are, but these ones like are just so present. The power, everybody, all engineers are talking about the demand for power is AI becomes a hot topic, right? And then low earth orbit, know, whatever you call it, ubiquitous internet like what VESAT and... Suzanne Deffree (12:24) Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Judy Warner (12:48) and SpaceX is done with low Earth orbit satellites is very exciting and so wonderful. Well, Suzanne, thanks so much for joining us today. Anything else? And then I know I have to let you go. Suzanne Deffree (12:52) Right. Yeah, definitely if you're thinking about coming to the show register Don't wait until you get to the show because at the show there is a fee for an expo pass But if you register before the show you can get a free expo pass or 15 % off if you use the promo code that we have made for Judy on this podcast and that is ECC 025 Judy Warner (13:29) Very good. Well, thank you for that. And I will be sure to share that with our audience. Suzanne, I look forward to catching you in the show while you're running around shepherding or herding cats. But thank you for coming on and sharing all your insight to DesignCon. And I look forward to seeing you there. Suzanne Deffree (13:46) Thanks, Judy. We'll see you at the end of January. Judy Warner (13:49) Okay, see you then. For our audience, please go check out the show notes. I'm going to put lots of resources and links there for you to everything Susanna and I've talked about. If you're going to DesignCon, please, I'll be walking the floor this year, no booth for me this year. But please give me a call or reach out to judy at the ecosystem.com. I'd love to meet you for a cup of coffee and just connect while we're at the show. We will see you next time. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. And that is 14 minutes and 20 seconds even.