In the tenth grade at Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey,  I was introduced to the world of computer programming. I loved with the idea of getting a computer to do the work I was too lazy to do myself. For some reason, the actual process of writing and debugging the code never seemed like work to me. It always felt more like a puzzle or a game, and the quality of the end result always seemed better than what I could do manually.

When I was choosing my career path, my older brother told me that an Electrical Engineer not only writes code, but also designs the hardware it runs on, so I dumped my plans to be a sports-writer for the Miami Dolphins, and dove headfirst into engineering at Rutgers University. I wasn’t a great student, but I was fortunate enough to scrape by and gain enough real world experience to actually get a job in my chosen field.

I’ve been actively designing hardware and writing software to run on it since I graduated. During that time, I’ve completed over 100 board designs in Defense, Telecom, Datacom and High Performance Computing applications. I always relished the creative side of the design process and the lab debug and bring-up of the boards. What I struggled with, was the mind-numbing, repetitive manual tasks, and checking required to get a successful design completed. Hey, I signed up to be an Engineer, not an accountant!

I spent most of the 2000’s working for startups with some brilliant engineers who knew more than a thing or two about automation for ASIC and FPGA design. We were pushing technology with large cutting edge boards containing multiple high pin-count ASICS and FPGAs. Combine that with very compressed schedules and very little room for errors. Automation for the library, schematic and board tools turned out to be the best way to get the job done, and as a bonus it really renewed my interest in the job.

Fortunately for me, I had the privilege of having Dal Locke as my PCB engineer. He automated the Allegro PCB tools and I handled the schematic, library, manufacturing and board testing tools. If our Allegro Tools couldn’t do a job efficiently, we figured out how to make it happen. We went on to design some crazy boards together for 15 more years, until Dal finally broke off and started dalTools to offer his Allegro PCB productivity tools to like minded PCB designers. His company has been enormously successful, and deservedly so.

A few years later, Dal convinced me to start CadEnhance and offer a complementary set of tools to the often overlooked schematic developers and part librarians who needlessly suffer through manual tasks that really needed to be automated 20 years ago.

I’m happy to say that CadEnhance has been growing steadily for 5+ years now. We keep polishing and extending the features of the tools, and making them work seamlessly in much more general applications. We work with many great customers who use our standard tool offerings and  others who need custom solutions to solve problems they run into with their own EDA tools. We enjoy the challenge of meeting their exacting demands, and their ingenious ideas have really enhanced and extended the feature sets we offer. 

We are proud of what we’ve done, but we aren’t close to finished. We’ve learned the hard way that we don’t have all the answers, and we’d love the opportunity to keep learning while helping you get your next problem solved.