The process originates in the customer’s mind. In this particular case, ACCES has received numerous requests for PCIe versions of mPCIe cards from the company’s catalog. The need for the product has therefore been expressed by the customers themselves which made it easier for both sides as everybody was excited for the project to come to fruition. As a side note, this is yet another reason for maintaining long-lasting relationships with customers that can communicate their needs and expectations effectively. Instead of trying to forcibly impress and convince customers to purchase certain products, which is exhausting for both sides, a two-sided conversation about standards sets in. 

Making a PCIe version of every single product in ACCES’s portfolio would be an extremely expensive and time-consuming process with no guarantee for enough sales to justify it. From the marketing, reliability, and financial standpoints, shipping third party adapters didn’t make sense either given that the company prints new PCB products on a monthly basis. I was therefore tasked with researching the features of high end PCIe-mPCIe adapters to deliver a product that meets the customer’s highest expectations. 

Some of the most important features of similar solutions were the ability to fit it in low-profile PCs, the ability to use the USB features of mPCIe not offered by PCIe, as well as a reliable mPCIe and USB signaling. Additional perks included the ability for mounting a half-size mPCIe card, availability of external 12V connector pulled from PCIe bus, and an optional mounting bracket, which in our case includes a DB-37 cutout used with some of ACCES mPCIe boards. This led to a full mPCIe functionality that could be used with traditional PCIe slots meeting the original objective. After getting approval from my supervisors, I was ready to begin the CAD design work.

The project was realized using the somewhat old school PCAD software. Learning its usage from one of the engineers at the company was a fun learning process that I enjoyed despite some initial difficulties in troubleshooting. I believe that knowing how to use such a program, including making new parts and symbols from scratch is a very important experience many engineers miss out on nowadays due to wide availability of CAD libraries online. Nevertheless, sometimes the part footprints are not available or are outdated and the need for creating one arises. I have therefore designed the board and the bracket for it according to all PCI-SIG specifications almost from scratch and while it took longer, I’ve learned a lot of skills that will be useful in the future. Having an engineer that would give me advice and answer my questions about all of the problems that I encountered throughout the whole process was invaluable. Looking for answers on the internet doesn’t always yield the best results and requires digging through lots of data irrelevant to the problem at hand.

One of the things that I learned from this internship is that human feedback can often go a long way and that it let’s you get straight to the heart of the problem without unnecessary skimming through the vast abyss of internet data. Understanding the complex needs of another person, whether it is a customer or an intern, is an invaluable skill rare even to humans, but something that for a long time cannot be possibly supported by an AI algorithm. I feel fortunate that in my takeaways I’ve found so much connection between what I want to study (circuits and machine learning) and what I’ve worked on during this internship.