02-02-2023

When you’re new to your career, your role, or even new to the industry, the pressure can be immense. Then you find yourself at a trade show representing your company, tasked with bringing information back to your organization. But take heart, at least you’re not Harrison “Jack” Schmitt. Jack really understood pressure. Schmitt is a retired NASA astronaut from the Apollo, era but let me take a step back and explain some of the history. The U.S. space program, as you may recall, went to the moon with a science-based agenda; astronauts brought back lunar samples to study.

01-18-2023

This month, PCB007 Magazine looks at the evolution of advanced packaging from the fabricator’s perspective. This is, as you’re aware, a global topic. Asia harbors nearly all the manufacturing capabilities for the packaging and interposer substrates required for the latest packaging technologies. North America and Europe, buoyed by their respective chip technologies legislation, are working to bring packaging capability back to their home shores. How this plays out remains to be seen.

01-04-2023

Advanced packaging is not new to our coverage. Over the past two years, we’ve written about the heterogenous integration roadmap, as well as reported on the October 2022 IPC Advanced Packaging Symposium in Washington, D.C. This is a topic wherein printed circuit manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing begin to converge. For this issue of SMT007 Magazine, we contacted industry experts on packaging technologies to get their perspective on advanced packaging, and followed up with many of the participants in the IPC symposium, seeking a deeper dive into their presentations. We found enthusiastic voices willing to share their concerns, solutions, and R&D work with you.

12-05-2022

December is a month full of traditions. They may be religious, spiritual, family, or entirely personal. They may be related to the calendar or business cycles, but whatever the reason, December certainly seems to be driven by tradition. While traditions often get a bad reputation as stodgy and tired, they aren’t all bad. For example, we use this last month of the year to prepare you for IPC APEX EXPO. The upcoming conference and trade show is scheduled for Jan. 21–26, 2023, at the San Diego Convention Center. As we prepare this issue for publication, the show floor boasts 366 exhibitors.

11-17-2022

It was over lunch on the second day of the recent IPC Symposium on Advanced Packaging when I asked a question that triggered an interesting discussion about advanced packaging and ultra high density interconnect. While these two technologies are distinct, they are also symbiotic; it takes both to make either successful. As the symposium delivered on its agenda, the inter-relationship between those two technologies became crystal clear.

11-02-2022

How many times have you watched a conveyor belt in a movie played out for comedic effect? It’s a familiar trope: The belt starts out slowly, then increases its speed, until chaos ensues. Think “I Love Lucy,” “Star Wars,” and Charlie Chaplin in “City Lights.” These are perfect metaphors for this issue on workflow management, where planning your workflow on the manufacturing floor in these challenging times sometimes feels like being just one step away from disaster—or safety.

10-04-2022

Technical conferences, expos, symposia, and trade gatherings of all kinds are back and in a big way. Maybe it’s just because we’ve been quiet for a while, followed by a year of careful, tentative restarts to the event schedules, but this upcoming year’s calendar of events seems to be full steam ahead. I’m excited to get back into the convention centers and hotel ballrooms; that is where some of our best news and reporting originates. That comes at a price, however, as my travel schedule looks pretty brutal between now and Thanksgiving. Just between you and me, while it may feel brutal to my workload, I’m ready to dust off my passport, see some airports, and wear thin some shoe leather.

09-19-2022

In a 2010 New York Times article titled “Failing Like a Buggy Whip Maker? Better Check Your Simile,” writer Randall Stross confronts the buggy whip analogy and unintentionally offers some perspective on our industry. PCB fabrication is thriving on a global scale. Innovations are occurring regularly, mostly in Asia. It’s not that the world has moved beyond needing printed circuits; the world is simply evolving its wants and needs from a circuit board fabricator. It makes sense that those who are leaning on the buggy whip analogy may have given up on the industry. Truth be told, however, we’re more like the carriage parts manufacturers than like the buggy whip makers. Here's why.

09-02-2022

The development of an issue of SMT007 Magazine can take two to four months of planning, research, content gathering, editing, and production. Under normal conditions (are they ever normal?) the stories we identify at the start of the planning process are still accurate at the time of publication. We move fast in this industry, but sometimes, just like the rest of our industry, things evolve.

08-02-2022

We’re all feeling the discomfort, aren’t we? Things are getting squeezed and stretched. While the correct amount of that “something” is hard to put your finger on, there’s stress in the PCB manufacturing and assembly process. It reminds me of coming home from the hospital with my first born. He was 28 days early, and naturally, his early arrival threw off all our birth preparations. For example, we attended the last session of our Lamaze class with a newborn in a baby carrier. Never have I seen sharper, dagger-eyed stares than from that class full of moms-to-be.

07-19-2022

The gears of the economy worked like clockwork for quite a long time, at least in North America, Europe, and Asia. Overall, that smooth operation is no longer the case, for several reasons. It’s as if the watchmaker has upended the clockworks onto the worktable and is rearranging the mechanism to work differently—to tell a different time, if you will. In the overall economy, there are bearish signs (9.1% inflation year-over-year in the U.S. in mid-July). But in electronics manufacturing, the market looks quite bullish on the demand side. This month’s cover reflects that dynamic—a bullish industry within what seems to be an emerging bearish economy.

07-05-2022

In May 2022, the news broke in Portland, Oregon that the city government had suffered a “cybersecurity breach” and lost $1.4 million in city funds. As reported by numerous news sources, a city-issued press release stated that “preliminary evidence indicates that an unauthorized, outside entity gained access to a City of Portland email account to conduct illegal activity.” Incidents like these are more common than we realize, and must be addressed in our industry as well.

06-01-2022

When we first started planning this issue, we used the word “partnership” in our working title. Partnership certainly is one way to collaborate. Creating close working relationships with manufacturing specialists who can extend your capabilities for your customers is one obvious way to collaborate. But there are others, for example, collaboration can also look like proactive communication with customers as well as vendors.