PCB Chat

This episode was recorded live at the SMTA Pan Pacific Microelectronics Symposium in Hawaii. David Raby is president of Madison Alabama-based STI Electronics, a contract manufacturer for the EMS industry. David worked at the family business since he was a child and eventually took over the family business when his father (and company founder) Jim Raby retired. The electronics industry moves at the...

On this episode of PCB Chat we discuss the third quarter 2022 printed circuit design software market data from the ESD Alliance, which were released Jan. 23, 2023. Our guests are Wally Rhines, who spent more than 45 years in in semiconductor and PCB design as an executive with Mentor Graphics and before that, TI; and Merlyn Brunken, whose is the longtime market intelligence director with Siemens D...

Travis Kelly, president and chief executive of Isola and chairman of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America, joins PCB Chat host Mike Buetow to discuss the latest policy plans in support of the US printed circuit industry, and the new president of the trade group. Kelly gives updates on HR 7677, the bill introduced last year in support of the US PCB industry, and weighs the impact of the...

Electricity is the life blood for all circuit assemblies. It can also afflict significant damage via electrostatic discharge. Today, Christopher Almeras of Raytheon reviews the various ESD mitigation strategies as well as some ESD horror stories! Almeras began his career in process engineering for a small electronics manufacturer in the late 1990s. There he became responsible for the sites ESD com...

Historically, circuit assemblies are rigid devices. IoT (Internet of Things) has opened up the opportunity to embed electronics into a near limitless array of form factors. Some of these form factors require the electronic assembly to be flexible such as in wearable and medical applications. To complicate matters, the metal conductors on the assembly are rigid, not flexible or malleable. That may...

Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution. Beyond the buzzwords, what does this mean? David Graham is chief technology officer of 4IR.UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of Internet of Things-focused British Systems. 4IR.UK specializes in creating monitoring, control and automation solutions, often based on the MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform, for manufacturing environments. They also provide con...

Allspice has developed a software platform that supports users of CAD tools for collaboration, design and schematic reviews and commenting, and tracking various hardware-specific attributes such as order status, manufacturing, and connection to the PLM. Allspice CEO Valentina Ratner and CTO Kyle Dumont have extensive experience in electronics hardware and software, both with startups and some of t...

HDP User Group is an industry consortium made up of more than 50 leading companies that collaborate on research in order to reduce cost and time to market. Madan Jagernauth, marketing director and a project facilitator, discusses the latest programs, including ones on Pb-free manufacturing, with PCB Chat's Mike Buetow.  

SMTA is well known for producing high-quality relevant technical conferences and symposiums. This includes, among others, the technical conference held at SMTAI, the High Reliability Cleaning and Coating Conference, the Symposium on Counterfeit Parts and Materials, the Advanced Electronics Assembly Conference, the Wafer-Level Packaging Symposium, the Electronics in Harsh Environments conference, a...

Like most manufacturers, the electronics manufacturing industry relies on countless suppliers to fulfill its manufacturing needs. I'm quite certain there is no one within the EMS space who fabricates their own boards using materials produced in house, operates their own semiconductor foundries, designs and manufacturers their own components, and produces soldering materials for their reflow proces...

It's been said on this show that one key factor to international competitiveness is automation. While labor rates vary widely across the world, automation helps to level the field. Michael McHale is CEO of Production Systems Automation, otherwise known as PSA. He graduated from Drexel University with a BS degree in mechanical engineering. PSA is a privately owned engineering and custom manufacturi...

Last July, Indium Corporation announced a partnership with SAFI-Tech, an Iowa-based startup that is creating no-heat and low-heat solder and metallic joining products. They call these supercooled molten metal products, and they have direct application to electronics soldering. Dr. Ian Tevis, SAFI-Tech’s president and co-founder, and Dr. Andy Mackie of Indium Corporation, discuss this supercooling...

Today we’re diving into conformal coating best practices. With the explosion of IoT, the electrification of vehicles, and the miniaturization of circuit assemblies and associated components, many of which are operating in harsh environments, the need for conformal coating has never been greater. Coating your assemblies? Where does one start? What material should one choose? Should it be applied in...

Wang Lu is cofounder of Jove Enterprises, a China-based printed circuit fabricator with five facilities in mainland China and one pending in Thailand. She discusses the company's technical strengths and markets, and reasons for branding out to Thailand, with PCEA president Mike Buetow.  

Modern electronics assembly has seen so many changes over the years. In today’s era of IoT, the electrification of vehicles, the explosion in the use of bottom terminated components, the increasing implementation of electronics into harsh environments have all contributed to the increasing complexity and difficulty of building electronics. While so much has changed, there are some things that have...

Stephen Chavez spent the past 12 years as a principal engineer and global subject matter expert of PCB design for Collins Aerospace and Raytheon. This year, he joined Siemens as a senior product marketing manager, where he focuses on methodologies for adopting a strategy for resilience and integrating the Design-to-Source Intelligence insights from Supplyframe.   He speaks with PCEA president Mike...

Today, Mike Konrad talks about low-volume electronic assembly. We all know who the “big players” are when it comes to solder paste printers, pick-and-place machines, reflow ovens and other assembly equipment. But what choices does one have if they need to produce low volumes of electronic assemblies such as prototypes and other low-volume applications?   Let’s face it, most assemblers can’t justif...

Today, we're going to talk about contract manufacturing. Do you have a circuit assembly that needs to be built? Don’t have the equipment in-house or enough bandwidth or specialized expertise to build it? You may be best served by utilizing the services of a contract manufacturer. Contract manufacturers come in all shapes, sizes and capabilities. Should I seek out a Tier 1 manufacturer? How about T...

It seems today, the entire world is experiencing supply chain challenges in nearly all product categories. In the electronics assembly industry, the focus has been within the semiconductor market, especially in North America. Why is this? How did the US allow this to occur? Was it shortsightedness, greed, an overreliance on foreign suppliers, other factors, or a combination of all these factors? W...

This is the 100th episode of the Reliability Matters podcast! Hear clips from past episodes and messages from past guests on their views about reliability. Mike Konrad gives a special thanks to the 117 guests he has had the privilege to learn from. Also, thank you to listeners and viewers of this podcast. Here is a list of guests (subject matter experts in their fields) that had been on RM: Jen Fi...

Reshoring has been a buzzword for a few years now. But when supply chains are undergoing dramatic disruption and inflation is raging worldwide, what is the reality? To answer those questions and more, we are turning to Dr. Matthew Dyson, senior technology analyst at ID Tech Ex. Dr. Dyson just coauthored a white paper titled "Factory of the Future." He discusses what that looks like, explaining the...

Is there a broad consensus on what "smart manufacturing" is, and more specifically, its application in electronics assembly? Brian Morrison, vice president of engineering for Vexos, a mid-tier multinational EMS with manufacturing facilities in the US, Canada, China and Vietnam and more than 900 employees worldwide, gives his take on smart manufacturing and its relationship to AI and Lean to PCEA c...

In late 2018, IPC shocked the electronics assembly community by introducing an amendment to section 8 of the J-STD-001G. This amendment radically changed the way industry determines cleanliness. Now, assemblers must prove their assemblies are clean enough not to experience electrochemical migration events which would cause the assembly to fail. This new process of obtaining objective evidence has...

John Burkhert Jr., senior PCB layout engineer and author of Designer’s Notebook, the monthly column on PCB design engineering, talks about the so-called soft side of engineering: people skills. He recently posted a 1250-word piece titled There May Come a Time When PCB Design Requires People Management Skills. It struck a chord with more than a few designers and engineers, who shared similar anecdo...

Jen Fijalkowski works for Aim Solder. Jen obtained her B.S. from the University of Rhode Island in chemical engineering and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Prior to her role as a technical marketing engineer, she interned as a SMT Process Engineer, where she analyzed various reports regarding solder paste printing and coauthored "Comparison of Aperture Designs, Solder Pastes, Nanocoating...