PCB Chat

Merger and acquisition activity took a bit of a breather last summer as Covid protocols kicked in, but has really heated up since calendar flipped to 2021. Our guest is Bruce Mahler is Vice president and general manager at Ohmega and Ticer Technologies. Both are recent additions to Quantic Electronics, a newly formed umbrella company focusing on electronics components and materials. We break down...

  Welcome to episode number 5 of the Concept to Creation Podcast. I’m so glad you’re here. Today, my guests are Robert Boguski and Regina Lathrop. They are the husband-wife team behind Datest, a Fremont California based company which provides advanced, integrated PCBA testing and inspection services, serving the CM and EMS industries as well as the OEM community since 1984. Robert and Regina purch...

IMI Inc., a printed circuit board fabricator in Haverhill, MA, celebrated its 50th anniversary in May. CEO and president Peter Bigelow joins Mike Buetow to discuss the company's golden anniversary, its focus on niche PTFE boards, and how manufacturing in the US might attract new talent for future prosperity.   This podcast is brought to you by Turnkey PRO from Sierra Circuits. What if you could so...

Mike Konrad a guest on the Pick-Place Podcast with Chris Denney (Worthington Assembly) and Melissa Hough (CircuitHub). This is the second of a two-part interview. This episode gets us into the nitty gritty details of how to implement a proper circuit board cleaning process. In the first part of this conversation (RM 68) we delve into the history of board cleaning, the electronics the industry's tr...

Dr. Mike Bixenman and Tom Forsythe talk about the founding of Kyzen Corporation, a multinational chemical manufacturer for the electronics cleaning and metal cleaning industry. They discuss the early days and challenges they faced along the way. They even disclose the "secret" meaning of an early ad campaign featuring the  cryptic message "2LG2Q"!   This podcast is brought to you by Turnkey PRO fr...

Each year CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY publishes its rankings of the 50 largest EMS/ODM companies. Editor in chief Mike Buetow offers a recap of the Year of Covid, and provides insights on a few under-the-radar trends that could have seismic effects down the road.   This podcast is brought to you by Turnkey PRO from Sierra Circuits. What if you could source your components, upload your specs and receive an i...

Mike Konrad joins Chris Denney (Worthington Assembly) and Melissa Hough (CircuitHub) on the Pick-Place Podcast . This is the first of a two-part interview.   In this episode we are joined by Mike Konrad to chat about board cleaning best practices. Mike founded  Aqueous Technologies in 1992 in response to the Montreal Protocol and the resulting international treaty banning most popular cleaning/def...

Episode # 3 of the Concept to Creation Podcast is now available. My guest is Mike Scimeca of FCT Assembly. Mike founded his first business in 1991. Today, he owns nine businesses units. Mike shares his successes, failures, challenges, and advice for budding entrepreneurs.   Mike may be reached at: mscimeca@fctassembly.com  

Norman Mier is a retired veteran of the US Marine Corps with over 20 years of experience in the electronics rework and repair industry. He received his training through the Navy's Micro Miniature (2M) Electronic Repair Program. He has progressed through every level of rework and repair recognized in the industry. Norman has also earned the highest certifications awarded by IPC in electronics train...

Concept to Creation Episode 2  Allison and Chad Budvarson are a husband and wife team that founded and operates Out of the Box Manufacturing, a Renton Washington-based contract manufacturer. They share how they founded their company, their challenges, successes, and what motivates them. They also provide sage advice for navigating both business and home life. Allison Budvarson: allison@obmfg.com C...

David Bernard, Ph. D., describes a coming presentation on x-ray inspection, including understanding how the system works, how magnification works, detectors and sensitivity, handling various solder types (hint: it's the material density that matter), and why users should "stop wasting time with things their x-ray cannot do." Bernard's three-hour webinar, Getting the Best from Your X-Ray Inspection...

Dr. Ron Lasky (Professor at Dartmouth College) and three of his students -- Annaka Balch, Nadia Clement, and Raaga Kannan -- talk about the papers they wrote and presented at SMTA's Pan Pacific Microelectronics Symposium in Hawaii in 2020, as well as a new paper to be presented at the same conference in 2022.

Welcome to Mike Konrad's new podcast is called “Concept to Creation - The Entrepreneurs of the Electronic Assembly Industry.”  On this podcast, Mike will interview industry founders to talk about the following topics:  Concept  Creation  Execution  Growth  Challenges  Successes / Failures  Motivating Insights     The first episode features Dr. Bill Cardoso of Creative Electron. Bill earned his AA...

On part 2 of this series , we dive into oven profiling best practices. In part one, we looked at void mitigation and how vacuum reflow technology can help reduce or eliminate voiding.  Our guests are Tim O’Neill from AIM Solder and Fred Dimock of BTU. Tim will discuss voiding mitigation from a materials standpoint while Fred will bring cover equipment and profiling strategies. Tim O'Neill is techn...

On this episode, we’ll have a conversation with two industry experts on the subject of solder voiding mitigation and oven profiling, two subjects which influence solder voiding. This will be a two part episode. Here, we dive into void mitigation and how vacuum reflow technology can help reduce or eliminate voiding. Part two (episode 65) will discuss profiling best practices. Our guests are Tim O’N...

Design engineers are paying close attention to materials. It’s not just about the routing anymore. Keshav Amla and Tarun Amla are founder and CEO and cofounder and CTO, respectively, of Avishtech, a San Jose, CA-based developer of simulation and design software, specifically stack-up and 2D field solvers.  They discuss how their signature software enables better board design and how it came to be...

Dock Brown brings his more than 30 years of electronics reliability experience to clients of Ansys. Prior to joining Ansys, he spent 20 years at Medtronic where he most recently concentrated on cross business unit implementation of reliability initiatives for Class III medical devices. He was also responsible for supplier assessment and approval, on-going supplier audits, failure analysis, correct...

By now, most of us have heard of Industry 4.0, or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), or Smart Factory, or Factory of the Future. The key all of these acronyms is Connectivity, Data Management, Material and Process Control, Traceability, and Analytics. It’s not as simple as collecting data. The data much be understood, useful, and contextual. François Monette, is cofounder and chief business...

A little over two years ago DuPont opened its Silicon Valley Technology Center. It is also finishing work on a major investment at its laminates manufacturing plant in Circleville, OH. Andy Kannurpatti, global business leader - Films & Laminates, Interconnect Solutions of DuPont Electronics & Imaging, explains how DuPont is helping the domestic industry grow.   

This year’s APEX Expo is a virtual event. Matt Kelly and Mike Konrad discuss IPC's new technical conference focus and review a small sample of the upcoming technical presentations and professional development courses.

Tara Dunn and Mike Konrad discuss the world of flex and rigid-flex circuits including flex best practices when it comes to design and use of flex technology. They also discuss the new world of additive electronics. Tara Dunn is a seasoned professional with more than 20 years in the electronics industry exclusively focused on the PCB sector. Her experience spans roles from manufacturing to sales an...

AJ Incorvaia is executive vice president of Siemens EDA, more familiarly known as Mentor. He joined Mentor in 2013 after more than 25 years in software engineering at OEMs and other major EDA vendors. He discusses the mainstream (desktop) PCB CAD market, its shift to internal sales channels, its upsides, and limitations with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

Solder voiding has been with us longer than we know. Modern x-ray inspection technology has allowed assemblers to see and quantify voiding. Metallurgical expert Dave Hillman from Collins Aerospace explains the causes and possible remedies for solder voiding. Dave Hillman is a metallurgical engineer in the Advanced Operations Engineering Department of Collins Aerospace in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He ser...

Matt Wrosch is senior products specialist at EMD Performance Materials. An expert in materials science, Matt has held a range of research, engineering and business development roles in the electronics industry in 1997. He has a master’s in materials science and engineering from UC San Diego and a bachelor’s from Michigan.    He joins PCB Chat host Mike Buetow to discuss transient liquid phase sint...

Eric Fossum is best known for the invention of the CMOS image sensor better known as the “camera-on-a-chip” used in billions of cameras, from smart phones to web cameras to ingestible pill cameras to DSLRs. In 2017, Eric was a co-recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the world's top engineering prize (and considered by many as equivalent to the Nobel Prize) for the invention of d...