Hans-Peter Tranitz: Dieter Bergman IPC Fellowship Award Recipient

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

From the IPC website: The Dieter Bergman IPC Fellowship Award is given to individuals who have fostered a collaborative spirit, made significant contributions to standards development, and have consistently demonstrated a commitment to global standardization efforts and the electronics industry. Each recipient will be eligible to bestow the Dieter Bergman Memorial Scholarship upon the university or college of his/her choice.

Patty Goldman speaks with Continental Automotive’s Peter Tranitz about his IPC involvement with press-fit and other automotive standards which have earned him the coveted Dieter Bergman IPC Fellowship Award. 

Patty Goldman: Peter, congratulations on this award. It’s quite an honor as you’re aware, and it means you have done a lot of work with IPC and standards development. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with IPC and the different committees.

Hans-Peter Tranitz: Hello, Patty. I’m working for Continental Automotive GmbH. My home location is Regensburg, and my profession is being an expert for mechanical joining technologies for metals and plastics in automotive final assembly, such as press fit and all kinds of technologies dealing with laser and material interaction. Welding, riveting and screwdriving are also within my and my team’s responsibility.

My first contact with IPC was in 2010 when I joined for the first time a tin whisker conference in Schaumburg, Illinois, near Chicago, and there I made a presentation about my current risk issues and how I deal with that. At that time, I felt that the people who joined the meeting were all “dinosaurs” that knew everything about whiskers and then here comes a freshman—even if I was already quite long in the industry at that time.

But, for them, I was a freshman, and I saw this very little smile in their faces when I was presenting. And I felt like, “Oh, they all know what I’m talking about. I don’t tell them anything new.” But when I arrived at the APEX EXPO one year later all of them recognized me and all of them talked to me. And there was a very, very open-minded communication and I felt really accepted right away. That is something which is quite unique and that is what I would consider the special environment that IPC has. I was impressed by its open-minded and warm welcome of new members and new arrivals.

Goldman: Yes, IPC and volunteers love new volunteers. Worker bees, as we call them.

Tranitz: Agreed. After that time, a few years later, I proposed to IPC to start a press-fit standard for the automotive industry and high reliability applications because the current standards that existed were basically coming from the former telecommunications industry. So simply, cold-joining technology is where a compliant zone of a connector or housing pin is pressed-in to a specific plated through-hole of a printed board. This joint can withstand very tough environmental conditions beyond those usually known for solder joints as long as the overall design is matching. And particularly from the reliability perspective, this is what we needed more in the automotive industry, and that’s why we made this proposal.

A year later my other co-chair, Udo Welzel, and myself got the request from IPC to write a PIN (project initiation request). From this moment onward, we were a very productive working team. After three years we were already in the ballot phase, and in May 2020 finally the standard has been published. I think we have been quite fast considering we started the standard absolutely from scratch.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the 2021 issue of Show & Tell Magazine, click here.