I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Welcome to April 15, everyone! There are reasons we tend to cover topics in a continuous conversation. First, there are always developments and news in the industry. Second, you dear readers respond to that content by reading it. This week the news items that drew the most reader interest verify that our industry has ongoing interest in government involvement in industry infrastructure, supply chain issues, cybersecurity, and new technologies like additive in fabrication.

I won’t keep you any longer; you’ve got news to read below, and if you’re in the United States, you might also have your taxes to finish. Get it postmarked by Monday!

Uncovering the Electronics Ecosystem 
Published April 8

Will Marsh, vice president of TTM Technologies and president of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America, talks about the work the PCBAA has been doing in Washington, D.C., to get the industry better recognized by the country’s decision-makers. Marsh is optimistic, not only about the companies and individuals joining the effort, but in the recognition by Capitol Hill to secure the nation’s defense systems, and makes a case for why fab companies should join forces with PCBAA.

AltiumLive 2022: Vince Mazur’s Supply Chain Advice—Always Have Alternatives 
Published April 11

Andy Shaughnessy gets an update from Vince Mazur, a technical marketing engineer at Altium, about his AltiumLive presentation, “Avoiding Supply Chain Issues with Variants and Live Part Choices.” Vince points out some of the high points of his talk, including the need for designers to pay closer attention to the supply chain than ever before, and to always have an alternative part or two as backup—just in case. Vince’s presentation can be found online with other Altium Live videos.

The Reality of Regulated Manufacturing 
Published April 12

Ryan Bonner is CEO of DEFCERT, a specialist in government regulations for data and cybersecurity. A key component of moving to a digital factory will be to ensure security of the data required to operate a digital factory, and most importantly, customer design data. We caught up with Ryan after IPC APEX EXPO, to discuss cybersecurity and the digital factory. Click through to the interview to learn how this may apply to your facility.

Additive Design: Same Steps, Different Order 
Published April 12

Dave Torp, CEO of Winonics, briefs Andy Shaughnessy about the company’s additive and semi-additive processes and what PCB designers need to know if they’re considering designing boards with these new technologies.  Two key take-aways Dave explains are that 1) additive design is not much different from traditional design, but the steps in the design cycle are a different order, and 2) additive designers must communicate with their fabricators because so much of the new processes are still proprietary.  See what else Torp has to say here.

Siemens’ SynthAI Revolutionizes Machine Vision Training with Artificial Intelligence 
Published April 13

For those of us in the industry who are adding AI and machine learning to our processes, this news article gathered a lot of reads.

From the press release: “Machine learning is used for a variety of vision-based automation use cases such as robotic bin picking, sorting, palletizing, quality inspection and more.  While usage of machine learning for vision-based automation is growing, many industries face challenges and struggle to implement it within their computer vision applications.  This is due to the need to collect many images of the parts in question and the challenges associated with accurately annotating the different products within those images – particularly before production or manufacturing begins.

“To solve this challenge, synthetic data is used to speed up the data collection and training process. However, utilizing synthetic data for vision use cases requires expertise in synthetic image generation and can be complex, time consuming, and expensive. This where Siemens’ SynthAI changes the game.”