Target Condition: Are Autorouters Friend or Foe?
Fresh PCB Concepts: Assembly Challenges with Micro Components and Standard Solder Mask Practices
Elementary Mr. Watson: Retro Routers vs. Modern Boards—The Silent Struggle on Your Screen
I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
May 6, 2022 | Andy Shaughnessy, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
We just went from freezing mornings to summer—just like that. What happened to spring? And, of course, things are definitely heating up in our industry!
This week, we have some M&A news from Summit Interconnect, and a variety of columns. Chris Bonsell discusses the lack of preventive maintenance planning in PCB manufacturing, and Kelly Dack lays out some solder mask guidelines for PCB designers. Duane Benson helps make sense of the quoting process in a time of 50-week lead times, and Dan Beaulieu has a great review of a book about how shareholder policies have caused many of the problems we see in corporations today.
Stay cool!
Summit Interconnect Acquires Royal Circuit Solutions and Affiliates
Published May 4
Summit Interconnect continues to grow its operations with the acquisition of Royal Circuits and Advanced Assembly. This expands the company’s flex, rigid-flex, DFA and prototype SMT assembly, and also allow the combined entity to integrate and automate many of its engineering and production capabilities.
The Chemical Connection: The Case for Preventive Maintenance
Published May 4
If you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you’ll like this column. You can either perform preventive maintenance on your capital equipment, or you can wait for it to break down and worry about it then. According to columnist Chris Bonsell, most board shops prefer the latter, much to their detriment. Check it out.
Target Condition: Mandatory Masking Guidelines
Published May 4
Leave it to columnist Kelly Dack to slide a reference to a children’s bedtime story into an article on solder mask guidelines for PCB designers. As Kelly points out, your goal is to reach the Goldilocks Zone for mask clearance, where everything is just right. There’s a lot of good information here.
Finding Solutions in the Quoting Process
Published May 3
The supply chain situation has improved somewhat, but we’re still seeing 50-week lead times for some components. So, how does anyone put together an accurate quote in times like these? Duane Benson offers a few tips, and he explains how software tools can make things a little easier during the quoting process.
Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: A One-Legged Stool—How Shareholder Primacy Has Broken Business
Published May 6
This sounds like a book I need to read. As Dan Beaulieu says, this book discusses the idea that “the shareholders’ economics philosophy expounded by Milton Friedman so many decades ago is basically the root of most of what is wrong with our companies and our economy today.” If, like me, you let your retirement planner worry about this sort of thing, this book should be on your must-read list.
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