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Nolan's Notes: The Rise (and Risk) of Data

Last month, I read about a United Airlines flight that declared an emergency over the middle of Hudson Bay in northern Canada. All the cockpit screens had gone blank and both flight management computers had entered into a “degraded mode with limited capabilities.” The pilots had lost most of their autopilot functionality, but still had enough control systems to manually fly the plane to a safe landing at O’Hare.

This story brought back memories of the cockpits in both SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and the Boeing Starliner where nearly all the controls are on touchscreens with no backup instruments. Both the airliners I mention were Boeing 787s.

These examples drive home the point that there are risks with depending too heavily on automation as well as the importance of a properly functioning dashboard. Sure, these types of failures are rare—most thankfully in life-and-death situations—but they do happen.

Do you have similar concerns when you’re considering a more digitally dependent manufacturing environment? Have you, perhaps, even had control hardware failures cause downtime for your facility?

In the November 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine, we focus on the rise of data in our factories, a topic I approached with a fair amount of both skepticism and optimism when considering smart factories. There is a lot of development, innovation, and potential disruption underway on the floor. We’re quickly moving our development up the data stack. The level 0 and 1 infrastructure had to be built out until it was ubiquitous, and sensors were then integrated to capture raw data. Intermediate communication protocols, such as CFX, could move that data around. Finally, data analysis could be applied to create decision-making aids for human supervisors.

At IPC APEX EXPO 2024 in April, I spoke with a number of EMS data analytics providers about the work they’ve been doing. It’s now several months later, and I wanted to see how things have progressed. Data analytics, dashboards, and AI agents are not here to take over, but to assist. Just as we still need pilots to land the plane when the systems go out, we still need process experts to assess the data on the floor. There’s nothing holding us back, though, from giving our process experts the most powerful tools we can.

I start with an interview with Tim Burke and Jennifer Davis of Arch Systems, who talk about the rise of artificial intelligence in handling straightforward tasks on the manufacturing floor. Julie Cliche-Dubois of Cogiscan writes about a successful software platform that manufacturers are using that focuses on factory data to improve their operations. Cybord CEO Oshri Cohen continues our discussion on counterfeiting, which interestingly connects real-time counterfeit detection technologies that contribute directly to improving process windows in production.

Columnist Mike Konrad provides a thorough tutorial of the impact of harsh environments on residue tolerance and the risk of electrochemical migration on circuit assemblies, and CEE PCB’s Tom Yang continues his excellent series on the strength of the American PCB industry. Finally, I share an interview with IPC’s Matt Kelly and Devan Iyer about a new white paper detailing IPC’s groundbreaking effort on advanced packaging—setting the stage for what’s to come in the next few months.

A note about CFX: While I mentioned CFX as a mid-stack data protocol, CFX is not represented in this issue. The IPC-CFX committee is concentrating on wrapping up the CFX 2.0 standard in time for IPC APEX EXPO 2025 in March, so the latest CFX news is not quite ready for public consumption.

This is just another reminder that much is in motion. Ultimately, the goal for all involved, from the bottom of the stack to the top, is to create meaningful and useful factory telemetry, easily and effectively applied.

This column originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of SMT007 Magazine.