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

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I-Connect007 has a new monthly digest newsletter, the Advanced Electronic Packaging Digest, and as I was scanning our advanced packaging newsfeeds this week, I came across a primer from tokenring.ai (republished through station WRAL, Raleigh, North Carolina), which I found quite useful. Whether you’re a designer, fabricator, or assembler, the package schemes being developed will change how you work, so be sure to keep your eye on the technological horizon and subscribe to the monthly Advanced Electronic Packaging Digest here.

Speaking of looking forward, our upcoming magazine issues will examine Mexico’s growing EMS manufacturing presence, state-of-the-art power plane design, and the legislative landscape. But let’s review the big stories of the week.

With SEMICON underway in Phoenix this week, much of the biggest news touched on chips and packaging somehow. Global Electronics Association’s Chief Economist Shawn DuBravac hosted his quarterly economic outlook mid-week, and semiconductors played a key role in his data. In addition, I attended a webinar on advanced packaging hosted by iNEMI, which suggested (among other things) that a significant chunk of the packaging-type manufacturing that left China in 2024 and 2025 has instead gone to Taiwan. Elsewhere, ultra HDI is on the rise, and tamper-proof is a term starting to trend in electronics as well.

Here are the five items you need to know about this week. The larger picture that emerges from these items continues to come into sharp focus.

Global Semiconductor Sales Increase 21.7% Year-to-Year in August
Published October 6

More chips sold means more board assembly. If not more boards in quantity, certainly denser, more complex boards. Read where the sales took place globally here.

I-Connect007 Releases Episode 5 of Groundbreaking Ultra HDI Podcast Series
Published October 8

In his episode, John Johnson concentrates on how via structures can and will change in UHDI designs, including a discussion on how designers can use UHDI via techniques to resolve some of the traditional HDI challenges. Catch that discussion with John Johnson at “On the Line With…” on the major podcast carriers.

productronica: Increasing Demand for Tamper-proof Electronics
Published October 8

While this might be a blip on the long-range market radar today, it won’t stay long-range. From the announcement, “Unlike software, hardware is difficult to protect against unauthorized access: Once manufactured, redesigns are costly—if not impossible. For this reason, open architectures such as RISC-V are increasingly being used.” Which raises the importance for designing not only chips, but the systems using those chips to be secure. Learn why productronica sees this as such an important theme.

Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino
Published October 8

This news goes hand-in-glove with productronica’s focus. Open architecture processors continue to gain ground in the marketplace, both making development easier, and also raising the importance of security. This acquisition accelerates open architecure’s move to the mainstream; could this also be one of the reasons productronica is getting serious about tamper-proofing?

Taiwan Rejects U.S. Proposal for 50-50 Semiconductor Production Split
Published October 3

According to the TCPA, the Taiwan PCB Industry projects $30 billion in output in 2025. The semiconductor supply chain is thriving. So, this news is no surprise whatsoever.