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The single most transformative shift in the electronics manufacturing industry over the next decade will be the convergence of AI-driven design with advanced packaging architectures, according to some of the APEX EXPO 2026 award recipients, but success will rely on how well the industry bridges the talent gap.
Recent award recipients express optimism over technological breakthroughs, from chiplet platforms and copper-to-copper hybrid bonding, to fighting the increasing incidence of conductive anodic filamentation (CAF) in flight hardware. Others see a workforce that can’t accelerate as quickly as the technology.
“The new leaders in the industry will be those that embrace the opportunities brought by AI breakthroughs and the shifting mindset of customers from pure cost-based decision-making to criteria based on reliability and value-add,” says Francis D’Souza of Banyan.eco, who received the Rising Star Award from the Global Electronics Association.
Tiberiu Baranyi of Flex, who received an Excellence in Education Award, says that “the real gap will be the global shortage of multidisciplinary talent who can combine manufacturing in semiconductor tech, system-level integration, and the ‘classic’ manufacturing, automation, data science, and system-level optimization, and who can continuously adapt to fast evolving technology.”
Brian Chislea of Dow, who received the President’s Award, says leadership is required to overcome significant hurdles evolving from the broader adoption of electric vehicles, which require a coordinated effort between the electronics industry and traditional automotive. “To advance adoption, the infrastructure and power grid needs to evolve,” he says.
Technology Driving the Next Decade
Bhanu Sood of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who received the Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame Award, says the future of electronics centers on a fusion that is “fundamentally redefining what’s possible in performance, power efficiency, and system integration. Advanced packaging is no longer a background enabler, but a primary driver of innovation.” He sees global revenues projected to grow 40–50% by 2030, fueled by AI, high-performance computing, automotive, and, increasingly, aerospace and defense applications.
Next-gen processor architectures leveraging 3D integration and AI-based design strategies should deliver up to 1,000x performance improvements alongside dramatic reductions in power consumption. “These are compelling targets for radiation-hardened avionics and space-qualified electronics as they are for data centers,” he says.
Bob Cooke of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, who received the Dieter Bergman IPC Fellowship Award, says his biggest headache now is CAF. “Everyone who understands how a PCB is manufactured knows that the potential for development of CAF has always existed because of the processes that are used,” he says. “The designs I am dealing with have reached a perfect storm: high-layer count, reduced layer-to-layer spacing, increased circuit complexity, increased power and thermal loads, increased signal speeds with reduced amplitudes, and increasing use of embedded technology.”
CAF is no longer a phenomenon unknown to many. “While the overall issue appears to be the combination of a lack of rigid process control and contamination within the layer stack, I also recognize the potential that CAF development isn’t limited to our hardware,” Cooke says.
D’Souza believes the industry’s most urgent need is to incorporate AI into operational processes, such as product compliance (critical minerals, PFAS, and rare earth minerals), component intelligence, and supply chain resilience preparation. D’Souza is currently developing an agentic AI platform for electronics that helps designers and manufacturers build compliant products using resilient supply chains.
Looking ahead, Baranyi says tomorrow’s engineers will need to operate in increasingly digital manufacturing environments driven by automation, analytics, and AI.
Hisao Nishimori of Toyota Motor Corporation, who received the Rising Star Award, believes the industry is underestimating the ability to “maintain stable, high-quality production of general purpose analog and logic semiconductors,” while fellow Rising Star recipient David Caputa of Lockheed Martin sees struggles related to additively manufactured PCBs, “which allow for reduced lead times, complex form factors, and new types of design features not previously possible with conventional fabrication methods.”
“There is an urgent need for continuing production, preserving quality, and sustaining profitability,” Nishimori says. “We must secure personnel capable of reliable designs that enable continuous, high-quality hardware production of electronics components.”
Leadership for a Changing Industry
In Japan, Nishimori continues, leaders who can recover lost ground in mounting technologies and production capacity for electronic components, including general-purpose semiconductors, must promote the sharing of in-house know-how and co-create standards for the commoditized manufacturing of electronic components.
Developing the next generation of leaders was a common concern for award winners, especially Helena Paquito of EPTAC, who received the Excellence in Education Award. She believes the industry “needs to have a very aggressive plan for leadership development in electronics. The next generation of leaders also needs to develop the soft skills needed for communication, team building, and critical thinking.”
Baranyi wants leaders who understand factories as connected digital ecosystems. “This requires providing early and meaningful exposure to technology transformations, accelerating cross-functional learning, embedding data and automation fluency into all career stages, and building leaders who bridge disciplines, cultures, and generations,” he says.
Today’s leaders are already embracing these changes. “I’ve seen my leadership work with more agility and an innovation-centric approach,” Caputa says. “This evolving mindset has enabled organizations to stay competitive amid technological disruptions and the changing market expectations.”
But even as technology accelerates, Sood believes human expertise will remain essential. “No algorithm will replace the seasoned design engineer who, after staring at a schematic at 11 p.m., scribbles the winning topology on a napkin and says, ‘I’ve seen this before.’ I believe that hard-won intuition, creative shortcuts, and battle-tested tricks that experienced designers carry in their heads represent decades of irreplaceable institutional knowledge.”
AI may accelerate the design cycle and explore solution spaces at a scale no human could match, he says, “but it is the winning partnership between machine-generated innovation and human judgment I am most excited about.”
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