A Conversation with IPC's President John Mitchell

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes

If you do that, when you finish you've got a whole new skillset and you've got more options. If you don't do that, your path is limited. I think that's the same, whether it's PCBs, EMS, etc., as technology changes, you always need some sort of innovation path going in order to take on the next thing. GE used to say you have to disrupt yourself because somebody out there is trying to do it anyway. Wow, that was a bit of a soapbox…I warned you that I was passionate about education and change!

Matties: As we walk through this show, and I was at the 3D printing show a week or so ago in San Jose, we are seeing a lot of inkjet technology coming in to play in this industry. It continues to get faster and faster and used in more and more processes. Eventually it looks like it's just going to come down to one box that prints out circuit boards. A lot of people say we're not going to get to the mass level quality anytime soon, but I’ve got to think within 20 years or less, we might.

Mitchell: Especially if you're able to print what they've printed already, like a car, a house, a plane, etc. Let’s think about cars for a moment, and let's use Ferrari as an example; they make 5,000 cars a year. What if they could do that with a couple of printers? I mean low volume, high complexity stuff. There's a market for that. If you could print a plane, that's a whole different ball-game. As soon as you do it there, it's got to move to mass market because people find a way to do it faster and smaller.

Matties: I was at a show in Santa Clara, CA, and a guy there was showing me multilayer circuit boards that he's printing on a table top. He described the base material as liquid FR-4 with conductive silver in between. What about soldermask? We don't need soldermask. What about drilling? We don't need to drill because we can just print right where it needs to be, and then I'm holding it in my hands already.

Mitchell: That's right. It's not the future. It's today.

Matties: It's today, and this unit he told me is going to sell between 70 and 100K.

Mitchell: That's one person's salary.

Matties: If I'm a prototype shop sitting in America, I'm saying, "Let's buy that and open a service," just to start the transition.

Mitchell: Low volume, high mix. There you go.

Matties: It's not going to be for everybody, but it's going to be for a lot of the marketplace. When you can take a machine like this and replace a 45,000 square foot facility.

Mitchell: Look at how fast 3D printing has changed in 10 years. When I was at Bose, not quite 10 years ago, we paid $60,000 for a 3D printer. In 10 years we went from that to printing a circuit board right off a printer. Now we are printing a plane, a car, a house…gigantic things. In one decade, that's a massive transition. Imagine the next decade.

Matties: When people say it's not going to change, I'm having a hard time believing it.

Mitchell: If there's a market for it and it's feasible, they'll find a way.

Matties: It's like going from 8-track to MP3 in the blink of an eye. It's an exciting time. Now you've been with the IPC for three or four years now, how has it been for you?

Mitchell: Three and a half years, and it's been a blast.

Matties: It looks like you're having a lot of fun.

Mitchell: I am. We are trying to make sure our members are benefiting and that we're helping their businesses grow, and we're trying to do that in really tangible ways. We've come up with new programs and we're trying to listen and respond to the needs and wants of our members. One of the things we are trying to change is the standards process, which can sometimes take five to six years to release a major standard. We're changing that because the electronics industry is changing too fast for that to be sufficient. Our members have come to us and said, “You need to do that faster.” Now we're targeting three years. There's some push and pull on that, but we're just trying to be smarter about it.

For education, we've brought online testing to certification to improve the quality of it. We’ve been providing analytics, so if you're a trainer, we can find out if there's a module that your students are consistently doing a little bit worse at, and we can say, "Hey, you might work on that one." On the flip side, if there's a question that 80% of the people in the world seem to be missing, maybe we need to look at the question and change it. Again, leveraging technology to improve things.

We focus heavily on advocacy because regulations are a huge portion of what impacts how we do business globally. We've put a lot of effort into advocacy efforts and the IPC Board has helped us direct that.  IPC will soon be in Europe. We've been there, but now we're going to have an actual presence in Brussels coming up very soon. Look for exciting announcements coming up in 2016 as far as what we are doing in Europe.

Then, as far as solutions, something you know we used to do in the past was special projects. We are going back to that, both big things and small. Lead-free and the high-reliability market, that's a big project. We are trying to raise tens of millions of dollars to solve that issue. We want IPC to be remembered for, "You remember that high-reliability lead-free issue? They squashed that. It went away."

Matties: That's real value that you're bringing if you do these things.

Mitchell: Exactly. We're trying to do that. We had one case, and sadly the company doesn't want us to use their name, but it's a large aerospace company that decided to really invest in IPC and they had throughput in some of their electronics manufacturing of about 73–74%. They invested nearly $200,000 in IPC training standards, etc., and at the end of the 18 months they had 100% throughput.

They paid for all that in six months. Then every six months after that in terms of decreasing the scrap and rework, etc. That type of tangible value is what makes a difference. We are in a technology world. The world is changing every second. There's a lot of new things we are going to be able to do to help our members succeed all along the way. It's been very rewarding.

Matties: What's been the greatest surprise to you?

Mitchell: How many manual processes we used to use internally at IPC [laughs]. For a technology group, how much paper do we really need? We're pretty much paperless now, so it's been good. Someday, if we get there on the standards front, we won't have to ship any paper either. We'll see.

Matties: That would be nice. You know, one of the comments we got several times over in our survey was the cost of standards. People would like to see that go down. How do you address that?

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