Speak Up!

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

If you have paid any attention at all to our newsletters and other publications, you should have been aware of this month’s topic long before opening this magazine. We tried to reach… everybody, so we could get their thoughts on the industry for this issue.

We got quite a few responses, but I wish there had been many more. Apparently the PCB industry has a huge silent majority. So, what is it? Why is everyone so quiet? What about you? No opinion, no thoughts, no ideas to share— you just keep your head down and do your job?  Do you wish you were in a different industry? Trust me, you are sucked in and will always have PCBs in your blood, so you might as well just start making the most of it.

When I was a newbie chairman at IPC I sat in my first CCC (committee chairman’s council) meeting and was totally awed by a huge table lined with other chairmen (almost all men, of course). As usual, the meeting started with everyone introducing themselves around the room. It took all my courage to muster up my name, company and subcommittee I was chairing because I feared stumbling over the words. Many people nowadays find that awfully hard to believe of me; yes, I can be pretty outspoken at some of those meetings now! What changed? Well, I developed some confidence in myself but what really happened was that I became involved in our industry. I cared about the standards and specs that were being developed, as well as the companies and people that would be using them, and I cared (and still do) very much about where the PCB industry was headed. And if any of you had been at one of those meetings and seen the solder joint guys arguing, or the vehement discussions on adopting metric terms in documents, you would know that I was and am not alone!

So I’m just saying, don’t sit back and wait out your time. Put a little thought in it, a little emotion, and you will be surprised with the results.

And now on to this month’s issue, which isn’t strictly “Voices;” we do have some great technical content for you too.

We start off the magazine with a newly created award, the I-Connect007 Good for the Industry Award, introduced by our publisher, Barry Matties. Once in a while someone or something in the industry impresses you beyond all measure and stirs you to action. That has happened here at I-Connect007 and we felt we had to let the world know about it. Alex Stepinski of Whelen Engineering has made such a significant contribution that we cannot ignore it.

We follow this with the voices of your colleagues, which I have found most interesting to read and I am confident you will too. Maybe you would like to reply to one or more of them or maybe you have some thoughts of your own that you want to share. Let me know—my email is at the end of this column—and keep in mind that we never publish without permission (you may remain anonymous if you feel a need to be).

As you must know by now, we interview a lot of people in the industry…a lot. We ask them about their companies, the industry, their plans for the future and whatever else they want to talk about. We’ve included a few in this issue, and the first “voice” is that of Steve Driver, managing director at Spirit Circuits. Steve discusses the new plant being built in Romania and the influence Whelan’s Alex Stepinski has had on the project.

And no doubt you are well aware that the seventh edition of the Printed Circuits Handbook came out this year and it is certainly the most read and most venerated book on printed circuits and electronics in our industry. So we asked the many authors to tell us their thoughts and we gathered them into a single section and put it in all three magazines. It starts off with a wonderful history of the handbook written by Clyde Coombs and continues with a dozen more authors’ “voices.” Get the inside scoop from the man who started it 50 years ago!

Our next interview is with Eltek USA’s Jim Barry, who shares his thoughts on devices that are getting tinier, the industry driving it (maybe not what you think) and the cross-overs between the end markets. He also discusses the challenges to the PCB business, where he thinks things are headed, and throws in a little of his own philosophy as well.

In our third interview, Stan Hetzel of the European Space Agency discusses the paper he presented at the EIPC Summer Conference on qualifying one’s PCBs for the space industry. He mentioned that they were raising the bar in terms of levels of testing and inspection that are required. It’s nice to hear from some European voices.

As I mentioned earlier, we have interviewed a lot of people over the past year, both video and audio. So this seemed a great time to pull them together into an index, if you will. And it’s quite a long index, organized alphabetically by the interviewees’ last names. Just an FYI, you can always search our website for an interview by using the search box in the upper right and putting your search term in quotes.

Lest you techies feel put out by all the “touchy-feely” voice stuff, our regular columnist, RBP Chemical’s Mike Carano, continues his discussion on PTH reliability and Keith Sellers of NTS talks about reliability testing in the new product development cycle, covering both mechanical and environmental testing. And we have an interesting article by David Ciufo of Intrinsiq that may be of especial interest to the flex folks, a discussion on the adhesion of very thin film copper for ultra-fine line circuits.

Our final entry for this month is Barry Lee Cohen’s Launch Letters column on your brand— and he is not just speaking to marketing and management folks. Whether it be your company brand or your personal brand, Cohen calls upon you to fully embrace it and believe in it. As always I find his columns to be inspiring and I’m thinking you will, too.

Next month, we turn to the military/aerospace electronics industry, examining and exploring the challenges, technology and market trends. How about you? Does your company supply the military and/or aerospace electronics industry? This is your chance to tell our readers what it is like, what is different from other industries and what you see for the future.

Editor's Note: This article has been originally published in the August 2016 issue of the PCB Magazine.