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

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

This week’s mainstream news was dominated—well, my personalized online news feed was, at least—by ballistics. SpaceX was in the news daily for lobbing multiple pieces of iron, even as their CEO took his household suborbital, leaving California and touching down in Texas. Pandemic numbers charts continue their skyward trajectory worldwide. The ever-present military tests and technology demonstrations, seemed a bit more commonplace this week as well. Worldwide political news, in general, seemed to follow parabolic curves like an Australian boomerang, veering off in unexpected ways only to suddenly cut a curving path and return.

While the Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads this week might not be quite so ballistic as the mainstream, we had some big news, nonetheless. Here are the five news bombshells that we think deliver the biggest impact in electronics manufacturing this week.

ECWC15 Virtual Conference Keynote: 5G PCB Technology and Material Challenges 
Published December 7 

Even while under pandemic lockdown in the UK, I-Connect007 Technical Editor Pete Starkey took advantage of the virtual ECWC15 format to attend a keynote from Dr. Shiuh-Kao Chiang, managing partner of Prismark, describing the PCB technology and material challenges presented by the introduction of the fifth-generation cellular wireless communication network—the roll-out of which was continuing in spite of the coronavirus pandemic. Readers, understandably, flocked to Pete’s coverage of this important, but often hard-to-access industry conference. 

IPC APEX EXPO 2021 Goes Virtual 
Published December 8

We all secretly hoped that the timing would be such that IPC APEX EXPO 2021 would be the bookmark to the pandemic, which started just after the 2020 EXPO, and an ending would allow the 2021 version to proceed. Choosing a prudent path, IPC pivots APEX EXPO to a virtual event. 

Chapter 1 Excerpt from the Book ‘Thermal Management: A Fabricator's Perspective’ 
Published December 8 

The micro I-007e book recently published by Anaya Vardya at American Standard Circuits, third in their series, is drawing significant readership. And this excerpt published in the Daily Newsletter did as well. 

Training Is Hard, But It’s Also Soft 
Published December 8

Blackfox’s Jahr Turchan encourages readers to look at workforce training not only from a certification perspective, but also from a people skills point of view–something that seems to resonate with readers as we all learn new ways to collaborate with our project teams and coworkers. 

Special Operations Strives to Use the Power of Artificial Intelligence 
Published December 8

From the article, “Project Maven was initially executed to automate the processing and exploitation of full-motion video collected by intelligence, instead of relying on humans to sort through all of it. With AI's ability to sift quickly through terabytes of data to find relevant pieces of intelligence, it allows the human to make faster and better informed decisions.”