Latest Articles

Finding Process Improvement Opportunities in Training

Nolan Johnson speaks with Leo Lambert of EPTAC about training the next generation out of high school and vocational schools, and how his company continues to improve processes, grow and adapt to changing requirements while fulfilling its mission to deliver technical certification training.

Predicting a ‘Roaring Twenties’ Innovation Boom

The 2020s have not started as anyone would have wished. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in supply chains and in global manufacturing, yet this could still be the most innovative decade ever.

Quality and Continuous Improvement

The concern for quality control and reduced product variation can be traced back centuries. Archaic quality control methods were used by the Xia Dynasty in 2100 BC in ancient China. During the late 1290s in medieval Europe, guilds—the pre-cursor to unions—were responsible for product and service quality. From 1700 to 1900, product quality was determined by the individual craftsman’s efforts. At the close of the 19th century, Eli Whitney introduced standardized, interchangeable parts to simplify assembly.

Functional Inkjet Printing in PCB Manufacture

Pete Starkey speaks with Dr. Luca Gautero, product manager at SUSS MicroTec Netherlands B.V., about advances in inkjet printing, even outside the lab.

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

I’m following the landing procedures for NASA’s Perseverance Mars lander as I’m finishing my Top 5 list for the week. The successful landing of the lander seems a nice highlight for this week. Our global aerospace programs, both national and private enterprise, make these missions seem almost, almost routine. They are, as we all know, anything but routine. No surprise, then, that aerospace-related news percolated to the top of mind for our readers this week.

The Benefits of Statistical Process Control

The concepts of statistical process control were initially developed by Dr. Walter Shewhart of Bell Laboratories in the 1920s, and were expanded upon by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who introduced SPC to Japanese industry after WWII. After early successful adoption by Japanese firms, SPC has now been incorporated by organizations around the world as a primary tool to improve product quality by reducing process variation.

Benchmarking With Your Suppliers: What to Know About Solder Mask

Everyone wants a smooth-running solder mask process with high productivity and minimal rejects, but to achieve this you really need a firm understanding of what your current process is capable of, what its limitations are, and what you want to improve. Process capability benchmarking is a great way to identify and implement improvements within your process.

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

We’re moving on into 2021, and there’s quite a bit going on in the world of PCB design, fabrication, and assembly. IPC APEX EXPO is fast approaching, and I know a lot of you will be attending, albeit virtually. In this week’s Top Five, columnist Eric Camden provides a how-to guide for PCBA technologists planning their IPC APEX EXPO schedule.

USPAE Launches $42M DoD Consortium

The I-Connect007 editorial team recently interviewed Chris Peters, Kevin Sweeney and Shane Whiteside, members of the U.S. Partnership for Assured Electronics (USPAE), about the award the association received from the Department of Defense to create the Defense Electronics Consortium. In this conversation, they discuss the objectives of the consortium, which was created to help the government identify and address potential risks in the electronics industry.

Best Practices: Footprint Design and CAD Library Management

The I-Connect team spoke with Altium’s John Watson about the hurdles surrounding footprints and footprint design. John talks about how being proactive and improving the CAD library can better QC processes and help protect against footprint difficulties.

Joe Fjelstad's Book Review: The Innovators

"The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" by Walter Isaacson is the best technology history book I have ever read, and at the same time one of the most engaging and entertaining. It is a forte of Isaacson to write biographies of great people. I have read his other books on DaVinci, Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein and found them equally brilliant. Isaacson has a number of other titles I have yet to get to in the future. He is a singularly great storyteller.

Orbotech Flex Equipment Introduction

Barry Matties speaks with Meny Gantz about the challenges for flex manufacturing, what’s driving the complexity around it, and how Orbotech’s new products will help their customers produce flex in much more effective way.

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

Another active news week in the electronics industry! February is launching with a high-G burn, to be sure. And if you’re a fan of The Expanse, like I am, then you’ve probably already watched through to the Season 5 finale; this means you have attention to spare for industry news all of a sudden. And if you haven’t reached the current end of the line for The Expanse, then today’s list is just what you need while you catch up.

Catching up With Nano Dimension

Dan Feinberg spoke with Valentin Storz, Nano Dimension’s general manager of EMEA and director of marketing, about how the pandemic has affected their business this past year and what they have planned moving forward.

Kemmer Praezision Partners with Insulectro

In this interview, Nolan Johnson and Gregor Dutkiewicz discuss Kemmer Praezision, their new working partnership with Insulectro, and some of the recent market challenges in mechanical drill bit technology.

Dan Feinberg's Favorite Career Moments

During a recent conversation on industry topics, Nolan Johnson asked Dan Feinberg, PCB fabrication pioneer, businessman and IPC Hall of Fame inductee, about his favorite career moments. In this clip, we proudly share with you two of Dan’s highlights. Both of these memories speak to Dan’s role as a trailblazer in electronics manufacturing—first in the U.S, then across the globe.

Making the Most of a Virtual Event

Nolan Johnson speaks with Alicia Balonek, senior director of tradeshows and events at IPC, about how both attendees and exhibitors can best prepare for this year’s virtual IPC APEX EXPO and breaks down some of the events you can look forward to at this year’s show.

Seven Tips for Your Next Stackup Design

Rarely do we have the luxury of designing a board just for connectivity. When interconnects are not transparent, we must engineer them to reduce the noise they can generate. This is where design for signal integrity, power integrity and EMC—collectively high-speed digital engineering—are so important. Eric Bogatin offers seven tips for stackup design.

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

This week, we have a variety of news and articles to share, and it’s all positive. We have a new president, and he’s pledging to help American businesses. December PCB sales were up 4.5% over the same period a year ago. Atotech is just about ready to launch an IPO. Sunstone has tweaked its free CAD tool, PCB123, to make it even easier for designers to receive their Gerber files. And columnist John Watson breaks down what we all learned during the chaos that was 2020.

Book Review: The Timeliest Read of 2021—The Business of WE

It’s only January, but this may be the timeliest book of the year, as well as the most important. Why? Because it deals with the issues that we are facing right here now. The gap that Kriska refers to is the one between black and white, men and women and as the title suggests “we and them.”

IPC’s Alicia Balonek Talks Trade Show News

Nolan Johnson discusses IPC APEX EXPO 2021 with Alicia Balonek, senior director of trade shows and events at IPC. Alicia provides an update on how IPC APEX EXPO will be structured in a virtual format, overviews the programming changes, and new additions designed to make IPC APEX EXPO the best virtual event possible.

5 Keys to Smart Process Success

Smart factories require the core underlying processes to be connected and “talking” to generate the data necessary to make real-time process decisions, that is, the IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). In a truly connected factory, an ongoing continuous dialog between machines, business processes, suppliers and customers is happening in the background. This dialog is not only interactive, but proactive, as a constant stream of real-time data is tweaking and adjusting processes to drive improvement. It also provides time-critical information on how processes are operating, supply chain pipeline, and delivery status updates—all based on data.

The Future of Imaging and Inkjet Printing

We recently spoke to Ed Carignan of Technica, who outlines the current landscape for both direct imaging and inkjet printing and describes how the technologies have evolved over the years. He also details what’s next on the horizon.

Book Excerpt: ‘Thermal Management: A Fabricator's Perspective,' Chapter 3

Conceptually, a metal-core board is exactly like it sounds—the metal is in the middle of the PCB sandwiched between layers on both sides. Just about any PCBA that will contain active heat-generating components can benefit when designed on a metal-core PCB. On a conventional PCB, the standard FR-4 layers are relatively poor thermal conductors, and heat is normally dissipated from active components using vias and thermal pads, as discussed earlier.

EIPC Technical Snapshot: Business Outlook

A headline in a Sunday newspaper had caught John Ling’s eye as he composed the invitation to this fourth EIPC seminar: “Now, more than ever, we need to talk.” Thus, it is that EIPC decided to run another technical webinar, which was just like one of their in-person conferences, except no one had to travel—or got to enjoy a beer or excellent food with convivial company.
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