Concurrently, private equity firm Bpifrance will take a 26% stake. John Sammut will remain CEO of Firstronic and will retain 4% of share capital, while COO Jochen Lipp will take an equity stake in Firstronic of 3%.

“We have had a stake in Firstronic for almost four years, during which time we have been able to observe the commitment and know-how of Firstronic’s teams and the strong potential synergies between our respective entities,” said Vincent Bedouin, CEO, Lacroix. “Together with keeping in place a highly experienced management team, which has been able to grow the business at a rapid pace, these elements convinced us that a combination would be mutually beneficial and incorporating Firstronic largely facilitated.”

Firstronic serves tier-one customers primarily in the automotive, industry and healthcare sectors in North America. The company has production sites in Michigan and Mexico and 1,300 staff.

In 2020, Firstronic posted revenue of $87 million, almost 20% of Lacroix’s revenue. Strong growth is expected across both indicators for the 2021 financial year, with a trajectory of $140 million in revenue and EBITDA above 9%. The deal should immediately prove accretive within the upcoming financial year. (CD)

• Semiconductor sales are finishing 2021 up more than 20% at $550 billion after growing 10.8% to $464 billion in 2020. (SEMI)
• The electronic component sales sentiment index for November was down 8.3 points sequentially to 111, and is expected to fall below 100 in December for the first time in 18 months. An index below 100 suggests a contracting market. (ECIA)
• More Wi-Fi 6 devices will ship in 2022 than 5G devices, to the tune of at least 2.5 billion Wi-Fi 6 devices versus roughly 1.5 billion 5G devices. (Deloitte)
• Global AR/VR device shipments in 2022 will reach 12.02 million units, up 26% year-over-year, with Oculus and Microsoft the leaders in the consumer and commercial markets, respectively. (TrendForce)

Communication has been transitioning over the past couple decades. Time, culture and technology have dramatically transformed. Long gone are the storied two-martini business lunches where colleagues, customers and suppliers met, broke bread and discussed one-on-one issues that needed ironing out. Over the past decades, face time (not FaceTime) with any business client has become extremely difficult to arrange. Today with Covid, meeting face to face is all but impossible for many. Long-changing trends compounded by recent events have had a negative impact on the ability to communicate effectively, which in turn has strained the quality of relationships in too many cases.

Business is strong despite shortages in labor and parts. Prices are rising, dramatically in some cases. Profits are being squeezed. Rapid government changes in travel restrictions and worker conditions seem endless due to the continuing evolution of the pandemic.

Supply chains are under pressure from a variety of events and circumstances. These include some brief power shutdowns at plants that produce wafers and PCBs in China, chip and other component shortages, shipping issues with a backlog of over 100 cargo ships carrying, for example, container loads of copper-clad laminates anchored off the Southern California coast waiting to be unloaded. The battery industry is gobbling up copper supplies. Major consumers are buying into chipmakers who can guarantee their needs. This affects those who cannot, causing them to scramble for new sources.

Whether the element is sand, saltwater, sunshine or perhaps a lack of thereof, many dangers age a system prematurely. Most faults caused by the environment are single-component failures. Okay, a part failed. Why? What is the root cause, and what can we do to prevent it from becoming part of a larger trend? Answering that two-part question is the gist of reliability engineering.

What broke is not always evident. Cosmetic damage or a burn scar may point the way if you’re lucky. In most cases, diagnosis is not that easy. Check connectors first, while the board-level investigation usually centers around the FETs that bring power to the device that is out of spec or failing altogether. Somewhere in there a tiny junction has burned up. The repair and return unit or perhaps field service technicians are a good source of reliability anecdotes.

What is wrong here? The billion-dollar mistake.

The billion-dollar mistake is rooted in the misunderstanding of the nature of electronic energy. One drawing is to blame.

As a result, the importance and mechanisms of impedance (herein the meaning of PCB trace impedance – typically referred to as “characteristic impedance”) for signal integrity have been widely discussed and seem to be generally understood by PCB designers.

Simply put, PCB trace impedance is a measure of the resistance that a circuit opposes to a current once a voltage is applied. So far so good. But the concept of impedance is also used in PCB design to describe the behavior of power distribution systems/power distribution networks (PDS/PDN). And this PDN impedance is becoming more of a headache for PCB designers as IC vendors define increasingly tight so-called “target impedance limits” that a design must meet (a few milliohms over a broad frequency range).

Are you sure what the term PDN impedance means for you and what to pay attention to when designing a PDN? Let’s look at what PDN impedance and target impedance are and take a stab at explaining their importance for the design of modern high-speed digital boards.

The amount of solder paste released from an aperture is referred to as transfer efficiency (TE) and expressed as a percent of total aperture volume. Stencil or solder paste release characteristics are often illustrated by plotting TE against AR.

AR guidelines were originally set at 0.66 as a minimum to ensure good (>80%) TE. Many of these original guidelines have been relaxed due to improvements in solder paste, stencil materials and nanocoatings. With good materials, equipment and tooling, and robust printing practices, apertures with ARs as low as 0.50 can often be printed in production on 4-mil thick stencil foils with excellent results.

Ambrose Bierce, of sainted memory, is known for a Devil’s Dictionary, a cynic’s primer on human behavior, laid out in Noah Webster style.

Pity he strayed into hostile territory in bandit-infested Northern Mexico in 1913, never to be seen again. Maybe someone lurking in the sagebrush took offense at imagined slights in the Dictionary. People are so thin-skinned.

Pity also that he lived one hundred years too soon. Bierce missed his moment. Obfuscation has exploded, rivaling worthless college degrees (or maybe because of them). A euphemistic pandemic with no known vaccine, for which we need a new dictionary, has infiltrated our lexicon. Straight talk in professional settings is frowned upon, covertly if not overtly. Blunt talk is often memorable and career-threatening. Verbal mush is benign and soon forgotten. As the author of the Bartleby column in the Nov. 20, 2021, edition of The Economist noted, concerning contemporary biz-speak, “People rarely say what they mean, but hope that their meaning is nonetheless clear. Think Britain, but with paycheques. To navigate this kind of workplace, you need a phrasebook.”

Past columns have highlighted Lean Six Sigma core tools such Gemba and the DMAIC process that help identify and correct quality issues that develop in manufacturing operations as project assumptions change. Lean Six Sigma is helping create an empowered, educated workforce at SigmaTron, capable of rapidly addressing unanticipated challenges found in today’s production environments. That said, defects can escape the factory or be induced by activities once product leaves the factory. Focusing on this area can have a long-term impact on eliminating another set of defect opportunities: muda (waste) and cost.