But while Siemens ultimately plans to apply Supplyframe’s platform across a range of markets and domains, it first plans to tackle EDA integration, incorporating certain Supplyframe technologies into its PCB design flows. In doing so, Siemens said, it will offer its PCB designers real-time visibility into global supply chains and other functionalities, aiding everything from schematic design to factory floor manufacturing.

A.J. Incorvaia, senior vice president of the Electronic Board Systems, Siemens Digital Industries Software (DIS), and Richard Barnett, chief marketing officer for Supplyframe, spoke about the planned integration with PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY in June.

Eagle’s management team will stay in place, Summit told PCD&F. No financial terms were disclosed.

In a press release, Shane Whiteside, president and CEO, Summit Interconnect, said, “Eagle is an impressive operation with an experienced and highly capable management team. The acquisition aligns Eagle’s extensive prototyping experience and commercial market reach with Summit’s differentiated production capabilities. We are particularly impressed with their consistent investments in advanced technology capability, resulting in an equipment set that closely resembles our other Summit factories. The new capabilities that Eagle brings will further strengthen our ability to serve our customers in both high-performance commercial and defense markets, as well as broaden our relationships with key suppliers.”

Eagle was founded in 1979 and provides advanced prototype printed circuit boards to the industrial, communications, medical, automotive and military markets. Its 50,000 sq. ft. plant in the Chicago suburbs is ISO 9001:2015, U.L. and ITAR certified.

Summit is the second-largest PCB fabricator in North America in terms of onshore revenue. (CD)

ATLANTA – CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY has opened free registration for its annual Service Excellence Awards (SEAs) for electronics manufacturing services (EMS) providers.

Now in its 30th year, the SEAs honor companies in contract electronics manufacturing for excelling in the critical area of customer service. This year, winners will be determined through an industry-wide voting process.

The SEAs recognize four categories of EMS providers based on revenues: under $20 million; $20 million to $100 million; $101 million to $500 million; and over $500 million.

CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY will honor winners during a virtual ceremony in February 2022.

“There are literally thousands of EMS companies in the world, making it an industry at once highly competitive and difficult to create differentiation,” said Mike Buetow, editor in chief of CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY. “The SEAs are a golden opportunity for the best-in-class assemblers to separate themselves from their competitors, using the endorsement of their own customers as the differentiator.”

For more information visit circuitsassembly.com/ca/editorial/service-excellence-award.html. To register for free, visit surveymonkey.com/r/8TCZN57.

The deadline to register is Aug. 13, 2021. (CD)

I am not an economist, but having been around the block more than a few times over the past decades, it sure looks like financial déja vu!

My career started in the mid-1970s. At that time, the economic arena was swirling from extraordinary events that, together, created the perfect storm for hyperinflation. The aftermath of the US political crisis Watergate, staggering gas lines and shortages caused by the rolling Middle East oil embargos, and questionable Federal Reserve tactics led us to double-digit inflation. At that time, I was pricing administrator for a division of a global electronic connector manufacturer. Among my responsibilities was keeping the multi-thousand-part price book up to date. This task historically was done once every one or two years. In the environment we were in, however, I was updating prices two to three times each year!

It’s with this perspective I find myself trying to read the proverbial economic tea leaves of where we are headed in 2021 and beyond.

Skyrocketing costs, shortages of copper and fiberglass materials, and longer delivery times mean remakes are not available as quickly as before. Rejecting PCBs for things that don’t affect the form, fit or function of the final project is simply bad business.

To be clear, I am not advocating acceptance of substandard product. IPC-A-600 standards are clear as to what is good and what is not. But thanks to lack of training or misinterpretation of industry specs, incoming PCB quality inspectors are turning away perfectly good commercial-grade boards that then must be remade.

The first step in mass production of a PCB assembly is preparing the board to take components. The boards may be baked in an oven prior to starting the assembly process. Although they are packed in sealed containers with a little bag of desiccant, the sponge-like dielectric materials still absorb water one molecule at a time. Prebaking releases the steam that could interfere with reflow soldering.

Ground is the point from which every measurement is evaluated. Therefore, any variation will affect timing and voltage. Every signal switching on the board, whether slow or fast, contributes to noise on the power and ground planes. This “ground bounce” is commonly referred to as simultaneous switching noise (SSN) and is essentially crosstalk on the ground (FIGURE 1).

Since all digital signals share a reference point (in this case ground), too much noise on one section of the board can have disastrous effects on unrelated sections of the board. With more ground planes and copper, the effects of SSN tend to be more of a local problem – such as near a chip with poor decoupling capacitors – rather than over the entire plane.

But there is always an “on the other hand,” and in this case the issues relate mostly to privacy and cybersecurity. We are putting more information about ourselves than ever before into the hands of data scientists. While we can expect better shopping experiences, we are at the same time disclosing insights into ourselves, our activities, and our preferences as individuals. And if we are not giving away information directly, everything we do online (and we are almost permanently online) reinforces the accuracy of any and every inference made by the AIs that constantly watch from the cloud.

The narrowing of various supply voltages, coupled with increasing IC complexity and the number of voltage rails required, makes power integrity analysis inevitable for high-speed designs. This applies to AC as well as DC effects. The most compelling evidence is that modern circuits like (LP-)DDR memories operate at very low voltages (LP-DDR4 at 1.1V, for example).

Hence, typical power distribution systems today contain large numbers of vias connecting the different parts of the PDN across board layers. Often, large currents travel within these PDNs. Currents can reach dozens of amps when multiple FPGA signals are switching in parallel, while parasitic switching currents can reach even higher numbers for a very short period of time. Automatic via reinforcement functionalities within the PCB design environment often add fuel to the fire. This means automatically generated via structures may not be optimally designed against the required electrical power conditions imposed by increasing currents.

In last month’s introduction to blockchain technology,¹ we noted how the technology offers a way to automate and simplify multiparty processes that are time-consuming, resource-intense, and therefore costly. We often summarize this sort of process as “high-friction.” But pioneers in applying blockchain to improve multiparty processes learned early that it wasn’t enough to find a process that was slow or frustrating. There needed to be a quantifiable performance (often financial) benefit as well. This wasn’t always easy to establish. Unlike applying automation to improve internal processes, the “friction” in multiparty processes occurs outside an organization. As a result, the costs and performance issues caused by that friction may not be captured well enough inside the organization to understand its true impact.

Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that the most successful early blockchain applications were often driven by companies large and sophisticated enough to not only recognize, but quantify, the opportunities and to have enough influence with their partner companies that those partners were willing to collaborate on a solution. Indeed, a recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review² states, “The biggest challenge to companies creating blockchain apps isn’t the technology – it’s successfully collaborating with ecosystem partners.”

In the failure analysis of electronics assemblies, we are often asked to perform a failure analysis on hardware that has undergone a significant thermal event. Hardware might be burned, melted or covered in debris. Determining a root cause for failure can be extremely difficult when the hardware itself is so damaged that much of the evidence has been destroyed. So, what can you do? Like many things, it depends. The success of the failure analysis depends on the overall degree of damage, the amount and type of secondary damage, and the history of the part. Over the years, we have developed some tools and techniques to get the most out of these challenging failure analysis requests.

The first step in these types of investigations is to manage expectations. Most customers will understand that much of the evidence was destroyed during the thermal event failure and that root cause analysis will be very difficult. It is important to discuss what types of information can be gained, however, and what may not be possible. It is also critical to get as much information as possible about the history of the part and any details about the failure itself. This proactive discussion will help lead the investigation in the “right” direction and avoid going down a path that will not yield useful information. For example, if some of the metallic hardware is corroded, it is important to know the storage environment of the unit, not just temperature and humidity, but also the amount of time the unit was stored and its relative orientation. The product history information is useful to separate damage caused by the failure versus damage that occurred before or after the failure.

Electronic assemblers have myriad material and process choices to make, not limited to board materials, solder masks, laminate Tg’s, components, surface finishes, assembly materials and design for manufacturing (DfM) process conditions. High-reliability alloys such as Innolot are designed to meet harsh automotive conditions and extend service life of the solder joint. Applications requiring higher operating temperatures and increased number of cycles to failure have benefited by implementing that alloy. While solder alloy selection is an important factor in determining reliability of the solder joint, considerations should be made for surface finish selection to further enhance performance. This study explores surface finish factors such as IMC formation, voiding and solder spread that contribute to reliability.

Each choice can have a significant impact on the in-service reliability and commercial success of the assembly. This multi-part article will focus on data developed from an extensive study of surface finishes and solder pastes used by many global, high-reliability assembly manufacturers. The study included two commonly used solder alloys in paste form:

Taiichi Ohno’s concept of the seven wastes (muda) in manufacturing as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS) provides a good thought process for evaluating any process. To recap, those seven wastes are:

1. Waste of overproducing (no immediate need for product being produced)
2. Waste of waiting (idle time between operations)
3. Waste of transport (product moving more than necessary)

What distinguishes a soft skill from a hard skill?

Is expertise conferred with an MBA at the tender age of 27? (How can somebody be considered a master of anything at 27?) Does wisdom come from meeting one’s quota nine reporting periods out of 10? Is it filling up spaces with arcane verbiage, hoping the reader is overwhelmed and won’t ask impertinent questions, like what does this all mean, and how does it benefit me?

Conversely, is acquisition of a hard skill dependent on one’s mastery of differential equations, and number theory, and polar coordinates, and game theory, and Brier scores, and C++?

The cracks visible in the microsection were found on via holes not after the initial two reflow steps and wave-soldering test boards, but after further temperature cycling at -55o +125oC. No electrical failures were detected, just the impact of repeated stressing of the copper. It is a good demonstration of how reliable a board can be, but all that stress does have some visual impact. Care must be taken during microsection preparation to see these indicators.