The CEWaste consortium warns access to the CRMs in these products is vulnerable to geopolitical tides. Recycling and reusing them is “crucial” to secure ongoing supplies for regional manufacturing of electrical and electronics equipment. Today, recycling most of the products rich in CRMs is not commercially viable, with low and volatile CRM prices undermining efforts to improve European CRM recycling rates, which today are close to zero in most cases.

The move is part of SERO’s international expansion and growth strategy.

SERO specializes in high-volume manufacturing for automotive and industrial customers. Automotive makes up 85% of the company’s sales. The company employs 300, primarily in Germany, and has annual sales topping €80 million ($98 million). Semecs focuses on medium-volume and manual activities, and has ISO 13485 (medical) and IATF 16949 certifications. Semecs generates 85% of sales in the industrial and medical sectors and 15% in the automotive industry. It has an engineering center in the Netherlands and production in Slovakia. Semecs has annual sales of approximately €70 million ($86 million) and about 460 employees. (MB)

For many years, colleagues from virtually every industry imaginable have agreed their Number One need, desire, concern and frustration is finding good people to hire. Regardless of job level or education experience, hiring qualified people is possibly the biggest challenge industry faces globally.

In my little corner of the world, which happens to be close to some of the most prestigious universities and colleges in the world, executives in companies of all sizes tell me the mantra is, “Where are the good people?” (Note: No one asks, “Where are the people?” The operative word here is “good.”)

Material constraints combined with unanticipated spikes in demand and shortages in transportation capacity apparently aren’t enough of an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) management challenge for 2021. Labor shortages are also an issue, despite unemployment numbers double what they were pre-Covid. The reasons are complex. While government stimulus payments and more generous unemployment insurance may be incentivizing some to stay home, other factors such as lack of childcare resources or health concerns are also at play. The availability of more remote work options and relocation of previously available workforce due to Covid restriction adaptations are also factors.

In a constrained labor market, the manufacturing sector often finds it hard to recruit. Several decades ago, everyone had friends and family who worked in factories and spoke of the benefits of that career choice. The service economy and offshoring changed that. Today, many potential employees do not even consider manufacturing sector jobs.

In many sectors of the economy, particularly commercial, the cost of goods sold (COGS) is close to the selling price, meaning little margin after overhead is accounted for. (PCB design is among the overhead costs.) Many units must leave the factory and find a consumer before the project hits the breakeven point. Product cycles are such that price erosion puts the squeeze on margins right from the beginning. Consumer hardware is a tough game, no doubt.

When we think about PCB engineering, we tend to consider product success in terms of process steps: people defining analysis criteria and working to make the product more useful, efficient and valuable.

DC vs. AC (aka static vs. transient). Historically, nearly all power conversations pertaining to printed circuit boards have been lumped into two categories, with the terms “power DC” and “power AC” emerging as almost standard terminology. Power DC is understandable as it addresses PDN capacity issues associated with inadequate copper.

On top of the misery came the recent blockage of the Suez Canal, adding several days of delay as the backlog was cleared. And, of course, there were domino effects at ports around the world, as cargo was unable to move into or out of the system. The problem has raised questions about the future of super-large container ships and strengthens the argument for using larger numbers of smaller vessels.

The rules for BGAs are much the same whether the board is rigid or rigid-flex. Due to some of the material differences in a rigid-flex, however, extra care is recommended when it comes to the artwork and the trace routing in the BGA field.

Let’s start with pad and via design. For microvias, many suppliers recommend staying at or above 0.005″ diameter vias for reliability reasons. Much experience tells us vias smaller than 0.005″ tend to have a much lower mean time between failure (MTBF) than vias at or greater than 0.005″. In more benign applications, smaller vias may be an option. If the product will experience temperature extremes, however, the conservative bet is to stay above 0.005″ diameter microvias. Depending on the design and manufacturer, the associated pads may range from 0.010″ to 0.012″. Smaller pads risk a via sliding off the edge of the pad. If it does, the risk is the laser may cut through the dielectric and down to the next copper layer.

EMC is the branch of electrical engineering and physics that deals with the unintentional generation, propagation and reception of electromagnetic waves (in the E and H fields). These can cause undesirable effects in electronic devices, including functional interferences, malfunctions, or even physical damage.

Generally, two fundamental aspects are considered. First, the emission referring to the unwanted generation of electromagnetic energy and its transmission to the sinks, along with the necessary countermeasures to reduce such emission. Second, the respective susceptibility to interference relating to the operation of electrical/electronic equipment (or components) that become “victims” of unintended electromagnetic interference (EMI).

To get a sense for how blockchain can address issues in the electronics industry, it may help to start with a story about an earlier technology. A young electrical engineer in 1980 had a job interview with an industry veteran who asked if he had ever heard of a thing called a “vacuum tube.” The young engineer admitted his semiconductor class had included a one-hour lecture demonstrating how field-effect transistors worked like vacuum tubes.

“When I was in college, they made us take a semester of tube theory because they thought it might be useful some day!” the veteran exclaimed. His outburst highlighted a common theme in emerging technology. More than 50 years later, it was easy for the next generation of engineers to see the number of new products enabled by vacuum tubes, even though by that time solid-state devices had already largely replaced them. But during the 1920s, when vacuum tubes represented the latest innovation in technology, it was difficult to see they would lead to radar, FM stereo, television, and rock concerts. In the same way, it’s doubtful the creators of the internet anticipated using it to watch videos, hail rides, or monitor a newborn baby in the crib. Even those of us lucky enough to apply the latest advancements in technology are unlikely to foresee all the ways new technology will be applied.

The ongoing IC lead-time crisis is pushing the margins of EMS companies and leaving their OEM customers scrambling. As of this writing, production scheduling under the conditions of withering lead times calls for unprecedented measures riddled with hunches and diminishing hope for acceptable recoveries. For now, production planning is all over the map, with EMS companies working closely with their customers to get through this period without major damage to OEMs’ brands and customer loyalty.

Today, lead times for ICs are snowballing up to 25 weeks on average, with some of the harder-to-source components such as tantalum capacitors hitting the 40-week mark (FIGURE 1). TSMC, one of the largest IC manufacturers in the industry, forecasts the global shortages of semiconductors could linger into next year.¹ The ringing note stamped on all lead-time quotes is “subject to change,” and in many cases lead times are downgraded to “TBD,” leaving manufacturers spinning for short-term solutions.

For most, 2020 can be summed in one term, and that term is Covid-19, of course. The pandemic disrupted supply lines, shut down factories around the world, and pushed many companies to the brink of financial collapse, to say nothing of the extraordinary and tragic loss of life.

Covid affected everything, but the rebound was sharp and quick. Manufacturers reconfigured assembly lines to tool up for medical devices like ventilators and face masks. The financial hit from the viral tsunami that erupted from China, which undertook a nationwide shutdown in February 2020, and rippled throughout Europe and North America in the following months, led to ugly June quarters for most. Certain industries, such as commercial aerospace, have yet to recover. Yet by the fourth quarter most markets had returned to life, and balance sheets were for many firms not only looking better sequentially, but even year-over-year.

The engineering analysis starts by mapping the process flow and evaluating the cost drivers in the assembly process. While this level of analysis is routine for high-volume, dedicated line projects within the EMS industry, it isn’t always done thoroughly in midrange projects. This typically happens because companies building those projects lack the engineering resources necessary to develop cost-effective custom automation solutions.

Several years ago, the general thinking was components would keep getting smaller. The prevailing view was that by this time, the metric 03015 and the metric 0201 would be working their way into mainstream production. Although the processes to accommodate these small devices have long since been developed, it will likely be some time before they appear on a majority of BoMs. What is happening, though, is manufacturers are trying to eek out slightly more with standard 01005s by placing them closer together, creating a much narrower gap from the edge of one component to the edge of the next. (See “Screen Printing,” December 2020.) These narrow gap designs – which today see pitches of approximately 100µm with 75µm on the horizon – in combination with the other elements of miniaturization require much tighter alignment tolerances in the stencil printing to ensure solder paste hits the pad target.