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Low Temperature, High Reliability
- Enhanced mechanical reliability over traditional SnBi solder pastes
- Superior wettability minimizing warpage induced defects
- Enabling peak reflow temperature of 175°C
- Increases energy efficiency and cost savings
buetow
AVE BIG BOX stores learned lessons that can be applied by electronics manufacturers?
One of the big takeaways from the Future Compute conference on the campus of MIT in May was a definitive “yes!”
There, we heard about how some of the large retail chains like Target use software, hardware and data in all kinds of customer experiences.
Almost every employee has handheld devices tracking the billions of sensors and cameras in use across some 1,900 stores and 50 regional distribution centers. At each store, it runs about 100 different software applications. They look at traffic trends: When is the peak? When is the lag? And how can they be modulated?
Around the World
The deal includes Royal Circuit’s operations in Hollister and Santa Ana, California, and the Advanced Assembly EMS site in Aurora, Colorado.
The acquisition expands Summit’s PCB offering in rigid, flex, rigid/flex and ATE PCBs, significantly strengthens engineering and service resources providing CAM, DFM/A, PCB design/layout, and also adds quick-turn, prototype SMT assembly services.
SANTA ANA, CA – TTM Technologies has agreed to acquire Telephonics in a debt-free cash transaction for $330 million, subject to customary working capital adjustments at closing.
Telephonics provides intelligence, surveillance and communications solutions deployed across land, sea and air applications. The transaction is expected to broaden TTM’s Aerospace and Defense product offerings.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. It is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022.
BATU KAWAN, MALAYSIA – Simmtech Holdings, through its Malaysia-based subsidiary, Sustio, in May officially opened its new manufacturing facility here, according to reports.
It’s the company’s first advanced manufacturing facility based in Penang, says Southeast Asia managing director Jeffery Chun.
“It is also our eighth factory, along with other operations in Korea, China and Japan. In May last year, Sustio broke ground on an 18-acre site at BKIP, investing more than RM600 million. Despite the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 situation, the practical construction work took only nine months to complete, and the factory is now fully equipped and ready to run mass production. This new factory has already employed more than 700 workforces, and it will reach its full employment of more than 1,000 employees by next year. This new factory will also deliver the first Made in Malaysia semiconductor memory chip packaging substrate and printed circuit board, bolstering Malaysia’s semiconductor supply chain even further.”
The factory is expected to increase Simmtech’s total capacity of substrates and PCBs 20%, according to Chun.
Bestronics hired Alison Shyu as program manager.
Creation Technologies named Steve Heinzen strategic account leader.
Emerald EMS appointed Lucian Soaita chief operating officer.
Essemtec named Quintin Armstrong North American service manager.
Irene Sterian, director, technology and innovation development at Celestica and founder of REMAP, passed away on May 8.
“Icape Group is well established in Germany,” said Cyril Calvignac, CEO, Icape. “Our business unit recently moved to brand-new offices. We deployed more logistics solutions in Nuremberg. We invested in the acquisition of BA Elektroniks in 2021, and we are now moving forward with the acquisition of SAFA2000, which brings another experienced structure to our organization, with very interesting tools, new customers, an expansion of our suppliers’ list, and advanced logistics services with a fully operational warehouse to manage our activities in this dynamic country that represents our biggest market share in Europe.”
The German company will be integrated into Icape Deutschland in 2023.
The printed circuit board fabricator and assembler had revenue of €169 million (US$182.4 million) in 2021, up 34%. The company aims for revenue of €500 million by 2026.
The company is currently owned by its founder, managers and employees.
Icape consists of 27 subsidiaries. The company believes its global organization is structured and sized to absorb a new phase of significant growth.
DRESDEN GERMANY – Cicor Group completed its acquisition of SMT Elektronik, according to reports. No financial terms of the agreement were disclosed.
The transaction will be financed by existing credit facilities and funds from a mandatory convertible bond issued in January.
SMT Elektronik is integrating approximately 130 employees here, expanding its electronic manufacturing services business in Germany. The merged firms will operate as Cicor Deutschland, effective immediately.
SMT Elektronik’s customer base is related to Cicor’s target markets of medical and industrial technology. The company generated sales of some €20 million in 2021.
As part of the deal, Cicor also acquired SMT’s data logger business, including Monilog products.
From the public issue, 25 million shares will be made available for application by the public, while 10 million shares will be designated for application by directors and employees. The remaining shares will be reserved for investors.
The proceeds will be allocated for the firm’s operations facility, in addition to R&D development and working capital.
The deal is estimated at an equity value of $919 million post-transaction. The transaction could include cash of more than $500 million.
ACE will hold a general meeting May 5 during which shareholders will be asked to consider and vote on proposals to approve the merger and related matters.
The deal is expected to close shortly after the meeting, subject to shareholder approvals and the satisfaction or waiver of the conditions in the agreement and plan of merger and other customary closing conditions.
Upon closing, the company will be renamed Tempo Automation Holdings.
In addition to the hands-on laboratory, the facility provides multiple secure collaboration spaces for Henkel technical staff and customers, as well as digital platforms for virtual engagement opportunities.
“The current pace of technology progress is unprecedented,” said Stefan de Diego, regional head of electronics, Americas and Europe, Henkel. “And, for today’s innovators, being first to market is integral to commercial success. With our knowledgeable team and extensive lab resources – located in the global epicenter of tech innovation – Henkel can provide even more immediate and impactful prototype design and analysis support for our customers, helping them meet critical time-to-market windows with tested, proven devices.”
Henkel’s application center offers a co-development environment, with access to resources required for technology design and testing.
Trends in the US electronics equipment market (shipments only)
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce Census Bureau, May 3, 2022
I thought I was the exception, but in conversations with colleagues, I realize I am the current norm. A trio of events had the combined impact of making what should be simple investments in machinery and equipment anything but.
The most talked about, problematic event has been the strained supply chain. I am not sure exactly how much of the problem getting machinery and equipment is directly attributable to the supply chain, but it has indeed had an impact. When obtaining lead-time quotations, availability of parts, chips, etc., are always the culprit cited for the long length of time to build the equipment, whether a complex custom-built item or simply a copier for the office.
& National Technology, Inc. (USA)
It’s All About the Real Estate
PCB costs are based on the amount of raw material required to make a particular board. The metal finish, like ENIG or silver, plays a part in pricing, but it is the amount of fiberglass and copper needed that really determines the final cost.
The quoted price for most boards in panel or array format is based on a fabricator’s desired panel price for a particular technology or quantity, divided by the number of arrays (or pieces) that fit on a standard 18 x 24″ manufacturing panel. The more arrays or pieces that fit on the panel, the lower the cost.
In many transactions, the only consideration of impact to an EMS company’s customer base is visits to key customers during the due diligence phase to enable the acquiring entity to assess whether the business levels they anticipate are likely to continue in the new entity. The alignment of EMS brand/differentiating processes and facility redundancy are often minor considerations.
A resurrected PCB East drew attendees from as far as the West Coast and Florida. There is nothing like in-person contact. The social aspect of networking has been missing for far too long. The enthusiasm of the attendees bodes well for future face-to-face regional gatherings.
We have so many aspects we can control that it can be tempting to disable or ignore some of them. That is a completely rational choice to make. New features take time to learn and implement. It may not be so easy to get everyone on board for a new feature or a whole new iteration of the software.
I’ve addressed the subject of onshoring as a potential antidote to globalization many times in the past. Arguably, now, the idea makes more sense than ever. On the face of it, shorter supply chains promise some protection against the unpredictability of today’s world. Hot on the heels of the pandemic, we now have the Ukraine crisis, and there is the fallout from Brexit, which has made for difficult and time-consuming trade between the region’s most influential economies. One major obstacle to the return of onshoring is essential indigenous-supporting industries have been largely swept away as activities have migrated offshore, taking expertise and investment with them. The conditions that caused and drove the offshoring remain in place, perhaps masked by current logistical difficulties. Accessing the data needed to move manufacturing activities from an established location is another barrier to reshoring.
You’re designing a new rigid-flex. Devices are getting fanned out, via structures defined, and layer count is becoming clearer. You have determined how many flex layers you need from rigid section to rigid section. There are competing considerations on how those flex layers are configured: foil and dielectric thickness, bonded or unbonded, and where they will be in the stack-up of layers. All this impacts flexibility and how the part will bend in the installed application.
For today, let’s concentrate on where the flex layers land in the stack-up and the effect that can have on manufacturing and end-application use. Several strategies have rational logic and can be successful in select situations.
An ideal digital interconnect is a lossless transmission line with characteristic impedance and phase delay flat over the signal bandwidth and termination resistors equal to the characteristic impedance. In such interconnect, bits generated by a transmitter would flow seamlessly into the receiver with no limits on the bit rate. Such a utopian transmission line exists only in our imaginations and textbooks. The physics of our world prohibit it. One way to describe “what happens to the signal on the way to a receiver?” is to use the balance of power that can be written for the passive interconnect as follows:
This is frequency domain over the bandwidth of the signal.1 P_out is the power delivered to the receiver, and P_in is the power delivered by transmitter to the interconnect. All other terms in the balance of power equation describe the signal distortion. The formula above expresses all we need to know about the interconnects. (It should be “cast in granite.”). As they say, “a formula is worth a thousand words,” almost literally in this case. To understand it, imagine the interconnect system as a multiport with the transmitter at port 1, receiver at port 2 and multiple other ports for links coupled to the link connecting port 1 and 2 and terminations to real impedance (not necessarily identical at all ports) – something like this below, together with the definition of waves and scattering parameters (or S-parameters):
by Lance Wang
According to physics, electromagnetic signals travel in a vacuum or through the air at the same speed as light, which is:
Vc = 3 x 108M/sec. = 186,000 miles/sec. = 11.8 inch/nanosec.
A signal travels on a PCB transmission line at a slower speed, affected by the dielectric constant (Er) of the PCB material. The transmission line structure also affects the signal speed.
There are two general PCB trace structures*: stripline and microstrip.
by Mike Buetow
Coinciding with that meeting came an announcement from a pair of US legislators that they had introduced a bill to incentivize purchases of domestically produced PCBs, as well as industry investments in factories, equipment, workforce training, and research and development.
The bill, known as the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act of 2022, is said to be modeled on the CHIPS Act of 2021, a much-touted piece of legislation that earmarks more than $50 billion toward new onshore semiconductor fabrication plants.
Production Sourcing Approach
by Brian Laney
As a business owner or engineer, working with a contract manufacturer can be daunting, particularly if it doesn’t have experience sourcing challenging parts in a challenging market. How can we as a community of manufacturers help solve this problem? We must put in the time to clearly identify the challenges, set aside time, and build resources to assist customers in real time – and offer a stratified path to a solution based on the type of client. Sounds easy, right? But don’t flinch when it comes to defusing bombs.
Recently, customers have tapped us to bring production to the US from Asia. These customers have been using turnkey, rapid-turn, low-volume solutions and are now looking at scaling production to about 1,000 from less than 100.
Another form of bump gaining more popularity is the copper pillar. These bumps, instead of being spherical in shape, are in the form of a pillar, with various shapes and sizes. The most popular shape is in the form of a cylinder. The pillar shape allows the high ratio of bump height to bump diameter, therefore permitting very tight pitch, even when bump heights are large. Sometimes a solder cap is formed on top of the pillar to help with connectivity with the mating chip.1 Due to the cylindrical shape and non-collapsing nature of Cu pillar bumps, they can be easily mounted on the fine trace of the laminate. Copper pillars are terminals used to flip-chip IC chips to a substrate in a semiconductor package by thermal compression flip-chip (TCFC) technology. Copper pillars are formed on aluminum electrode pads of an IC chip.
Authors: C. Hanumanth Rao, et al.
Abstract: The introduction of 3-D printing technology has revolutionized the manufacturing and electronics product design in the past few years, where it is used to produce printed circuit boards. Printed electronics is one of the fastest growing additive manufacturing technologies and is becoming invaluable to various industries. The evolution of several contact and noncontact types of fabrication techniques has been reported in the recent past. Leveraging these technologies, various types of printed electronic components have been realized. One method is inkjet printing technology, which has been widely accepted for printed electronics manufacturing. As 3-D printing uses only those materials essential to create the product, it eliminates waste production, with a smaller equipment cost and minimizes the number of process steps, resulting in lower manufacturing costs with reduced turnaround time. Various kinds of conductive and nonconductive materials have emerged in the recent past in conjunction with many manufacturing techniques for printed electronics. Herein, the authors review the most commonly used substrates, electronic printing materials, and the widespread printing techniques employed at the industrial level, giving an overall vision for a better understanding and evaluation of their different features. The technical challenges of several contact and noncontact techniques with corresponding solutions are also presented. Finally, status on advances in the production of various kinds of materials employed in 3-D printed electronics and the methods for producing them, shortcomings, technical challenges, applications, benefits, and the future opportunities pertaining to printed electronics are discussed in detail. (Journal of Electronic Materials, Apr. 1, 2022, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11664-022-09579-7)
