BOSTON – A pair of experts on printed circuit board design have released a new book exploring the temperature of traces and vias and how to accommodate them in a design.

PCB Design Guide to Via and Trace Currents and Temperatures covers PCB materials (copper and dielectrics) and the role they play in the heating and cooling of traces. It details the curves found in IPC-2152, the equations that fit those curves and computer simulations that fit those curves and equations.

The 246-page book, authored by Doug Brooks, Ph.D., and Johannes Adam, Ph.D., presents sensitivity analyses that show what happens when environments are varied, including adjacent traces and planes, changing trace lengths, and thermal gradients; and explores via temperatures and what determines them, along with fusing issues and whether we can predict the fusing time of traces. Readers will learn how to measure the thermal conductivity of dielectrics and how to measure the resistivity of copper traces and why many prior attempts to do so have been doomed to failure.

For more information, visit artechhouse.com. (MB)

ATLANTA – CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY and PCD&F in April announced the 2021 New Product Introduction Award winners for electronics assembly equipment, materials, software, and PCB fabrication. CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY also named the winners of the annual Service Excellence Awards.

The 14th annual NPI Awards recognize leading new products during the past 12 months. An independent panel of practicing industry engineers selected the recipients.

TAOYUAN CITY, TAIWAN – MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions opened its Greater China Die Attach Application Center here on Apr. 1. The advanced technology and application center will house technical service and lab personnel, equipped with die attach assembly and process equipment for high-volume process optimization and component designs using paste and film products.

“With MacDermid Alpha’s unique role as a leading packaging materials supplier to all steps of the electronics manufacturing supply chain, this multimillion-dollar investment to build a leading-edge application center is an important next step in enabling our customers to meet their design goals,” said Rick Frick, VP and GM of the Semiconductor Solutions division. (CD)

As the price of PCB materials continues to skyrocket, why are some circuit board buyers stuck firmly in the past, doing business as they always have? Why, even when paying more than they should, do they fear upsetting the apple cart?

Bare board buying can be competitive, but only if those overseeing their company’s PCB supply chain are willing to occasionally buck a system put in place years ago. For circuit board buyers and procurement managers in particular, I see three ingrained habits that do damage to a firm’s PCB purchasing program and its ability to get competitive pricing.

The truth shall set you free. The truth table of a logic device determines the outcome of a logical operation. A handful of operations are described as gates. The gates are named for the function that applies. To start, two main ones are the AND gate and OR gate. Both usually have two inputs and one output.

You may have a hallway or stairwell light in your home with a light switch at either end. When both switches are in the down position, the light is on. When both are up, the light is also on. If one is up and the other down, the light is off. The truth table for those two switches is shown in TABLE 1.

In this month’s column, I extend an overview of two recently held PCEA chapter meetings and give a nod to two interesting presenters who gave their time to cover relevant topics. Next, I hand it off to PCEA chairman Steph Chavez who relates a recent personal career “crossroads” experience and shares what gave him the hope and confidence to carry on. This month, I am excited to provide our readers with a growing list of events coming in 2021.

The Michigan Chapter held a highly anticipated kickoff meeting on Feb. 24. Chapter chairman Dugan Karnazes welcomed an international online audience to the meeting and spoke about the excitement and anticipation of bringing local area printed circuit engineers together to learn alongside a greater audience. The featured speaker for the event was Terry Munson, owner of Foresite, who presented The Forensics of Dendrite Shorting. Munson offered his definition of cleanliness, then described no less than 16 sources of contamination that cause dendritic shorts on PCBAs and offered mitigation techniques (FIGURE 1).

Much of the talk in the simulation world lately is focused on power. Even SI experts are starting to see how power has a material impact on their high-speed data transfer success. With power on the forefront, what effect will that have on the additional design demands of low-frequency supplies? Why should you consider power throughout your design process?

Signal integrity, at its basic core, studies and describes the effects physical structures have on a signal, as it is transmitted from a source (transmitter) to a destination (receiver), but makes no mention of where the energy for the signal originates, or where it goes once received. Although a bit of oversimplification, the transmitting IC pulls energy from its power supply, bundles it as a bitstream and transmits data to a receiving IC, where the energy is dumped onto the ground and eventually returns to the power supply, ready to repeat. Admittedly, today’s high-speed signals are largely differential and draw from multiple power rails, so we aren’t describing the exact current flow. What we are describing is the notion that reliable data transmission involves both a clean path from driver to receiver in addition to a well-designed plan to deliver and return needed power.

Last month we talked about the often ambiguous, unstructured design data packages running rampant in the PCB industry, which drive non-value-add administrative tasks across all phases of our data exchange and processes, and we underscored the urgency to integrate “smart engineering” data-driven processes, as becoming more efficient as an industry in reducing cost and NPI cycles should be a critical objective to all organizations. What exactly do we mean when we talk about smart engineering or data-driven processes? Buzzwords and acronyms are all around us, such as digital transformation, RPA (repetitive or robotic process automation), BPM (business process management), SaaS (software as a service), etc. All encompass a similar objective: optimizing our processes throughout the enterprise.

In the PCB manufacturing facility, some classic examples of duplicated data entry when receiving a new design package are in the front-end engineering process steps (FIGURE 1). Several generic steps occur across the industry, and all of these must occur, with the sequence varying based on the company or manufacturing facility. In many cases, each of these process steps are completely segregated software applications, which in essence results in non-value-added administrative tasks.

In the 2020s, receiving an undergraduate – or even a graduate – degree in one’s chosen area of expertise is no longer enough to start a career, let alone sustain one. We must all be lifelong learners to keep abreast of new information, technology, and processes to flourish. Continuing education is not an option; it is a must. The PCB design occupation is no exception. Cue scores of passionate subject matter experts, eager to impart decades of knowledge gleaned from on-the-job training, higher education, face-to-face interaction, and teaching in a time when the industry struggles to replace veterans who are retiring at a rapid pace.

In March, PCD&F reached out to the creators of emerging online programs available to those interested in perfecting design and layout of printed circuit boards. First, PCD&F spoke with Michael Creeden, CID+, and Rick Hartley, BSEE, CID, via Zoom about their new self-published manual, Printed Circuit Engineering Professional, and the instructor-led program that accompanies it: Printed Circuit Engineering Designer (PCED), available from a national training center.

Photosensitive glass was invented in November 1937 by Dr. Donald Stookey of the Corning Glass Works. It was made public 10 years later, on June 1, 1947, and patented in 1950. Most will know glass ceramics from their glass stove top or the iPhone 12 Corning Ceramic Shield screen.

Glass is amorphous, meaning it has no crystalline structure. It’s just a random assortment of molecules in a solid matrix. Ceramics, on the other hand, are crystalline structures of various types and compositions. Glass ceramics can exist in both the amorphous glassy phase and the crystalline ceramic phase. Glass ceramics are used in either one of those two states: 100% glass or 100% ceramic. For example, a Brown stove top is 100% ceramic, and the Samsung Gorilla Glass screen is 100% glass.

A key tenet of Lean manufacturing is to reduce variation through process standardization and control. To that end, most companies develop a control plan and monitor various steps of the process. The data collected in those monitoring activities are also useful in facilitating continuous improvement activities. This is particularly true as automated data collection technology has evolved and made it easier to share across multiple platforms.

For example, SigmaTron’s team in its Suzhou facility uses a combination of enhanced inspection equipment, a proprietary manufacturing execution system (MES) and a newly created IT tool to drive continuous improvement efforts.

BY THE TIME you read this, I’ll be having an anniversary of sorts. Commemorating, not celebrating.

Your life can change in an instant. Let me explain.

Two years ago, at the end of May 2019, our team exhibited a new CT scanning machine at an aerospace trade show in Southern California. Nothing newsworthy there. Display the machine, a kind of entry-level CT scanning system; answer questions from any and all; harmlessly scan a few souvenir water bottles to interactively show the novelty of nondestructive 3-D imaging. Do the usual glad-handing and manufactured sincerity that comes with the show gig. Expectantly snag a few promising leads over three tedious days. Inspire somebody to part with their cash. Show team solidarity around our maypole of a machine by memorializing the moment with a group photo. Say kumbaya, crate it up and dodge forklifts while prepping for shipment back north to our facility. There the system will go into working display as a demo unit. Goodbye, crate. Mission accomplished, take the rest of the week off and enjoy the sights and sounds of Southern California, rekindling my youth and visiting friends, savoring the week’s success over cocktails with broiled fish in Seal Beach. Life is good.

THIS MONTH WE look at etching faults on PCBs. This is no ordinary set of pads. They are for an 01005 chip capacitor, the second-smallest chip component available. (Yes, there is an even-smaller size.) The 01005 component package is approximately 0.016″ by 0.008″ or 0.4mm by 0.2mm and small enough for most members of your staff.

Ed.: This is a special feature courtesy of Binghamton University.

IMEC and Intel researchers develop spintronic logic device. Spintronics is a budding path in the quest for a future beyond CMOS. Devices use much less power than their CMOS counterparts and keep their data unpowered. IMEC and Intel researchers have created a spintronic logic device that can be fully controlled with electric current rather than magnetic fields. An electron’s spin generates a magnetic moment, and when many electrons with identical spins are close together, their magnetic moments can align and join forces to form a larger magnetic field. Such a region is called a magnetic domain, and the boundaries between domains are called domain walls. A material can consist of many such domains and domain walls, assembled like a magnetized mosaic. (IEEC file #12091, Semiconductor Digest, 1/21/21)