Peter Bigelow Inducted into IPC Hall of Fame

BANNOCKBURN, IL – IPC in March inducted Peter Bigelow, retired president of FTG Circuits Haverhill and a PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY columnist, into its Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame.

With over 30 years of experience in the printed circuit board (PCB) industry, Bigelow earned recognition for his enthusiastic support of IPC’s mission to serve the electronics industry as an advocate for standards development and committee programs. He served on the IPC board of directors for 11 years, shaping IPC’s strategic objectives and enhancing IPC’s position in the electronics industry supply chain. He later was a director for the SMTA.

IPC’s awards its most prestigious honor, the Hall of Fame Award, to individuals who provide exceptional service and make significant advancements for IPC and the electronics industry.

Groundbreaking AI Algorithm Learns and Detects Data Patterns

SYDNEY – University of Technology Sydney researchers have introduced a groundbreaking AI algorithm called torque clustering, which brings AI closer to mimicking natural intelligence compared to current methods. This new approach significantly enhances how AI systems learn and detect patterns in data, without the need for human input.

Torque clustering analyzes vast datasets from various fields such as biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, finance and medicine, uncovering new insights like identifying disease patterns, detecting fraud and understanding behavior.

The novel algorithm promises a shift in approach, surpassing traditional unsupervised learning methods in performance. It operates autonomously, requires no parameters, and handles large datasets with remarkable computational efficiency.

CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY Announces 2025 NPI Award Winners

PEACHTREE CITY, GA – CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY in March announced the 2025 New Product Introduction (NPI) Award winners for electronics assembly equipment, materials and software.

The 18th annual NPI Awards recognize leading new products during the past 12 months. An independent panel of practicing industry engineers selected the recipients.

Zetwerk Electronics Inaugurates $115M EMS Plant Near Chennai

PANNUR, TAMI NADU – Zetwerk Electronics in March inaugurated its largest electronics manufacturing facility in Pannur, Tamil Nadu, the EMS company’s seventh plant overall.

The new facility, part of a Rs 1,000 crore ($115 million) investment, will manufacture control boards for consumer durables and IT hardware. It features advanced production capabilities, including five surface-mount technology (SMT) lines and rigorous testing processes. At full capacity, it will employ 1,200 professionals.

While inaugurating the facility, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw stated, “As Zetwerk launches its seventh factory, we reaffirm our commitment to supporting Indian companies in becoming global leaders.”

Vexos Opens 45k Sq. Ft. EMS Plant in China

DONGGUAN, CHINA – Vexos, a leading global provider of electronics manufacturing services, has relocated its China operations to a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility here.

This strategic move enhances Vexos’ production capabilities, efficiency, and capacity to meet the evolving demands of its global customer base.

The new facility spans 4,200 sq. m (45,200 sq. ft.) and features automated surface mount technology (SMT) lines, precision test equipment, and advanced quality control systems. The investment in this site reinforces Vexos’ dedication to delivering high-quality, reliable, and cost-effective electronics manufacturing solutions to its global customer base.

Foxconn Building $140M HQ in Central China

ZHENGZHOU, CHINA – Foxconn broke ground in March on a new 288,000 sq. ft. headquarters at this central China city. The company, the world’s largest electronics ODM, plans for the site to be the centerpiece of its internal development for electric vehicles, new energy and energy storage in mainland China.

“Foxconn’s determination and confidence in investing in the Chinese mainland and Henan province remains steadfast,” said Cui Zhicheng, chairman, Foxconn Innovation Industry Development Group.

The company has built products in Henan province since 2010, and its operations there span some 2.8 million sq. m.

Consumer Electronics Sales Set to Accelerate, Study Says

Maharashtra, India – The global consumer electronics market is expected to grow 6.1% year-over-year in 2025 to $864.7 billion, according to a new forecast.

Market researchers at Fortune Business Insights report that the market, valued at $815 billion in 2024, will expand to $1.47 trillion by 2032, resulting in a CAGR of 7.9% between 2025 and 2032.

Data indicate the rising trend of connected homes is driving penetration of smart appliances globally. Consumers increasingly adopt appliances equipped with voice assistance, Bluetooth and wifi connectivity due to their higher convenience. (more)

Characterizing Etchback and Dielectric Loss Tangent

Fabrication-aware simulations to aid PCB design success.
by Tim Wang-Lee, Ph.D.

As engineers design printed circuit boards (PCBs) to operate at higher data rates, the system’s signal integrity becomes increasingly sensitive to the variation in the fabrication process. A practical design is a software-defined design that includes realistic fabrication variation.

Typically, the PCB material properties in electronic design automation (EDA) software have default values. These ideal values for the material properties and PCB cross-sectional geometry are often called the as-designed values. On the other hand, after fabrication, the as-fabricated properties are the measurable numbers and dimensions from a physical board.

Although these ideal, as-designed values provide adequate performance prediction, it is increasingly important to include as-fabricated values for material properties and cross-sectional dimensions in the simulation to achieve first-pass product success and reduce the number of board spins.

What is the Best Material for a High-Speed PCB?

Consider return loss and insertion loss – but don’t stop there.
by Zachariah Peterson

Material selection for high-speed printed circuit board design is one of the most common instances where a PCB becomes overengineered. Many of the high-speed PCB design guidelines available on the internet provide generalized recommendations and suggest advanced materials that may not always be necessary for digital systems. In fact, many high-speed PCB products are manufactured using less advanced, moderate-loss FR-4 material.

Advanced materials, such as Megtron or PTFE-based materials, might be encountered in commercial products. These material sets become necessary when channel bandwidth requirements extend into the GHz frequency range. The required operating frequency range and available material thicknesses are two of the most significant factors influencing high-speed PCB material selection. The following will help with understanding these materials and matching them to different digital interfaces.

Matching High-Speed PCB Materials by Frequency

High-speed PCBs are characterized by the edge rates of signals propagating in the design and the bandwidth of physical channels used to transmit those signals. Digital interfaces in high-speed PCBs require channels to have a minimum bandwidth to transfer enough power in a signal between the driver and receiver sides of a digital interface. Because all PCB materials exhibit some absorption (insertion loss) and conductor losses, these materials ultimately limit the available channel bandwidth.

Sequential Lamination in PCB Manufacturing

Higher layer count boards with mechanically drilled blind or buried vias may be built separately, then laminated together.
by Akber Roy

Sequential lamination is a fundamental manufacturing technique in an era of modern PCB fabrication and is a concept that must be especially understood when manufacturing high-density interconnect (HDI) PCBs with blind and buried vias.

Fabricators collaborate closely with designers to prepare their Gerber, ODB++ or IPC-2581 data – the input data for PCB manufacturing. This collaboration ensures that designs are equipped (to varying degrees) with clear, detailed instructions from the outset. For designers and design engineers, this means defining the stackup with all the requirements related to impedance control and sequential lamination.

Sequential lamination is one of the processes used to form mechanically drilled blind or buried vias. In this process, a PCB is built up layer by layer, inserting a dielectric layer between a layer of copper and an already-laminated sub-composite. HDI PCBs undergo this process when different combinations of layers and via structure types are required. Figure 1 shows an 8-layer sequential build, constructed as two separate 4-layer sections and then laminated to make an 8-layer circuit board.

The Art of Corrosion

An analysis of copper shorting caused by moisture and various residues.
by Terry Munson

Moisture reacts with high levels of weak organic acids, chloride and sulfate residues, leading to copper shorting. Poor adhesion from a low-pressure overmold exacerbates the issue.

The corrosive residues then dissolve the copper at the edges of the solder pads, and voltage bias drives the formation of dendrites. This creates a small gap at the board surface interface that permits moisture to ingress. The resulting colorful metal short exhibits is a result of the different states of the copper, voltage influences and organic materials from the substrate surface, which has titanium and silica in the white solder mask.

‘We Try to Take Away All the Barriers’

The market for recycled electronics, and what companies can do with excess stock.
by Mike Buetow

Circularity and inventory management intersect two key areas for electronics manufacturers. They are problems as old as the industry. In the early 1990s, for instance, an entrepreneur named Jerry Haller had an idea for a component exchange system set up much like trading financial stocks on Wall Street. He called the operation Fast Parts. It never caught on, however, nor did the many attempts others made to emulate it.

A few decades later, however, the industry might finally be ready for sustainable resource management.

Component Sense is an Edinburgh, Scotland-based company that leads electronics manufacturers toward zero waste. They take brand new, perfectly good excess components and redistribute them to other manufacturers for use. The impetus, as founder and chief executive Kenny McGee recently explained to Mike Buetow for the PCB Chat podcast, was to help manufacturers carrying huge volumes of excess inventories on their balance sheets, while also providing a path for using those parts so they aren’t ultimately landfilled. The company’s journey has even led to a self-produced documentary on the e-waste sites in Ghana.

Additive Manufacturing

“Inkjet-Printed Electronics for Rapid and Low-Cost Prototyping of Digital Microfluidic Devices Using an Off-the-Shelf Printer”
Authors: Babak Kamali Doust Azad, et al.

Abstract: Digital microfluidics (DMF) provides a versatile platform for lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems to dispense, mix, merge and separate discrete droplets at the nanoliter to microliter scale with high precision and reproducibility. Inkjet printing offers a cleanroom-free alternative for fabricating electrodes, potentially replacing existing methods even for mass production of DMF devices, by reducing design complexity, fabrication time and cost. 

Recent research explored inkjet printing of various conductive materials such as copper, gold, silver, graphene and carbon-based inks on multiple substrates. Researchers have found inkjet-printed devices for various applications, including 13-step rubella virus (RV), IgG immunoassay, microfluidic cancer biomarker detection, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy for detecting picomolar concentration levels of heavy metals. However, many research groups still rely on expensive material printers for inkjet printing of electrodes, with costs reaching $40,000. This price can make such printers inaccessible to many researchers, necessitating the development of fast and cost-effective electrode printing protocols using unmodified desktop inkjet printers. Their work also has the potential to substantially reduce the costs associated with mass production of DMF devices.

The authors present a detailed report on implementing single-plate DMF using an office inkjet printer and accessible electronic modules. This approach enables rapid and cost-effective prototyping outside of a cleanroom environment.

The focus on single-plate devices stems from their simpler fabrication process and ease of operation, making them more suitable for rapid prototyping and experimentation. The authors thoroughly characterize a novel inkjet printer to print electrodes of Ag-ink on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and glass slide substrates between terms here achieving maximum conductance. 

Silver (Ag) offers high electrical conductivity, relative affordability compared to gold and conductive oxides, and excellent chemical stability. Three different dielectric materials – SU8, parafilm, and tape – are evaluated in terms of minimum AC and DC actuation voltages. The authors designed the actuation setup from scratch using common electronic modules and components. They demonstrate the efficacy of their approach by manipulating droplets within a micromixer design based on the fabricated inkjet-printed DMF chips. Mixing is a fundamental function in LOC devices, and this demonstration highlights the potential of the authors’ printed electronics approach for developing various LOC applications.

The authors employ image processing to assess the mixing process, further validating the accessibility and effectiveness of the developed inkjet printing workflow. The presented approach can adapt to similar off-the-shelf printers, broadening the available equipment for inkjet printing. (Scientific Reports, Feb. 7, 2025)