ST-Line solder mask and dry-film pretreatment process equipment is fully compatible with CupraEtch pretreatment chemistry and reportedly boosts yields to control production costs.

ATLANTA – More than half the booths available for PCB West 2015 were sold prior to the official opening of exhibit sales, UP Media Group Inc. said today. 

Earlier this month two massive explosions rocked the port of Tianjin, northern China.

SANTA ANA, CA – Accurate Circuit Engineering has added Isola’s Astra and I-Tera laminates to its list of standard materials. 

AURORA, CO -- Advanced Circuits' parent company today said the PCB firm's sales fell 1.7% year-over-year in 2014.

AURORA, CO -- Revenues at Advanced Circuits increased 1% year-over-year in the third quarter, driven by growth in long lead-time PCBs and offset by lower sales in quickturn PCBs.

The results were in-line with management's expectations.

Third-quarter EBITDA margins fell approximately 80 basis points compared to the year-ago period, reflecting a shift in sales mix.

After seeing sales fall in 2014, the PCB fabricator has now turned in three straight quarters of revenue gains in 2015.

Advanced Circuits is the third-largest PCB fabricator onshore in the US, after TTM Technologies and Sanmina. It has annual sales of nearly $90 million.

FLAGSTAFF, AZ -- Former colleagues of the late Gary Smith will continue to provide EDA market data services, it was announced today.

SYDNEY -- Altium today announced fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $23.87 million.

An industry icon reflects on five decades in PCBs.

WASHINGTON -- By challenging the technology community to integrate the collective functions hosted by an entire PCB onto a device approaching the size of a single chip, DARPA’s newest program is making a bid to usher in a fresh dimension of technology miniaturization.

Ansys 17.0 features improvements across the entire workflow, from modeling to post processing. SpaceClaim Direct Modeler speeds time to CAE with improved performance for importing complex models and more tools for faster geometry creation and editing. New industry-specific vertical solutions facilitate OEM-supplier interactions while adhering to such industry standards, such as ARINC 664/653, FACE and AUTOSAR. Chip-package-system design workflow for electronics is more tightly integrated and automated, and now includes across-the-board performance improvements for power integrity, signal integrity and EMI analyses. High performance computing improvements provide 20 to 60X performance gains for package and board simulation. Thermal analysis in now integrated and automated in SIWave.

Ansys, ansys-blog.com/introducing-ansys-17/

CHONGQING, CHINA -- AT&S has launched production at its new $545 million IC substrate plant here.

LM1000 grid tester for bare board PCBs can be fitted with universal or dedicated fixtures. Uses modern double shuttle concept with high-speed linear drives and integrated optical high-resolution scanning. Test heads can be stepped precisely over product for high first-pass rates by micro-aligning each image individually. Handles boards up to 300 x 300mm. Maximum test area is 163 x 244mm (6.4"x 9.6").

atg Luther & Maelzer, atg-lm.com

Autodesk Eagle schematic, PCB and collaboration software features a new routing engine, precise selection, and easy circuitry reuse.

Stencil design software has evolved from simple rule checkers to custom, sophisticated engineering tools. 

QFNs, microBGAs and 0201s keep showing up everywhere. They used to appear only on boards requiring miniaturization; now they are used on revisions of legacy products, bringing a new set of headaches for process engineers.

ODENSE, DENMARK -- Danish PCB fabricator Azitech plans to expand elsewhere in Scandinavia and Germany, the company said today.

AARBERGEN, GERMANY -- Beta Layout has added quickturn flexible printed circuit board fabrication capability, the company announced today.

VALLEY COTTAGE, NY -- Sales of PCB design software will grow from $1.41 billion this year to $4.76 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 12.9%, a new report says.

Government incentives are just part of the formula.

Government-led directives of late are aimed squarely at bringing manufacturing back to the US. President Biden recently signed an executive order requiring the federal government to buy more goods produced in the United States and limiting the ability of federal agencies to issue waivers on overseas purchases.

Earlier, then-President Trump had approved regulations that increased the share of a product’s components that must be produced domestically to qualify as US-made. He also imposed a 25% tariff on goods imported from China.

The $740 billion 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which took effect in January, includes a provision forbidding the purchase by the Department of Defense of printed circuit boards manufactured in potentially adversarial countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Many in our industry have welcomed this new directive as a means of rebuilding the once-robust PCB manufacturing climate in the United States.

To continue reading, please log in or register using the link in the upper right corner of the page.