Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine

Columns

At AltiumLive, Lots of Sun (and One Big Cloud)

by Brooke Anglin One of the first things I heard when I arrive at AltiumLive last week was was how much they loved the recap of the event my colleague Chelsey Drysdale wrote last year. They added that Chelsey truly captured …
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What a Waste

I like articles like this one from Forbes — even if they are out of date, because they cast attention on the intrinsic complexities of manufacturing. But, while Forbes may think manufacturing inefficiencies cost the industry $8 trillion a year …
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Submit an Abstract to SMTA Pan Pac

Folks, This coming February will be my third SMTA Pan Pac. Pan Pac is a very enjoyable and rewarding conference. It is small enough that you can get to know all of the speakers, yet large enough that there is …
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The Disruptors

I used to think that with the many brilliant minds in our industry, we would successfully disrupt ourselves -- in other words, the ideas that obsolete our current ways of doing things would be conceived and implemented by one of our own -- maybe some genius in the basement of Apple or Intel or IBM. I'm less confident of that now.
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Selecting Reflow Oven Length

You are putting in a new assembly line to assemble some large boards. Your boss is pressuring you to get another 5-zone oven, as they are cheaper and take up much less space than a 7- or 10-zone oven. But, you are concerned that a 5-zone oven may not have the capacity that is needed to keep up with the component placement machines. Let’s make some calculations and see if your concerns are justified.
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Not with a Bang …

Cemtrex’s run in EMS ended today with a decided whimper. The New York-based company sold its remaining contract assembly assets to a German private equity group for about $7 million. It brings to a close one of the stranger stories …
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Ralph Morrison, RIP

I don’t have all the details, but the industry icon Ralph Morrison passed away Aug. 2. Ralph spent more than 50 years in the electronics industry. He was responsible for teaching thousands of engineers all about the fundamentals of how …
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Silicon Valley Not Paved with Gold

Is the bloom off the rose in the Silicon Valley? For years, manufacturers have insisted on putting factories in the greater San Jose area. The CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY Directory of EMS Companies lists hundreds of entries with Silicon Valley zip codes. …
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Trade Wars Battlefield Goes Beyond US-China

The tension between Japan and South Korea further complicates an already cloudy memory market picture. DRAM prices are already threatened by a global inventory glut, leading Gartner to forecast a 4% price drop this year.
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What’s the Difference?

Here’s the headline: F-35 Jets: Chinese-Owned Company Making Parts for Top-Secret UK-US Fighters” Sounds dramatic. As it turns out, Exception PCB, a UK-based fabricator, is building circuit boards for the next-gen airfighter. And Exception is owned by Shezhen Fastprint, the …
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	CAVEAT LECTOR Spinning in circles. Mike Buetow		ROI A lesson in lean training. Peter Bigelow
	Board Buying Shake that distributor! Greg Papandrew		PCB GUIDED INSIGHTS Prepping the data for assembly. EMA Design Automation
	designer's notebook Calculating trace length from time delay values. Lance Wang		Material Matters The impact of glass styles on precipitating or mitigating skew. Bill Hargin
	Material GAINs Reliability implications of self-driving vehicles. Alun Morgan		DEFECT of the month Avoiding 01005 termination lift. Bob Willis