Somewhere between the badge scanner beep and missing business cards, community happens.
I’ve been reading to my son before bed lately. And now that we’ve (mercifully) graduated from the picture book phase, I did what any overexcited parent with a bookshelf full of “classics” would do: I went straight for the big ones. Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. The Secret Garden.
I quickly realized, somewhere around my third dramatic reading of a particularly dense sentence, that perhaps I was a little too eager. I was narrating stories with words he wasn’t quite ready for yet, piling on adventures that made more sense to me than to him.
Boards aren’t the only things getting more complex. Workloads are too.
PCB designers are, by and large, a veteran crew. Many have been in the game for decades, steadily turning out increasingly complex boards while titles and org charts shift around them.
Avoiding solder paste failures through proper handling and preparation.
Our technical support team often sees the same preventable issues repeat themselves. Three times this week alone, I traced the root cause of a solder paste problem back to using paste straight out of the refrigerator without warming it up. In each case, once the user followed proper handling procedures, the problem resolved itself.
Test points, underfills and connectors: rethinking legacy rules for parylene.
Conformal coatings come in several types, each with its specific properties and performance advantages.
From Shenzhen to Southeast Asia: The changing map of PCB production.
Accurately investigating the revenues of the world’s largest PCB fabricators is confounding: Each year is filled with mergers and acquisitions, and no public records exist for a number of fabricators because they are either privately owned or part of large corporations which do not disclose the revenues of their PCB operations. As years go by, more “estimates” creep in. As a result, the author’s confidence in the data diminishes each year. Nevertheless, the NTI-100 continues to reflect the status of the global PCB industry; its size and market trends can be deduced from the fabricators listed.
For clarification, while ranked lists often refer to the 100 largest, in this case, “100” refers to companies with printed circuit board manufacturing revenues over $100 million. A record 159 companies reached that mark in 2024, versus 134 companies in 2023.
SMTAI Women’s Leadership Program highlights how technology shifts lead to greater opportunities for those with specialized skills.
The need to develop new technologies to meet the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly urgent. The manufacturing of the necessary hardware at scale presents its own set of significant challenges, however, including highly skilled labor, specialized equipment requirements, automating complex tasks, supply chain disruptions and quality control issues. Given these manufacturing challenges, applying the principles of design for excellence (DfX) from the beginning of the design process is essential.
