Where excess inventory stops being clutter and starts being currency.
For years, companies have treated excess electronic components like an embarrassing secret. They get over-purchased, boxed up and quietly written off – destined for the trash, the gray market or whatever corner of the warehouse no one wants to inventory.
How do modern stencil materials and coatings influence transfer efficiency and volume repeatability as SMT features continue to shrink?
The key indicators of SMT stencil performance are transfer efficiency and volume repeatability. Transfer efficiency (TE) refers to the percentage of solder paste released from the stencil when compared to the stencil’s aperture volumes and is expressed as a percentage. Typical values range from 60% to 120%.
Just when the industry thought the shortage saga was over, the parts giant hit refresh on the chaos.
The global electronics industry faces another shortage situation. What began as a governance dispute between the Dutch government and the Chinese ownership of Nexperia has morphed into a geopolitical crisis with wide-ranging impacts on the printed circuit board assembly industry.
The real bottleneck isn’t the layout; it’s decoding those half-hidden specs stuffed into a PDF.
Every electronics engineer and PCB designer knows the feeling: the design is done, the data package is zipped, and the request for quote (RFQ) is sent. And then ... you wait.
This is the quoting “black box.” A project’s momentum comes to a halt, sometimes for days, as you wait for a price. When the quote finally arrives, it might come with design for manufacturability (DfM) queries, unexpected costs or lead times that jeopardize the entire schedule.
How a longtime PCB supplier became a contract manufacturer.
More than a handful of US-based printed circuit board fabricators offer some degree of assembly in order to meet customer demand. Often, these companies are flex circuit manufacturers which add in-house SMT as a strategic advantage so they can offer a one-stop supply model.
Recently, however, a Chicago-area supplier of bare PCBs took a different approach: It acquired, of all things, a full-service EMS company.
Nine critical checks for OEMs to avoiding bottlenecks.
Established OEMs with ambitious growth goals often hit a wall as they expand their product ranges. Internal design and development (D&D) teams become overloaded while juggling updates to legacy products, managing lifecycles and integrating new features. Meanwhile, mounting pressure to innovate and accelerate time-to-market for new products adds to the challenges.
For many, the answer is clear: outsource D&D. But choosing the right partner is anything but straightforward. This is the tipping point. OEMs often need to work fast to choose a D&D partner or face a vicious cycle of competing demands and delays that impact revenue (Figure 1).
Press Releases
- AIM Solder Hires Francisco Rodriguez as Regional Sales Manager for Northeast Mexico
- The Test Connection, Inc. Adds Creative Electron Prime TruVision™ X-ray and CT System for Deeper Failure Analysis
- Kurtz Ersa Goes Semiconductor: Expanding Competence in Microelectronics & Advanced Packaging
- ECIA’s February and Q1 Industry Pulse Surveys Show Positive Sales Confidence Dominating Every Sector of the Electronic Components Industry