And the path forward is all around us.

At industry events and when visiting with like-aged colleagues, I often hear reminders of “the good old days.” Such comments typically arise while discussing the difficulty finding, recruiting and retaining bright young talent. On one level I agree, especially when long-gone fun times and great friends come to mind. On a more focused, pragmatic level, however, I am thinking, “Things are exactly like they were in those days, and maybe it’s time that changed.”

Many of those old friends were, in their day, just as immature, impatient, all-knowing and audacious as the generation coming of age now. What’s changed is our perspective.

What’s in a name?

We probably ask that question about 10,000 times over the course of our lives. It often starts with our own. How many times did you complain – loudly or under your breath – about your own name? “Mine’s too common/uncommon/plain/weird,” etc. A name is just a name, but for many juveniles, it’s their introduction to branding.

I attended a parochial school for eight years. At one time, no fewer than five of the 20 or so boys in my class were named Michael. And “it wasn’t me, it was the other Mike” could only fool the nuns for so long. At one point, probably around third grade, in the faintest of hopes to distinguish myself, I remember telling classmates and teachers to call me by my middle name: John.

That didn’t take either. And so went my early attempts to raise my “personal brand.”

But don’t obsess over the distribution.

Yes, I said it. Normal data are nearly never normal.

In Six Sigma classes we study outliers, shift, drift and special cause events. But what we don’t always consider is that these “unexpected” data points may be part of the process and not as rare as we think.

First, let’s look at a set of screw torque data. The chart in FIGURE 1 is for a set of screw torques taken sequentially from a “smart” driver. We can see the data are normal (p=0.895), and the histogram and time series plot back that up.

There are more solder balls to inspect, so use oblique views.

With board area often at a premium in today’s sophisticated and high-performance electronics, using the third dimension of height to enable greater device functionality is ever more attractive. In particular, package-on-package (PoP) devices have been around for years and are popular for this purpose. From an x-ray inspection point-of-view, the most common POPs can be considered as two BGAs stacked on top of each other. Therefore, the real and “virtual” issues associated with BGAs, as mentioned in previous columns, also come into play for these devices.

However, we now have an additional dimension (sic) to consider in the features seen in the x-ray images, as well as just having a single BGA and anything within, or on the second side of, the board. On top of these, we also have the potential for overlap of solder balls from the two BGA layers (FIGURES 1 and 2). As with BGAs, all the interconnections are underneath the package, and are not visible optically, permitting x-ray the opportunity to make nondestructive inspection analysis. With twice the number of BGAs in the same place, does this mean twice the number of potential problems or more?