A one-size-fits-all approach can lead clients to your competition.

Recently I had an under-the-slab plumbing leak. I’ve been using a plumber who has deliberately kept his business small for over three decades. He is responsive, but complex jobs often take longer because he doesn’t have all the tools the larger plumbing firms carry in their vans. He also doesn’t have their overhead, so for most jobs he is more cost competitive. I called and he walked me through shutting off the water at the meter because he couldn’t come until the next day. Part of my childhood was spent in Florida, so I applied my post-hurricane water management skills while I was without running water.

Sadly, when he arrived, he was unable to determine the source of the leak. Watching the meter spin, he mentioned it was a big one. He recommended a water leak detection firm. Its voice mailbox was full, however, and said it sometimes took a couple of days for them to return calls. My plumber reassured me he would come back after we found the leak. I got on the computer and found a water leak detection firm that operated 24/7. Fifteen minutes later they were at my house and 30 minutes after that we knew where the leak was. They were able to cut a hole in the wall and cut off the bad pipe so I could have water in the rest of the house. They couldn’t fix the leak until the next day, and it would likely involve more demolition to reroute the pipe, so I had a decision to make.

Should the ground connections share vias?

Just like it says "on the tin," wafer-level chip-scale packaging (WLCSP) is a technology that shrinks the substrate down to a size quite close to that of the actual silicon, gallium arsenide or whatever material makes up the die. Rather than calling it a substrate, the WLCSP material is known as a redistribution layer, or RDL for short. It's a subtle but important distinction.

By definition, WLCSP devices exclude wire bonding, leaving flip-chip technology as the method of die attach. That means that there is no die cavity where a solid ground plane on the bottom of the die would normally act as the mating surface. Instead, the chip is mounted face down with BGA-style balls on a pitch that is typically less than 0.5mm. Right there, the challenge can be to maintain a good thermal path through the tiny connections (Figure 1).

The solution is to have numerous ground balls to help dissipate thermal energy. The ground balls can be distributed around the device or gathered into a central square or rectangle, maybe both. Either way, it's best if every one of the ground connections gets a dedicated via rather than combining them to share a via.

Durability in the heavens can lead to sustainability on Earth.

We are increasingly reliant on satellite-borne services, as evidenced by the huge increase in launches in the past few years. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) has recorded over 5,500 launches between 2020 and 2022 in its Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space. This contrasts with typically 100 to 200 per year from the early 1960s until 2016.

The vast majority of satellites in operation today support communication applications such as Internet services. Of the 6,718 operational satellites at the start of 2023, 4,823 are communication satellites. While their number has increased more than 50% since 2022, there are also over 1,200 Earth observation satellites, up by more than 13%. Others are used for technical development, navigation and positioning, and space observation.

We need the services these space vehicles provide. The Starlink constellation, delivering high-speed Internet services, operates in a low earth orbit at an altitude of about 550km. It can boast much lower latency than typical Internet satellites in higher, geostationary orbits needed to support streaming services and video calls. This enables high-quality services to reach areas where installing ground-based Internet infrastructure is not cost-effective or practicable.

Over-the-top security controls can do more harm than good.

Is the bureaucracy of security making us all less secure? That is a question I find myself asking increasingly as layer after layer of bureaucracy in the form of forms, protocols and additional steps makes quoting, receiving orders, building product and then shipping and invoicing more cumbersome and time-consuming.

Don't get me wrong: I believe in quality and security, especially in the world we are living in and with the cyber-reliant environment we must utilize to communicate and share data among people and businesses. Increasingly, however, some measures that are intended to increase security instead have the effect of wasting time, adding cost and extending lead times to deliver much-needed product.