WILMINGTON, DE – DuPont has entered into a definitive agreement with private equity firm Advent International to acquire Laird Performance Materials for $2.3 billion, which will be paid from cash on hand. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Laird provides high-performance electromagnetic shielding and thermal management, as well as performance components and solutions that manage heat and protect devices from electromagnetic interference. It has a workforce of more than 4,300 employees with a global network of 11 manufacturing sites in North America, Europe, and Asia and 2020 revenues of $465 million.

WASHINGTON – As a final rule, the US Environmental Protection Agency is prohibiting the processing and distribution of phenol, isopropylated, phosphate (3:1) (PIP (3:1)) in electronics as of Mar. 8.

There are some exceptions to the prohibition: for example, for new and replacement parts for automotive and aerospace industries. However, there are no electronics industry exceptions, says IPC.

The EPA’s final risk management rules to reduce exposure to five persistent bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals (PBTs) went into effect Feb. 5.

MONTABAUR, GERMANY – iTAC Software will acquire 100% of the shares of Cogiscan for an undisclosed sum, the company announced in mid-February. Cogiscan, founded in Bromont, Quebec in 1999, provides factory automation software for the electronics manufacturing industry. It will continue to operate independently after closing.

iTAC, a subsidiary of the Dürr Group, cited Cogiscan’s expertise in Industry 4.0 as an impetus for the deal.

“Digitalization is one of the Dürr Group’s core competences and offers great potential for growth. With the acquisition of Cogiscan, we will be adding a strong team of experts and key technologies to the digital factory, which is a cross-divisional virtual organization for joint development of digital products,” said Peter Bollinger, CEO, iTAC.

Cogiscan has more than 450 customer sites across 50 countries. The two companies have been collaborators for more than 10 years, with Cogiscan supplying machine data to iTAC’s MES for corporate customers. (MB)

AUSTIN, TX – Virtex continued its growth by acquisitions in March with the purchase of Anoka, MN-based Altron Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Altron, not to be confused with company of the same name once located in Wilmington, MA, has a single facility outside Minneapolis, where it focuses on regional defense and medical customers. It was founded more than 45 years ago and specializes in high-mix, low-volume production.

In a press release, Brad Heath, CEO, Virtex, said, “Altron extends Virtex’s geographic reach further into the Midwest medical, aerospace and defense corridor, enhancing our relationships with key customers we service in other regions. Altron also brings expanded expertise in medical device manufacturing to Virtex.” (MB)

Many will disagree with this column’s title this month, especially supply-chain professionals working 24/7 to address a market with varying material constraints, continual logistics challenges and unforecasted demand spikes. That said, over the past few years the electronics manufacturing (EMS) industry has had a changing of the guard. While some replacements are veterans of the last round of market constraints, most haven’t seen the perfect storm that 2021 represents. The lessons learned this year will create invaluable experience for this next generation of leadership. Here are a few examples:

Information technology. Over the past decade, even small EMS companies have upgraded their IT capabilities to provide real-time visibility into most of their critical metrics. However, while an exception-based real-time system is wonderful in situations where exceptions happen in relatively low volumes, it creates information overload when it is identifying hundreds of exceptions in a month. The current market challenges are driving management teams to analyze what data they need to prioritize and how that data can be best formatted to help them stay ahead of shortages or capacity constraints. This will broaden the use of time-saving apps and create management teams with a better understanding of systems strategy strengths and weaknesses.

A raging fraternity party with thumping house music can be annoying as the morning hours approach. Noise suppression ordinances to the rescue! The partiers have two choices: quiet down or get shut down.

In that sense, the fraternity party is like building an electronic circuit. If our machines make too much “noise” in any part of the spectrum, it’s game over.

Just like kids can stop trampling everyone’s lawn and come inside, shut the doors, windows, shutters and even the fireplace flue, we can also contain unwanted spectral emissions. Left unchecked, a printed circuit is an antenna for transmitting and receiving energy from within and outside the board.

TWO COMPELLING FORCES driving much of our technology – miniaturization and performance – are not new. In fact, one could say they have appeared within every product spec and design document in some form or another since the terms were coined. Fundamentally, this has enabled capability and portability with products in virtually every hardware sector. This will (and should) continue. In the area of miniaturization, both board and package are transforming as technologies such as rigid-flex, blind/buried vias, and multi-die packages move from fringe to mainstream. Further, performance improvements maintain the well-known doubling trajectory and are propelled forward by orders of magnitude in speed, while increasing efficiency and extending battery life. Often these gains are continually achievable only by reducing the voltage swing to under a volt. As miniaturization and performance drive devices to new functionalities and applications, the effects of these requirements are visible throughout the design process. Nowhere is this drive for smaller, faster, cheaper more noticeable than in power. =

Hopefully, we will soon be able to start living our post-Covid-19 lives. Going forward, some of us want fundamental changes. Others are keen to return to the way things were. Although we will be pleased to put this situation behind us, some things are here to stay. One, obviously, is the lethal group of coronaviruses that will surely continue to take lives after lockdown (we hope at a greatly reduced rate). Another, I believe, is the tendency for many of us to continue working from home (WFH) to a much greater extent than before.

WFH has been one of the headline trends of this crisis. Although clearly not to everyone’s taste, it could turn into a revolution founded on the internet technologies that allow us to meet with colleagues online, access data and tools remotely, and benefit from high connection speeds wherever we are – wired or wireless. That so many can do meaningful work this way also reflects the soft nature of many tasks associated with getting things done in developed economies. These soft deliverables liberate us from location and will be critical to our economic survival of this pandemic.

In this month’s column, the chairman and chairman emeritus for the PCEA give their viewpoints on the importance of organizing. And as always, I’ll provide a list of events coming up.

This month I am excited to bring to our readers an inspiring message from not one but two of the PCEA’s chairmen.

Many readers may not know that our PCEA board has two chairmen by design. Our idea from the beginning has been to preserve the experience from our past organizational associations and use it as our compass as we move ahead.

The concept of “smart engineering” has been a major focus of mine these past few years. In the 35 years I have been in the PCB industry, I’ve come to the conclusion we are stuck in a quagmire of unintelligent, unstructured and, frankly, 40-year-old technology of exchanging design data packages. The impact is repetitive, mindless, non-value-add administrative tasks across all facets of the industry. The problem has only been exacerbated with increased technology. All this negatively impacts labor costs, quality and NPI lead times.

When designing a flex jumper between two rigid PCBs, where no room exists for connectors, are solderable pins or tabs that extend out of the edge of the flex circuit a possibility? If so, what are the cost and reliability implications?

Quite a few options are available, each with its pros and cons and cost implications. This month, we look at the possibilities.

Sculptured fingers. This construction yields unsupported copper fingers that extend beyond the circuit outline. The fingers are typically ~0.010″ thick. These can be made by starting with very heavy copper (usually half hard) and etching down all areas other than the fingers, or starting with thinner copper and plating up only the finger areas to meet the desired overall finger thickness. The fingers can then be formed to best fit the desired applications (FIGURE 1). The cons to this construction are cost and handling issues. Adding sculptured fingers to a flex circuit will have a modest cost impact, but the biggest downside is these parts are fragile. The fingers can be easily bent out of shape during shipping or handling on the production floor and are difficult to realign once damage occurs.

A few buzzwords dominated headlines in 2020, many centered around Covid-19 and politics. Those who follow trends in technology probably noticed one area saw an explosion of growth: artificial intelligence. Unfortunately for the hardware developer, the tech world’s interest always seems to be drawn to the software side of AI.

The software industry has quickly embraced AI to the point where many software-driven services incorporate some element of AI to provide a meaningful user experience. As of the first quarter of 2021, it’s getting difficult to find a SaaS platform that doesn’t use AI for some specialized task. SaaS-ification is fine, and it’s creating a wealth of productivity tools that businesses can mix and match to make their processes more intelligent. And there are the big players like Facebook, whose AI models run quietly in the background, determining which advertisements and inflammatory memes you’re most likely to click.

When a principle of physics is accepted, it explains phenomena everywhere in the universe. The law of gravity works on matter, whether the masses are located on earth, in the sun and or among the stars. The law must transition at the atomic level where the particles must follow the laws of quantum physics. There may also be a transition when dimensions are those of the entire universe. For the world, we can sense there is only one law.

The laws I want to talk about are the basic laws of electricity. I am not referring to circuit theory laws as described by Kirchhoff or Ohm, but to the laws governing the electric and magnetic fields. These fields are fundamental to all electrical activity, whether the phenomenon is lightning, ESD, radar, antennas, sunlight, power generation, analog or digital circuitry. These laws are often called Maxwell’s equations.

Regression analysis utilizes the relationship between quantitative variables to predict one variable from one or more other variables. These relationships are either functional or statistical. Functional relationships have perfect fits. For example, ice cream cones cost $1 each, so one can buy 10 ice cream cones for $10 or 20 ice cream cones for $20. Statistical relationships typically do not have perfect fits. For example, cholesterol levels and body weight have a non-perfect fit. It is commonly accepted that the term “regression” describes the statistical, not the functional, relationship between variables.¹

A regression model is a formal means of expressing the general tendency of a dependent variable (Y) to vary with the independent variable (X) systematically. The independent variable (X) is also referred to as the predictor variable. George Box (2007) states, “all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind” (p. 414), implying there are random errors present, hence the nonperfect fit.^1,2 The expression of the general tendency of a dependent variable (Y) and an independent variable (X) is potent in many different fields.

For years, the word in the electronics industry has been laser depaneling is expensive. This may have been true for investments in laser machines a decade or more ago, but the situation looks different once operating expenses are accounted for, especially with newer systems. In fact, according to our data, depaneling with laser systems is the most efficient method for a range of applications, and the cutting results are excellent, which means quality standards are also met.

The trend in the price-to-performance ratio for current laser systems, especially with respect to production of rigid PCBs, is obvious: The cost of depaneling based on the effective cutting speed has fallen to approximately one-tenth of what it was a decade ago (FIGURE 1). This dramatic shift is based on three major factors, all based on the rapid advances in laser technology. First, capex cost for laser depaneling systems has decreased to almost 30% of what it used to be a decade ago. Second, overall throughput has improved more than seven times. Finally, the operational costs for energy and maintenance have noticeably decreased.

IT’S COMMON SENSE, really, and probably one of the most familiar sayings of mankind: Communication is key. Good communication is central to productive relationships, effective business strategy … just about everything, honestly. It’s not just communication, however, but communication quality and transparency that result in informed decision-making. This is especially true in the manufacturing setting and is the basis for Industry 4.0. Machines have been cranking out data for decades, but applying them in a meaningful way is, at the core, what Industry 4.0 is all about. Until recently, however, data exchange was largely supplier-specific; proprietary equipment system software could manage tasks rather seamlessly, but communication among disparate equipment brands in relation to PCB movement and traceability was challenging. The IPC-SMEMA-9851 standard provides a solid foundation and is still successfully employed, yet enhancements are required to progress toward a nimbler, automation-friendly solution that permits open and uniform machine-to-machine communication.

This month we look at solder spotting, which is often seen after first- or double-sided reflow, most commonly on gold boards. The two examples below illustrate what happens. FIGURE 1a shows two spots on a nickel/gold pad, and FIGURE 1b shows one spot on a copper OSP pad finish.

Solder spots are basically the result from one or more particles of solder paste in random positions on gold pads. When the board is reflowed, these also reflow and wet the gold. In some cases, they are a cause for rejection, if the gold area is a contact point, bond pad or other functional point. If a spot is random and will not affect the product function, it should be considered cosmetic.