Monthly Archives: August 2011

China Inc. Hits a Snag

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DigiTimes is reporting that a new round of fees levied by China on MNCs doing business there has bankrupted hundreds of electronics companies, and threatens the solvency of thousands more. The fees, which underwrite worker medical and injury insurance, are on top of government-mandated salary hikes. China has quietly extended the structure from covering just workers during their actual time of employment to underwriting their post-employment coverage as well. (Employees contribute a portion, but the businesses cover by far a majority share.)

More than 300 firms are said to have gone under already, and a Hong Kong official forecasts some 2,500 to 3,000 firms face bankruptcy this year alone.

And they say the US is unfriendly toward business.

It’s a fascinating turnabout for China Inc. and its “if we build it, they will come” attitude toward business, manufacturing in particular.

Now, there are many ways to view this. One is that, given the dollar amounts involved are rather low, the companies affected probably lacked the resources to compete over time anyway. A second is that China is targeting Taiwanese companies as part of its long-term strategy to force the island nation further under its umbrella (although from the story, non-Taiwanese companies are also being hit hard). A third is that China sees this as easy money and a way to look out for its domestic citizenry much in the way, say, the US levies Social Security taxes on alien seasonal workers even if they return to their home countries each fall and will never draw upon that retirement fund. And a fourth is that China recognizes that growth alone won’t pay for the soon-to-be top-heavy population it faces as the 1 child per family policy changes the age-plot dimension from rectangular to an upside-down pyramid.

But coupled with the staggering increase in wages seen there over the past few years — with many more to come — and China’s long-term dominance of manufacturing no longer feels like a fait accompli.

 

Should Whistleblowers Get Leave With Pay?

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Nobody likes a tattletale, a gossip or a rat. You can lose the trust and respect of your co-workers pretty quickly by stepping out of line that way.

With that in mind, it’s highly unlikely that the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) revision and overhaul of its “whistleblower” program will affect much.  The effort did purge some backlog and, yes, it does aspire to make the process of reporting a safety fail quicker and easier going forward.

But there’s still one elephant in the room.

Why workers don’t report safety issues. What I’ve never heard anyone say about whistleblowing is something so basic that I wonder if rulemakers miss it.

The fact is that most workers today live paycheck-to-paycheck, or very close. And if their section of the manufacturing, construction or mining project is shut down while a reported safety issue is inspected or fixed, there is no paycheck coming in. A project suspension or furlough is a pay freeze. Not just for the person who reported the safety breach, but for coworkers. Who wants to be responsible for family, friends and neighbors losing their income?

For most of American workers, work is about making sure there’s food on the table each week for the family. After food and water, there are clothes, medical bills, educational expenses, plus payments to banks a la my own well-documented pet peeve: the incomprehensible DEBT that a typical working family carries in this country (mortgage and auto), plus mandatory miscellaneous payments (insurance and alimony) that must be honored each month.

That’s a lot to risk just to report a potential safety issue.

There are also well-documented issues on the importance of respect and community in the workplace; and whistleblowers typically aren’t the most welcome folks on campus after the fact. But what do you stand to gain by reporting a safety fail? Maybe it gets fixed, maybe not. And what do you stand to lose? Everything.

A recent Food & Drug Administration law takes strides to protect whistleblowers, and now OSHA is doing same, but without a salary protection plan these measures won’t inspire workers to feel more confident about reporting safety breaches.

Good effort.  But missing the mark.

Intelligent Design

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In my monthly column for PCD&F last month, I was ostensibly discussing standards and how they come to be. The first standard I worked on was IPC-D-350, one of the first of the would-be slayers of Gerber, the so-called unintelligent data format. Indeed, I’ve spent a good part of my life watching electronic data transfer formats come and go, and at the end of the day, Gerber, warts and all, has remained the one to beat. So I’m not prepared to rise up and shout to the heavens that IPC-2581, the latest iteration in 40 years’ worth of attempts at an “industry” standard, is at long last the answer.

But as we noted in “Around the World,” there are enough notable differences in the process this time around to make it newsworthy. First and foremost, there are real live CAD tool vendors not just showing up at the meetings, but actively participating (!).

To understand why this is significant, we must go back to my IPC-D-350 days. Digital Equipment and the late, great Harry Parkinson were instrumental in trying to revive interest, and we at IPC also had support from several smaller software folks like Dino Ditta at Router Solutions and Steve Klare at Intercept Technology. But we never managed to break through, and a big part of the problem was the major CAD vendors’ collective refusal to offer IPC-D-350 as an output (or input). The response always was, “We’ll do it if our customers ask us.” But what they were really saying was, “We don’t want to make it easy for our customers to migrate their designs to a competitor’s tools.”

In the meantime, AT&T offered up RS-274X (aka extended Gerber), which UCamco continues to support, and Valor developed ODB++, and (like Gerber) while it was originally conceived as much a machine language as a format for electronic design data, it was accepted by fabricators desperate for something, anything, more intelligent than Gerber.

Under the leadership of Dieter Bergman, IPC also continued the fight, enlisting the help of the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) through not one but two (GenCAM, Offspring) successors to IPC-D-350. (For a short history of the standards, click here.) Yet even now, after decades of trying, no group has been able to dismount Gerber from its perch, and it’s long past time we did. Data transfer formats are not something anyone ever will make money from, but every day we go without a better one, everyone will lose some.

Curiously, just a few weeks ago, I was contacted by David Gerber, son of H. Joseph Gerber, who invented the photoplotter and the eponymously named de facto standard that ran it. Gerber’s genius cut across many industries, from electronics to apparel, and he was awarded the 1994 National Medal of Technology for his life’s work.

For such an esteemed inventor, Gerber’s backstory is even more interesting than his career. As a teenager in 1940, he fled Nazi Germany for America. As an aeronautical engineering student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he discovered a way to reduce the time-consuming nature of graphing calculus problems using (seriously) an “expandable ruler” created from the elastic waistband of his pajamas. And of course, he formed The Gerber Scientific Instrument Co. in 1948, which is still going strong today.

The younger Gerber is writing a book about his father’s exploits. I look forward to learning more about the life of one of our industry’s true unsung heroes. But at the same time, I’m going to do everything I can to help retire one of his legacies.

In our cover story this month, Hemant Shah and Keith Felton of Cadence explain a new consortium taking root. The consortium is backed by a Who’s Who of OEMs and EDA vendors, including Harris, Ericsson, Fujitsu, nVidia, Sanmina-SCI, Cadence, Zuken, Adiva and Downstream Technologies. Its goal is to accelerate the adoption of IPC-2581 as an open, neutrally maintained global standard to encourage innovation, improve efficiency and reduce costs. The members are committed to adopting IPC-2581, which as I noted gives this latest effort a big leg up on all previous attempts.

Where does UP Media Group stand on this? For 20 years, we have supported the development of an intelligent, robust format for electronics data transfer. As such, we fully support the consortium’s effort to ensure a viable, supported and independent data transfer format that is driven by user needs.

That new task group attempting to update IPC-2581 recognizes that design needs will at some point “break” Gerber. Many of the players are new to the game, and a lot of the old rivalries appear to have died off due to retirements and, well, death. That’s good, because the industry needs a better standard than Gerber. Thanks in part to his son, Joseph Gerber’s name and many contributions will hopefully never be forgotten. But it’s time his namesake data format is.

Change Time at Cadence?

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John Bruggeman, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Cadence, is leaving the company after two years. This comes as something of a surprise to many industry watchers, given Bruggeman’s prominent role in reshaping the EDA vendor following its revenue drop and ill-advised play for Mentor Graphics in 2008.

In laying out his EDA360 vision, Bruggeman asserted software must help profitability as much as productivity, and that future designs will be app-driven, in which users would start with the applications and then overlay the optimized hardware/software.

In doing so, Bruggeman echoed hardware design industry guru Lee Ritchey, who famously said at a Printed Circuit Design-sponsored tech session that users buy the hardware to run the software.

Bruggeman’s departure has raised the question about Cadence’s executive succession plan, and whether he lost a battle to run the company in the future. Again, some analysts feel CEO Lip-Bu Tan plans to step down sooner rather than later, and that Bruggeman’s resignation paves the way for senior vice president of worldwide field operations Charlie Huang to ultimately ascend the throne.

Stay tuned.

On Misstatements and Pb-Free

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Folks,

Here is an interesting turn of events related to the reliability of lead-free (Pb-free) soldering reliability.

I was reminded recently by something Carl Sagan said, or, actually, did not say: Billions and Billions Although this term is strongly associated with him, he never said it. Sagan believed that this term was connected to him because Johnny Carson mimicked him and used the term.

Although not even close to being in Sagan’s league, I find that I am now equally unfairly associated with the term “lead-free solder is a grand success.”

This came about in an interview by Rob Speigel, which he summarized in a blog post. In reading the post, you will see that  “lead-free solder is a grand success,” is Rob’s term, not mine. Well, Rob’s post resulted in a string of postings on IPC’s Technet. One person opined:

Irresponsible statements like “lead-free solder is a grand success” should NOT be ignored. Those who make such statements in the face of all of the contrary evidence should be noted, and treated as motivated only by greed. Lead-free soldering certainly has been known for many “thousand$” of successes.

I have learned that it is not even worth the bother to refute such statements with those who make them. It may be a “grand success” for PhDs who contract to solder paste companies, but it certainly has not been a “grand success” to literally thousands of companies dealing with the reliability elephant sitting in the room getting larger by the day, and the associated fallout as a result.

Ouch!

Another shared:

I disagree with the stated and implied affect of RoHS, on PWBs expressed in this article. Lead free assembly reduces reliability by 50%. There can be no doubt about that. There are too many studies that confirm lead free assembly significantly degrades reliability. There are so many studies that demonstrate a reduction in reliability that Rod’s contention is almost laughable. We are now faced with increased failures of copper interconnections and dielectric material due to high assembly temperatures. There is an increase in crazing that can support CAF, significant copper dissolution, and cratering in assembly, Switching to lead free in most HDI applications is a significant challenge. Lead free assembly has a profound affect by degrading PWB’s organic component (epoxy) due the temperature required and copper interconnection and also the exaggeration of the z-axis expansion of the dielectric.

I have asked for copies of the many reliability studies referred to. No response yet.

Finally someone hit the heart of the matter:

I’m curious if “grand success” were Dr.Lasky’s words or Rob Spiegel’s editorializing.  Lasky does mention the lack of long term results, and Speigel, in the comments, enumerates a number of reliability problems. ISTM that neither truly believes those words.

Correct! Thanks.

Here was my response as posted on Technet:

Pete is correct. I never said lead-free implementation was a grand success. These were Rob’s words in his blog post.

I have said repeatedly that adequate lead-free reliability has been demonstrated for consumer products like mobile phones, PCs, portable electronics with service lives less than 5 years. This level of reliability has been demonstrated in numerous studies and more importantly with field data. Vahid Goudarzi, of Motorola, stated that field reliability of lead-free assembled mobile phones has been equal or better than leaded assembly units. His data go back to 2001 (not 2006. Motorola started early for reasons discussed below).

The reason Motorola shipped early with lead-free products is due to the fact that lead-free solder does not spread as well. Because of this poorer spreading, Motorola was able to decrease lead spacings without getting shorts, thus increasing the amount of electrical function in a smaller space. Since increased function in a smaller space is the defining attribute of portable electronics, the importance of this lead-free advantage cannot be overstated. Admittedly, lead-free’s poorer wetting is a challenge in other regards, especially hole fill in wave soldering, but the Motorola Droid X2 could not be assembled with leaded solder, there would be too many shorts. Since the packaging density of the iPhone and similar devices is on a par with the Droid X2, I suspect this statement is true for most mobile products.

I have also repeatedly stated that lead-free reliability for long term service, mission critical devices has not been demonstrated. As a result, these types of devices should not consider lead-free solder at this date.

I regularly discuss these topics in my blogs. The most recent post shows a striking photo of leaded solders spreading — which is too “good” for portable electronics.

 

‘Dark Silicon’

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Dark silicon refers to the underutilized transistors on a microprocessor. And those transistors are deliberately shut down during certain operations in order to contain the heat buildup that otherwise might fry the entire chip.

Some experts now say up to one-fifth of the of the transistors on the higher-performing chips will need to “go dark” to stem the chances of incorrect results at the least and a fried chip at the worst.

While users perpetually want faster devices, a group of US researchers have modeled expected microprocessor speeds and utilization and found that computing speeds will rise only 8 times their current pace over the next 15 years because of the limitations caused by potential overheating. They further argue that speeds would increase about 47 times if the problems of heat can be overcome.

The solution? While dual and quad core microprocessors have become mainstream today, more advanced chips could have between 100 and 1000 cores. Intel, for one, already uses multiple cores and next-gen chips will optimize those cores for different operations, helping to reduce the amount of power used (and thus heat generated).