Author Archives: Mike

About Mike

Mike Buetow is president of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (pcea.net). He previously was editor-in-chief of Circuits Assembly magazine, the leading publication for electronics manufacturing, and PCD&F, the leading publication for printed circuit design and fabrication. He spent 21 years as vice president and editorial director of UP Media Group, for which he oversaw all editorial and production aspects. He has more than 30 years' experience in the electronics industry, including six years at IPC, an electronics trade association, at which he was a technical projects manager and communications director. He has also held editorial positions at SMT Magazine, community newspapers and in book publishing. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikebuetow

Future Shock in Modern Times

Posted on by
By the time we round the corner into 2013, I will enter my 20thyear in the PCB and electronics industry. I find myself often gravitating to others like me (50 years and older) to swap nostalgic war stories of days gone by.  My journey in the industry, unlike my cronies, is marked by a 12-year hiatus that began around 1998 when I made the decision to stay home and raise my two young daughters full time. I resurfaced in 2010, with nearly grown kids, totally clueless about the state of an industry that I had all but forgotten.
Rip Van Winkle
For this reason, I possess a rather unique perspective, not unlike that of Rip Van Winkle waking from a prolonged slumber.  Some things have changed dramatically, while other things seem unaltered. The greatest “future shock” that I experienced upon reentry was the fact that people had all but ceased to speak to each other or meet face to face (apart from coworkers) preferring rather the more efficient use of emails and texts. The sophistication of voice mail systems had evolved so radically that they secured decision makers into cozy office-bunkers. Phones rang far less, and real-live receptionists had nearly gone extinct! I quickly adapted to the brave new world and became a speed-typing, computer-dependent, Linked In guru. I am now fully integrated into the modern day business sensibilities of 2012. Phew!

Last week Transline was exhibiting at the Del Mar Electronics and Design show, and I was asked to do a one-hour talk. I decided my topic would be How to Fall in Love with Your PCB supplier. I meant it to be a tongue-in-cheek comparison to John Gray’s relational model of Mars and Venus, and how suppliers and customer relationships contain a similar tension. I sought to identify the areas of disparity and offer ways to reconcile these differences—noting that much of these are a result of poor communication and not talking to each other!  For research, I went on Linked In and asked people what they loved and hated about working with PCB suppliers. I received some excellent feedback and blended that with my near 20 years of experience, having worn my share of hats and gaining multiple perspectives—including my Rip Van Winkle viewpoint.
I would like to share some of the input I received along with the input of the dozen or so folks that showed up for my talk. I hope you will find it as fascinating as I did! I will also chime in with my own opinions for what attributes add up to a really effective “lovable” PCB supplier. I will also attach a paper I wrote with the culmination my findings. Until next time … Live long and prosper!

— Judy

A Short History of PCB Design

Posted on by

The death of PADS Software founder Gene Marsh last Friday has prompted me to — at long last — update the PCB design industry timeline on the PCD&F website.

From the 1800s, when photosensitive coatings were perfected, enabling use of photoengraving and setting the stage for future copper etching processes, to the present day, we’ve tried to fill in all the blanks, from the start of companies like Scicards and Racal, who were the pathfinders, to the ingenuity of John Cooper and Dave Chyan, the autorouter specialists, to the rapid merger and acquisition activity that turned almost everyone into a one-time colleague or coworker.

Are there omissions or — gasp! — errors? Most certainly. But that’s where you come in. Please feel free to email me at [email protected] about anything you see that’s amiss. We want this to be complete, and we want it to be accurate.

DfM Chat

Posted on by

Who better than a fabricator to explain design for fabrication?

Join Sunstone Circuits CAD/EDA manager Nolan Johnson this Thursday for a one-hour chat on DfM. Trained as a software engineer, Johnson wrote applications software for Mentor Graphics before transitioning into technical marketing roles. He managed Mentor’s OEM verification development projects, including Dracula and CheckMate. Johnson then concentrated on operating technical training centers for semiconductor manufacturing and telecom analysis equipment at both Electro Scientific Industries and Tektronix.

At Sunstone Circuits, Johnson has assisted in the many successful initiatives of its core product line, including an integral role in the development of the PCB123 design software, including enhancing the software’s schematic functionality and Live BOM (Bill of Materials).

Nolan’s chat takes place May 10, 2 to 3 pm Eastern time at PCB Chat. There is no charge to participate.

Remembering Gene Marsh

Posted on by

Gene Marsh, one of the true industry pioneers, has died.

Marsh, as many readers may recall, founded PADS Software, one of the first CAD software developers, in 1977. In fact, he beat Mentor’s, Cadnetix’s and Daisy’s respective founders to the punch by four years. (1981 was a big year for CAD, as it turned out.)

Gene was such a big deal, Printed Circuit Design started an award for software innovation and named it after him.

While Gene has been out of the industry for years, this is still a sad day.

Rethinking Reshoring

Posted on by

The reshoring drumbeat continues to get louder, and has now attracted the attention of the trade groups. The IPC this week launched a survey in an attempt to quantify the trend.

I took a look and would admit to finding the way some of the questions are asked perplexing — click here to see for yourself — because I don’t think that the answers derived will necessarily show whether the trend is real or not.

Most of the survey is aimed at where manufacturers plan to locate their sites, as opposed to where buyers intend to source from. In my experience, manufacturers are the tail on the supply chain dog: They move to where they think they can land the most business.

Another potential problem I see is the way the questions are worded. For instance, one  asks, “Does your company plan to move existing operations to the Americas in the next three years?” If the respondents are primarily US-based companies with US-only operations, then the trend may well appear to be “no.”

The supply chain is very complicated, and the implications of reshoring a potential game-changer for many companies. I commend IPC for its attempt to generate some quantitative analysis, although I’m uncertain whether the questions as asked will get to the core of what’s really happening (or not happening).

 

From Sydney to Shanghai

Posted on by


It was a year ago that Altium decided to pack its bags and relocate its headquarters and R&D to Shanghai. The company’s revenue was up 20% year-over-year in the second half of 2011, and the pretax income, excluding charges related to the move, was $4.6 million, up from a loss of $315,000 the year before.

It’s way too premature to call the move a success, but on the other hand, those who thought the PCB software company would vanish into the Chinese ether have quieted down.


Design Tradeoffs

Posted on by

As many EMS firms are trying to grab a bigger piece of the design services market, one thing we’ve noticed when we tour their digs is how much more relaxed those designers appear. They are different in terms of setup – some sit in open cubicles, others have individual offices, and still others share a common but separate office, akin to a bullpen – but no matter the configuration, the occupants come across in control and unrushed.
Contrast that to the OEM designers we speak with, who almost uniformly come across as harried.
We’re not sure why this is. Perhaps those at EMS sites are more confident in their job security, knowing that more designs are being shipped their way each year, while their OEM counterparts feel under the gun, worried that their bosses, having already outsourced fabrication and (in many cases) assembly, might at any time let design go, too.
Even so, those designers who responded to our annual salary survey overwhelming were employed by OEMs. Does that suggest EMS designers are significantly fewer in number, harder to reach, or just less interested in filling out a survey? We don’t know.
What we do know, however, is that designers are as not easily compartmentalized as they once were. More have advanced degrees and increasing responsibility. They have become integral, even if more than one-third of respondents still worry about their jobs.
About three-fourths of those who responded were based in the US (probably because the survey was conducted only in English). Most of them have more than 20 years’ experience, suggesting that cost-cutting measures elsewhere aren’t decimating the field.
The average annual US household income was $63,000 in 2011. Given that, designers are doing well. Some 73% of respondents indicated their salary exceeds $60,000, with 17% revealing salaries topped $100,000. For comparison, the median income for a bachelor’s in engineering is $82,712. And most continue to get raises in line with or exceeding the average US raise of 2.8% last year. After the roller coaster of 2008-10, stability is welcome.
Keeping up with the Joneses is one thing. Keeping up with technology is something else. More than one-third of our respondents again said maintaining their technology fluency is their biggest challenge. That’s understandable – as consulting editor Jan Vardaman notes (pg. 20), advancements in everything from wiring materials to substrate systems are ahead. Moreover, an impending shift to copper pillar offers exciting possibilities for tighter silicon and package routing, but with those come the headaches of greater crosstalk and signal integrity issues. Technology, like life, is about tradeoffs.

One more note on the salary survey. Of those designers who recommend or approve products or services, only 78% get to weigh in on CAD tools. While we understand why some designers are out of the loop on this – many EMS companies buy tools as directed by an end-customer, user be damned – it’s still jarring in this day and age that those tasked with such a critical job don’t get a bigger say in how they perform it.

(I would be remiss if I failed to add that senior editor Chelsey Drysdale conducted the survey, compiled the data and wrote the report.)

What Electropac’s Intern Program Represents

Posted on by

Electropac, one of the oldest printed circuit board fabricators in the US, has established an intern program that is the focus of an NPR story today. 

I’ve known Ray Boissoneau and his family for years. Ray’s a realist: the company once was around $40 million per year in sales but now does much less. And, as the article points out, the full-time staff has dwindled from 500 at its peak to 34 today.

That drop tracks with the US domestic PCB manufacturing market, which was once a $10 billion annual business but now is around $3 billion (and probably less, once brokered boards are deducted).
 
Boissoneau doesn’t see the program as a lifeline, but it does offer an opportunity to bring new folks in the door, little by little, to give them a taste of industrial manufacturing. If the US is going to recover its former glory in the PCB market — and some say it never will — it’s going to have to do it like this: one step at a time.

All Worked Up

Posted on by

It’s vogue to assert that mass employment will never return in surface mount manufacturing, but there are good reasons to be skeptical of such reports.

It’s true that efficiency and automation generally go hand in hand, and that companies look to minimize their fixed costs. (While some economists consider labor a variable cost, I think it’s more practical to view it as a fixed cost because, in practice, it is very difficult to match staff to short-term dips and peaks in demand.) But it’s also true that as we drive down the cost of electronics, we expand the potential market for those products, thus potentially increasing the volumes. Higher volumes demand additional lines which in turn begets increased staffing.

I do think there will be a continued tendency to reduce the number of workers per line, but true “lights out” manufacturing is still a long way off. As long as the demand for electronics remains insatiable, and as long as creative designers and engineers continue to dream up ingenuous ways to integrate technology into every facet of our lives, we will need workers — and lots of them — to turn those dreams into reality.