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

‘Riddled’ With Mistakes

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I haven’t the slightest idea why Gene Riddle didn’t properly dispose of thousands of gallons of hazardous waste from his long-defunct printed circuit board shop, but I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes today.

Riddle, who owned Riddle Inc. from 1972-1991, has been brought up on federal charges for failing to get permits for nearly 3,800 gallons of oxides, acids and other materials typical in PCB wet processing. After the plant closed, the waste materials allegedly were stored in a building that was falling apart. Worse, it was situated just a few hundred yards from a creek that was prone to flooding. The surging waters breached the building several times, leading the feds to slap Riddle with illegal discharge violations to boot.

It’s a cautionary tale not just for those who are in the PCB business, but those who are ever affiliated with it. Given the increasing number and depth of regulations that amplify the need to pay attention not just to what goes on under your roof but that of your suppliers’ as well, one wonders whether the dirty (and I mean dirty) little secret of how many emerging nations handle waste will come back to haunt the Western OEMs that so heavily depend on that part of the supply chain.

TLA Winners

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Several companies were repeat winners of Mentor Graphics’ annual Technology Leadership Awards, announced today.

Best Overall Design went to GE Intelligent Platforms from the UK for a rugged 6U singe-board computer for high-rel applications. The winning design had over 3,500 nets, 20,000 connections,, 11,000 vias, and 80 components, including 20 BGAs placed on both sides of the board. The design team included Paul Curran, Mike Tapp, Rob Savage and John Digby.

For Consumer Electronics & Handhelds, the winner was Seagate (USA), and the runnerup was Qualcomm.
In the Industrial, Instrumentation, and Medical category, NTC ELINS – JSC of Russia won. GE Intelligent Platforms was runnerup.

In the Computers, Blade & Servers and Memory Systems category, the winner was ZTE (China), and in second was Broadcom (USA).

In the military/aerospace category, the winner for a second time was General Dynamics of Canada. Astrium of the UK was the runnerup.

For the Telecom/Network Controllers/Line Cards category, the winner was Alcatel-Lucent of Italy. In second was Sienna ECAD Technologies (a repeat winner) and Alcatel-Lucent of Israel.

For Transportation/Automotive, the winner was Huizhou Desay SV Automotive (China) for an MP5 unit. The runnerup was another design team from Huizhou, this for a radio navigation product.

All boards were designed using Mentor CAD software. This was Mentor’s 22d annual TLA program. 

Disclosure: PCD&F design technical editor Pete Waddell was a judge. Other judges were Rick Hartley of L-3 Communications, Gary Ferrari of FTG Circuits, Happy Holden of Foxconn, and Andy Kowalewski of AdvantagePC.

Supply Chain Sanity

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US factory inventories rose 0.7% in September, led by automobiles, machinery and electrical equipment.

I wouldn’t get too worried yet. Inventories remain well below historical levels. We’ll see a slight dip in orders in some end-product segments, some of which is seasonal, some due to OEM caution.

Keep an eye on the component stocks, though. Don’t overorder just because you think parts are going to get even harder to come by. A good supply chain balance requires the entire chain to work together. Remember 2001.

Are Soy PCBs Good for Your Health?

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File under surreal.

A pair of University of Delaware researchers have developed a way to fabricate a low-Dk substrate made from soy.

Yes, soy.

Mingjiang Zhan and Richard P. Wool, who are part of the chemical engineering department of the University of Delaware, started with biobased resin acrylated epoxidized soybean oil (AESO), which they crosslinked with divinylbenzene (DVB) or chemically modified by phthalic anhydride. The DVB-crosslinked resins had a 14° to 24°C increase in their glass-transition temperatures (Tg), which was dependent on the crosslink densities. Tg increased linearly as the crosslink density increased. Phthalated acrylated epoxidized soybean oil (PAESO) had an 18 to 30% improvement in the modulus. The dielectric constants and loss tangents of both DVB-crosslinked AESO and PAESO were lower than conventional dielectrics used for printed circuit boards (PCBs).

The results, the researchers say, suggest that the new biobased resins with lower carbon dioxide footprint are potential replacements for commercial petroleum-based dielectric materials for PCBs.

Their work will be published next month in the Journal of Applied Polymer Chemistry. (It was published online in July.)

By the way, this isn’t Wool’s only attempt to trick nature. As part of another project, he is trying to carbonized chicken feathers so they can store hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles.

TLC for TLA

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Mentor will announce winners of its Technology Leadership Awards this afternoon. While the name of the award is misleading — non-Mentor CAD users need not apply — there always are some great designs. (Side note: Our own Pete Waddell is a judge.)

We will post the winners as they are announced; check back around 2 pm Eastern.

Let’s Get Small

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With 005005 components (metric 0201)  scheduled for production within two years, it becomes less attractive to place and solder what are truly microminiature parts using traditional means.

Robert Barbucha, a researcher at the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery Center’s Plasma and Laser Engineering in Gda?sk, Poland, is working on a laser device that may solve the problem. His method involves using lasers to project pathways on printed circuit boards covered with a layer of photopolymer. The concept isn’t novel — many engineers have suggested printing or lasering parts on boards — but in this case the laser itself is the focus of Barbucha’s research. He reportedly has begun working with a manufacturer in Gda?sk to produce a prototype.

Stay tuned.

A Package Worth Gawking At

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Here’s the new Xilinx part, which as contributing editor Jan Vardaman reports today, is the world’s first multi-die FPGA, with more than 3.5 times the logic capacity of the largest current-generation Xilinx 40 nm FPGA with serial transceivers and 2.8 times the logic capacity of the largest competing 28 nm FPGA with serial transceivers. Pretty cool stuff.

SMTAI: Good Times in Orlando

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SMTAI this week in Orlando was a good show. A good regional show, but a good one nonetheless. Traffic on the show floor was strong the first day, and not bad the second morning before slipping off to the usual end-of-show vacancy. The technical sessions were very strong; the session on EMS that I chaired drew about 30 folks, which is about as good as it ever does.

Not much new in the way of technology. DEK did show its ProActiv squeegee, which oscillates during the print stroke in order to pack more paste into the apertures. My old friend Phil Zarrow points out that the concept isn’t exactly new — roughly 25 years old, to be exact — but sometimes good ideas take awhile to find their place.

Tom Sharpe gave a scintillating keynote on a trip to China, showing just how systemic counterfeiting operations have become. He notes some 29,000 incidents of counterfeits were reported to the US Department of Commerce between 2005 and 2008. And he warned that the process by which some are marking fake parts now renders the ink impermeable to scratches, which means simple tests for isolating counterfeits may no longer work.

Rod Howell, founder of EMS firm Libra Industries, made an extraordinary gesture with a $5000 donation to the Charles Hutchins Grant, which underwrites the costs of a student doing post-graduate work in the fields of electronics packaging or assembly. And the SMTA has renamed its best paper award in honor of the late Rich Freiberger, a former director of the trade group and one of its most avid supporters. A nice touch.

Hot Seat

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I’ll be blogging from SMTAI in Orlando next week, where I’m chairing/co-chairing a couple of sessions on contract manufacturing.

On Tues. Oct. 26, from 2:00pm – 3:30pm is Outsourcing Strategies: Niche Requirements and EMS Best Practices, featuring

  • ODM or EMS: Which Choice is Best for Your Project?
    Jim Chen, Tailyn Communication Company, Ltd.
  • How Efficient Is Your High Mix EMS Supplier
    Dave Cesar, The Parkland Group and Roy Starks, Libra Industries
  • Outsourcing LED PCB Manufacture
    Scott Mauldin, LEDnovation, Inc.

    Then from 4 – 5:50pm is EMS Segment Focus: Aerospace/Defense:

  • Understanding Differences Between Defense OEM/CEM and Traditional CEM Business Models
    Allan B. Day, TEAM Technologies, Inc.
  • ITAR Compliance – Challenges and Benefits in an Outsourced Relationship
    Joe O’Neill, Hunter Technology Corporation
  • Practical Issues and Solutions for Handling Plastic Encapsulated Microcircuits (PEMs)
    Rick Iodice, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems

    • Tighter Ratio Rules Ahead?

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    The long-held area ratio rule (the ratio of aperture size and stencil foil thickness) of 0.66 is under attack from all sides, it seems.

    Writing this month in CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY, columnist Clive Ashmore explains that  improvements to the shear thinning capability of the print stroke can reduce the area ratio to 0.40. This is an important development because tighter ratios offer greater latitude in stencil design. The rule today is that, since a larger component generally requires more paste volume than a smaller one, one or the other suffers: Optimize for the larger part and print quality suffers on the small aperture; optimize for the smaller ones and the larger parts are starved of paste. With the lower ratio however, as Ashmore notes, 0.3 mm CSPs could be placed beside large tantalum capacitors without penalizing one or the other.

    Next week at SMTAI in Orlando, Rockwell’s Kevin Liticker will present his work evaluating several stencil technologies including “PhD,” fine grain stainless and nickel stencil, and aperture forming methods like pulsed YAG laser, fiber optic laser (with and without electropolish) and electroform as they relate to paste transfer efficiencies for small apertures. I’m not going to give away the store, but he found some evidence that the release characteristics of fine grain material may be superior as apertures shrink.

    I strongly suggest checking out both engineers’ work.