The PCBAA is ramping up efforts to secure funding for R&D and capacity in the US.
What constitutes the printed circuit board industry? And how much, if any, investment should the US government allocate toward ensuring its technological and capacity capabilities?
These are among the questions David Schild is tackling every day. Schild is executive director of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America, which was founded in 2021 to advance US domestic production of PCBs and base materials. The organization is made up of corporate members of all sizes and includes fabricators, assemblers and suppliers.
Schild addressed questions about public and private investment, how governments can help create "demand signals," and the PCBAA's annual meeting with PCEA for the PCB Chat podcast in late July. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The unstructured evolution of integrated circuit package technology (and its consequences).
I purchased my first "integrated circuit" around 1957, which was roughly a year before Jack Kilby is credited with inventing the IC. In appearance, it was a paper phenolic PCB with six discrete transistors in TO-cans and a few axial-leaded resistors and capacitors soldered on one side. If one can stretch their thinking just a bit, however, one can see the truth of the suggestion that it was arguably an "integrated circuit." The fact that Kilby was working at Centralab in Milwaukee, a ceramic circuit maker, immediately before heading to Texas Instruments for his new job was fortuitous. I have long assumed it influenced his invention. Around the same time, the IC's recognized co-inventor, Robert Noyce, took the idea a step further and showed how transistors and interconnections could be built on silicon wafer, which remains the primary method used today – featuring sizes a few orders of magnitude smaller and significantly increased material sets to embrace many new semiconductor materials in addition to silicon.
Claire Wemp is hot on the trail of better thermal interface materials and more engineering roles for women.
Thermal interface materials (TIM) are used between components to help with heat dissipation. Claire Wemp, Ph.D., is a thermal applications engineer at DuPont, with a doctorate in mechanical engineering, where her research was on heat transfer enhancement for metal surfaces. While an undergraduate, Wemp also became involved in the Society of Women Engineers, and continues to work with the nonprofit professional organization today. Wemp joined PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY on the PCB Chat podcast, where she discussed the use of TIMs and her work with SWE. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
For students at Palomar Community College, a finely-tuned design curriculum is just the beginning.
It goes without saying that finding talent is a big deal in electronics hardware development. Outside of internal training programs, talent development falls to the handful of colleges, universities and third parties involved in teaching printed circuit design and manufacturing.
One of the original providers is Palomar College, located in San Marcos, CA, part of San Diego County. The community college has offered practical printed circuit design coursework since the mid-1990s.
Effects of types of TIM types, thicknesses and contact pressure in a real-world application.
Power electronics are integral parts of power components, power supplies, 5G networks, automotive and defense/space applications. All modern power electronics have two critical factors in common that drives the need for unprecedented thermal management: first, increased transistor density to meet the higher demand in increased computing power and second, component miniaturization leading to higher heat flux. It is well known in the electronics reliability field that 55% of the component failures in electronics devices are related to excess heat. The Arrhenius equation in Eq. 11 predicts that, for electronics, the lift of the device decreases by half2 by increasing the device temperature by 10°C. Design engineers mitigate this issue by carefully selecting thermal interface materials (TIM) to keep the system/device temperature at the desired level.
Summary statistics can be misleading, but in different ways.
Cpk and Ppk are numeric capability summaries of process or product characteristics based on common cause variation (due to chance) and assignable cause variation (special cause). Understanding these capability indices and their limitations is critical in pursuing world-class quality, "on target with minimal variation." Cpk and Ppk indices are reviewed, and details on how to use them synergistically are provided.
