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

No End for Space

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I, for one, am thrilled to see the US is not ignoring the challenges of moving beyond our humble domain on Earth.

As NASA announced yesterday, the Obama administration has given the go ahead to push forward on deep space missions. Tapped for the mission is a design called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle developed by NASA and Lockheed Martin.

So much of the communications capability we take for granted today — from cellphones to satellite communications to GPS and so forth — was enabled by federal funding of bleeding-edge technology used in the space program. (And that doesn’t even begin to cover the major advances in rockets, materials science and other areas.)

Even in the midst of a severe cash crunch, the US is betting that the benefits outweigh the costs.

While some opined that it was a mistake for the Bush and Obama administrations to give up on moon landings and obsolete the Space Shuttle, the picture that is now emerging is more complete. Far from completely giving up on space travel, the US is once again putting the proverbial stake in the ground (or its celestial equivalent) and moving the bar well past where man has thus far traveled.

The electronics industry historically has benefited from NASA’s investments. Let’s hope history once again repeats.

Tin Whiskers and Toyota: Collision Course?

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New criticism of the reports by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA Engineering and Safety Center that led the US Transportation Secretary to publicly absolve Toyota of unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles is breathing new life in what the mainstream media had decided was a closed story.

When the US agencies released their reports in February, Sec. Ray LaHood stated that the findings by the NHTSA and NASA proved Toyota’s electronics were not guilty of causing unintended acceleration. “The verdict is in,” LaHood said. “There is no electronic-based cause for unintended, high-speed acceleration in Toyotas.”

Not so fast, said Safety Research & Strategies, which this week went to press with a report condemning the earlier findings for everything from flawed analysis to conflict of interests.

In the report, SRS claims the tin whiskers found in the vehicle samples provided to NASA did in fact reveal a failure mechanism that was ignored in the NHTSA report, yet that mechanism in accelerator pedal sensor circuits can cause resistive shorts that could lead to acceleration.

The report has become a hot topic among a group of printed circuit board reliability experts, who are pointing to the “extremely small sample size” of vehicles used by NASA to perform its investigations. “There are millions of Toyotas on the road today but NASA was able to look at only a handful,” wrote Bob Landman of HRL Laboratories, on the IPC TechNet Listserv. “Despite the small sample size, they found whiskers.  The Law of Errors tells you what about this fact?  That whiskers are a significant finding.”

Landman noted that in one case, NASA found whiskers in a pedal assembly after a woman who had an incident of sudden acceleration was provided the defective assembly by the dealer that fixed her car. “She learned of the [Department of Transportation] investigation and gave them the assembly, and it found its way to NASA where [researchers] found whiskers shorting the leads of the potentiometer.

Landman also said NASA demonstrated a braking problem under a test track sudden acceleration simulation.  “A NASA driver was strapped in, a NASA passenger had two switches, one to cause sudden acceleration at 45 mph and the other to safely turn off the the sudden acceleration so the vehicle could be brought to a stop.  What happened?  When sudden acceleration was initiated, the throttle was at 100% so there was no vacuum assist and the driver, using both feet on the brake pedal, could not stop the vehicle! It was found that it would take 600 pounds of brake force on the pedal to cause the brake to slow down the vehicle. Clearly, the software does not allow the brake to override the pedal. This is a defective design.”

“Something is rotten in this [NHTSA] report, it seems to me, and SRS found it,” Landman said.

Blowing Smoke

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The deadly explosion Friday at Foxconn’s Chengdu site killed three workers and injured 15 others. Will the company, at long last, feel its workers pain?

It says here, no.

Apple, one of the larger customers for the site, released a statement that was at once nonjudgmental and noncommittal. In it, the iPad maker had this to say: “We are deeply saddened by the tragedy at Foxconn’s plant in Chengdu, and our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We are working closely with Foxconn to understand what caused this terrible event.”

Whoopee.

For a company that takes incredible umbrage at the slightest hint of disclosure, I suppose it would be asking too much for it to reveal any hint of emotion now. But Apple has long shown itself to be disinterested in the ugly goings-on at its largest supplier. Report after report has ripped Foxconn for worker abuses ranging from environmental conditions to overtime and penalties for mistakes generally associated with penal colonies.

Reportedly as much as 30% of the highly profitable iPad 2 tablets are built in Chengdu. If that’s the case, there is absolutely no reason Apple should not have an employee on site, 24/7, ensuring operations are running smoothly. This begs the question, where was that employee? Did he or she not know about the conditions in the polishing department where the explosion reportedly took place, and how workers complained “the department is full of aluminum dust” and “(e)ven though they have worn gloves, their hands are still covered by dust and so (is) their face and clothes?”

Other major Foxconn customers, such as H-P, Dell and Motorola, generally have avoided the scrutiny that Apple gets, but that doesn’t — or shouldn’t — make them any less culpable. It’s a convenient excuse to hide behind the veil of outsourcing as a means to ignore what goes on inside your supplier’s factories.

To me, it’s corporate-sanctioned cannibalism. We are supposed to be better than that.

Designer Salaries by Region, Revisited

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Some readers have asked for a more complete explanation of the data contained in Table 5 of PCD&F senior editor Chelsey Drysdale’s annual designer salary survey.

The table shows the current annual salary range by region, but due to an editing error, the salary percentages were not broken out in a meaningful way.

The graph below should help. (Right click on the graph to enlarge it.)

2 for the Show

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The early sense is Carl Icahn will win two seats on Mentor’s board. Given there are eight seats total, and that Icahn and Casablanca Capital — another disgruntled shareholder that is supporting Icahn’s slate — between them own slightly more than 20% of the EDA company’s stock, that seems pretty fair.

Whether it will benefit the company in the long term remains to be seen, of course.

Conflicts over Conflict Metals

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A top Avnet sales executive is advocating a market-driven solution to the Conflict Metals problem; that is, that industry should go along with US legislation charging companies with oversight of their supply chains back to the mines.

Gerry Fay, senior vice president, supply chain solutions, Avnet, argues that the death of millions should be enough impetus for industry to comply with the Dodd-Frank bill that requires companies to trace the source of minerals used in their products. The law essentially bans the import of gold, columbite-tantalite, cassiterite and wolframite, and their derivatives, from the DRC by US-based publicly held companies, enacts strict reporting standards, and implements a new labeling procedure. Under the new law, any publicly traded company that makes products that use conflict minerals and buys those minerals either in the DRC or an adjoining country must exercise due diligence on the source and supply chain.

That prompted a reply from an IPC executive who rejects the notion that the electronics industry can resolve a “long-standing social [sic] conflict.”

Then there’s Cookson Electronics president Steve Corbett, who asserted last year that the US government should stay out of the matter because it simply has no hope of resolving a civil war in Africa.

I won’t begin to pretend I have the answer, but it’s interesting that three people so entrenched in the matter could have such differing opinions on how to (or how not to) address it.

Sales Up, Profits Down

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Another round of EMS quarterly reports came out today, as LaBarge and SMTC provided their numbers. Now that the bulk of the major EMS companies have reported, the picture is pretty clear that first quarter revenues were up fairly broadly but profits took a hit.

This is unfortunate, of course, because the margin-sensitive EMS industry relies on leveraging higher sales to drive incremental profit gains.

Based on the consensus forecasts, expect second-quarter revenues to be generally flat, with pressure on margins because of higher component costs due to supply constraints.