Biologists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have genetically modified bacteria to produce tiny conductive wires that may one day be used in electronics.
Courtesy UMass AmherstIf we extrapolate this, does it mean that job-seekers won’t just have China and robots to compete with, but bugs, too?
A fond farewell to Mel Parrish, who retired this week from STI Electronics.
I’ve known Mel (below, right) for more than 20 years, back to my days at IPC and his at the EMPF in Indianapolis. Through his stints at the Air Force, US Navy (China Lake), and finally STI, Mel has been a constant at the solder and training standards and certification programs. He’s also been one of those rare preternaturally even-keeled fellows you could rely on for technical advice, or a good story, or just some thoughtful wisdom.
STI president and CEO Dave Raby (above, left) said that while he’s happy for Mel, he has been “a vital part of our organization for many years and will be missed.”
I think the industry would agree in spades.
It’s been just over three years since the US government indicted a former hacker at a major defense contractor for, ironically, spilling reams of classified information for all the world to see.
In doing so Edward Snowden irreversibly opened the eyes of the public to both the capacity of the US to plumb the world’s communication channels and the sheer volume of information it was collecting (or may still be collecting) on a routine basis.
But it also begged the question of why aren’t government networks more secure. Certainly there are hacks and attacks taking place at a near-constant frequency. Why are these channels still hooked up to the world at large? Would not the world’s respective defense departments be better served if they operated on secure, private networks that weren’t, for example, routed on common platforms? Put another way, isn’t the cost of being digitally pick-pocketed far greater than the nuisance of having to work on multiple systems?
Setting up systems as such wouldn’t prevent a rogue operator like Snowden from successfully spilling the beans, but it would create a far superior barrier from the reach of foreign hands than is currently in place.
In light of all the IP and security concerns so prevalent today, one would think we’d be wise to no only close the barn doors before the horse is pilfered, but also move the barn away from the farm once and for all.
Not quite 18 years ago, a pair of venture capital firms bought a small Washington fab shop named Power Circuits. The following year those two firms, Thayer Capital Partners and Brockway Moran & Partners, added Power Circuits in Santa Ana, CA, to its stable. It renamed the fabricators TTM Technologies.
Today TTM is one of the largest PCB fabricators in the world, with revenues of around $2.5 billion across 25 facilities and 30,000 employees. It made some of the largest acquisitions in industry history, and unlike some of its competitors, made those acquisitions work.
It’s not without some irony, then, that one of the former directors of Power Circuits has teamed with a venture capital fund to acquire a pair of Southern California fabricators this week.
History repeating?
Shane Whiteside, who was general manager and director of operations at Power Circuits, rose with TTM, eventually becoming executive vice president and COO before departing the firm in 2013.
With his background, Whiteside certainly would know which plants to target on the West Coast of the US. I haven’t been through KCA Electronics, but Marcel Electronics is one of the finest shops PCD&F has had the pleasure of visiting. I’m eager to see how this evolves.
An ex Photocircuits engineer says the gutting of US manufacturing has led to a huge shift in ownership of US assets, with dire consequences for all Americans.
“With only a very small manufacturing base left, there is a small need to make capital investments in these businesses. Capital investments are what drive productivity,” writes Jason Tillberg.
He’s preaching to the choir, no doubt, but I always find it interesting when folks support their with details. In this case, Tillberg points to the massive transfer of ownership of US assets to foreign entities — remember Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” metaphor? — as a real cost paid by Americans through its inability (unwillingness?) to compete in manufacturing.
I find his thesis a bit incomplete and scattered, but he makes an important observation on capital investment and the disincentives to invest in a shrinking manufacturing base.
(As an aside, Tillberg talks about his experiences at Photocircuits in another piece on productivity written a few years back.)
We get this question a lot: How much per square inch for a 4-layer board? (or double sided, or 6 layers … same question). I won’t hold you to it, I promise. Right….
We understand that it is difficult to provide the boss with a project cost roll up if you do not have the board cost estimate. If you do a lot of designs you may have a feel for it or you may refer to a similar board cost from a past project. This actually can be very effective.
I have even seen online cost calculators that presume to give an accurate number. Knowing what I know about PCB pricing, however, I can say that it just ain’t so.
Here is why calculating PCB cost is tricky and dangerous ground.
The biggest cost drivers for a bare board are:
All manufacturers have a floor or minimum and it is best to ask how many boards you can get for the minimum charge. Some of the internet guys will sell one or five at a very low seemingly low cost, but your boards will have to fit perfectly into their narrow technical profile.
Not the following:
So, now think about putting all of this into an algorithm and coming up with a defensible, unchangeable answer. That is a dangerous guessing game.
My best advice is this: Get preliminary Gerbers to your preferred vendors and tell them they are preliminary. If the effort is conceptual, provide a simple description answering the cost drivers above and email your proposed or preferred vendors for a quote. (To make it easy for you, we offer a template. Go to precisionpcbs.com/pcb-manufacturing and click on the “Fab Drawing Template.”)
For years we’ve been told that EMS companies are in the service business only and would never develop their own products. In one of the first interviews I did, back in late 1991, then IPC director Tony Hilvers — a leading proponent of the then-emerging CM industry (it wasn’t even called EMS then; that term was coined by Sue Mucha the following year) — insisted to me that contract assemblers wouldn’t go down the product development and branding path because it would put them in position of competing with their customers.
We can bury that old saw. With today’s news that Foxconn has, at long last, bought Sharp (for the low, low price of $3.4 billion), the loop between EMS and OEM has been drawn taut.
Not that this is ground-breaking in practice. Certainly, many, many EMS companies have, through acquisition or otherwise, developed and marketed their own products. Our 2009 EMS Company of the Year had a healthy, branded keyboard product line. And we estimated in this space in 2012 that 15 to 20% of the (then) 2,400 companies listed in our EMS directory did some degree of ODM/OEM work.
Going further, we wrote in 2015 we felt the line between EMS and ODM has been “permanently crossed.” But the Foxconn-Sharp marriage takes it to an entirely different scale.
Whether the Sharp name stays on its product lines, which range from Aquos televisions to smartphones to solar panels, and includes the OLED technology so prized by Apple that it compelled Foxconn to write the check in the first place, remains to be seen.
Either way, there’s no going back. EMS is now OEM. Going forward, who is the customer they will serve? And knowing the line keeping their suppliers from their end-customers has been permanently breached, will this spur OEMs to reestablish their assembly operations?
The big story out of IPC Apex Expo last week – about the only story, really – was the introduction of an open communications standard by Mentor Graphics’ Valor division, followed by the rapid response by more than two dozen assembly equipment providers and software developers over shared concern that the solution to machine-to-machine communication might end up residing in the hands of a single company.
At the heart of the matter is the so-called Industry 4.0. Also referred to as IIC (US), Made in China 2025 (China), Industrial Value Chain Initiative (Japan), Manufacturing 3.0 (South Korea) and other names, it stands for the capability for different equipment, made by different OEMs, to share bi-directional data over an open, yet secure, platform. Done right, it’s a major step toward permitting manufacturers to pick the best machines for their specific needs, versus being beholden to a single line solution. Fundamentally, it’s at the heart of a fully beating Internet of Things; some feel the fully automated factory can increase production efficiency by more than 30% over time, adding billions or more to national GDPs.
Let’s start with the Mentor specification. Two years in the making and announced just prior to the annual IPC trade show, it was released at the Las Vegas event as OML, which stands for Open Machine Language. Having years of experience writing translators for various assembly line machines, Valor took those translators and installed OML in front of them, and packaged the combination in a black box. Thus, in a relative instant, a solution to a much-discussed electronics assembly problem was at hand; OML satisfied the need for machines to talk to each other, and the box handled any connectivity issues.
Mentor planned to make OML available to any company through a partner program and would retain ownership over the protocol while relying on the partners to help shape the future direction of the specification.
In Las Vegas, of course, everything’s a gamble. Once word got around the show, equipment vendors said “not so fast.”
Mentor’s angle was to multiply the use of IoT through OML, thus exponentially expanding the market for its Valor tools. Perhaps worried by the legalese, or the potential for a single “owner” to license and potentially change or even shut out competitors, roughly two dozen assembly OEMs met over the course of two days to hammer out an agreement that reshapes the trajectory of the specification. Several equipment OEMs PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY spoke with agreed OML is technically sound but felt the business issues inherent in licensing a corporate spec could pose a host of problems. Up against this strong front, Mentor pivoted and offered OML as a starting point for a to-be-determined IPC standard.
In one sense, then, bi-directional communication goes back to the drawing board. Some 15 years ago an IPC committee published a shop floor equipment communication standard labeled IPC-2541 and colloquially known as CAMX. One presenter at the Apex sessions demonstrated how IoT could work using enhanced CAMX. The early take – and this has yet to be finalized, as not even the charter is on paper yet – is the task group will study a combination of OML, CAMX and perhaps other, yet-to-be-written software as part of its IPC mission.
All sides agree there will be an emphasis on speed. If nothing else, OML forced the industry to confront the fact that not only is a standard needed, it was needed yesterday.
Going forward, it will be up to each software company and manufacturer to leverage the IPC standard as they see fit. It remains to be seen if Mentor will ultimately concede OML or whether it will attempt to go it alone.
Some will recall a similar scenario with the data transfer formats for printed circuit board designs. Various specifications sat mostly idle for years, IPC-D-350, IGES and EDIF among them, until the powers behind Valor’s ODB and IPC’s GenCAM formats squared off. Valor donated the XML version of ODB to IPC in 2008, yet continues to maintain its ODB++ format. GenCAM evolved into IPC-2581, and upon Mentor’s purchase of Valor, finally gained traction among worried software competitors and OEMs who feared being shut out of markets or forced to switch tools.
Regardless of the back story, this is where the industry stands today, and a basically workable plan is being formulated. The speed with which the industry moved – and Mentor should be thanked for spurring action – screams the need is present and widespread, and there is general consensus on the solution. That’s a great story. After all, in electronics, how often does that happen.
And some trivia. You may have noticed that the soldermask used on most PC boards is green, as is the paint used on most steel truss bridges. Why is that? And what do the two things have in common? Why green PCBs and why green bridges?
To answer, I brought in color expert expert Patty O’Patrick O’Dell, who stated: “Many bridges and PCBs are green because they absorb red and blue light, only reflecting the green.”
That wasn’t quite what I was getting at, but close enough. The important thing, is that, generally, in commercial products, the PC boards are hidden, so the color doesn’t matter that much. With prototypes and a lot of the hobby or development boards, that is not the case, so many companies have chosen to use a different color as a part of their identity.
Arduino products are blue, as are most boards from Adafruit. SparkFun makes theirs red. Ti Launchpads are red as well. The Beaglebone uses color, essentially, as a model number; Beaglebone black, Beaglebone green. This is possible because major PC board fab houses have made different colors more economical than they used to be.
I’ve been asked if the color makes any difference electrically. In general, no. If you’re dealing with super high speeds, RF, or other exotic conditions, it’s always best to ask your board house. In those fringe areas, a lot of things have the potential to make a difference. Other than that, if you can afford it, and want to make a statement, go for it. You can often get different color silk screen legend too. Just make sure there’s contrast between the two. White silkscreen on white soldermask would not be the best choice.
Duane Benson
Beware the monsters from Id