Category Archives: Hot Wires

Mike Buetow’s thoughts on the industry

Goldman Moment

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Congratulations to my old friend — as in “long-term”; I would never dare call her old — Patty Goldman, who was inducted into the IPC Hall of Fame this week (long overdue). In doing so, Patty becomes the first woman inducted to receive IPC’s highest honor (also long overdue).

I was on the IPC staff when Patty was chair of the Technical Activities Executive Council, which sets the priorities for all IPC standards activities. She ran that group of unruly engineers with an iron fist (well, really a gavel), demonstrating that not only could some sense of order and civility be brought to the Council, but that their meetings didn’t have to last four hours, either.

Way to go, Patty!

An Electronic Business Card Holder

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I design and build electronics at home, late at night when the spiders are out, and by day, I put my hours into Screaming Circuits. My job here doesn’t involve building things. I’m the marketing department, but I like to keep as much manufacturing smeared all over me as is possible. Here’s one way I do that.

Business cards are a bit of an anachronism today. I don’t give out many, this being the 21st century and all, but I still need some on my desk – I guess to look businessy or something. No one’s ever given me a cheap card holder with their logo on it, and I don’t want to just scatter cards around. So, why not combine my need to display business cards on my desk with my compulsion to create electronic things? With that thought in mind, I decided to build an electronic business card holder. Of course, I first had to decide just what an electronic business card holder would be.

Here’s what I came up with:

  • It should be small, about the size of a business card
  • It should have a lot of blinky lights
  • It should do something when a card is removed
  • It should have a long battery life
  • It should use tiny parts to show off our manufacturing capability a bit
  • It should be 100% buildable within our electronics manufacturing process (meaning it should be just electronics; no bolts or case)

That’s not a long list, but does involve a few decisions. I’m pretty familiar with Microchip PIC processors, so that would be a logical choice to drive the thing. Arduino compatibility would be cool, but I’d have more trouble with battery life, and the PIC microcontrollers come in some pretty inexpensive forms.

I’d recently been using a variant of the PIC18F46k22 on another project. I comes in a 5 x 5mm QFN package and can be purchased for less than $3 in small quantities. it has plenty of I/O and can be set to a very low power sleep mode. I settled on that MCU and a CR2032 coin cell battery for power.

Rather than add any extra hardware to hold the cards, I came up with an arrangement of pin headers and small push-button switches. (as in the photo below right). One header is the six-pin Microchip in-circuit programming (ICSP) header, and the other is a six-pin I2C/SPI header. Not that I need I2C or SPI, but with that, you could turn this into a robot business card holder or something.

I considered a light sensor to detect when a card is being picked up, but that would require leaving the A to D powered up, and it would be less reliable due to changes in lighting. I looked around my junk box at home, and found a Freescale MMA8452 3 axis accelerometer in a 3 x 3mm QFN package. It also has a decent low power mode, and can be talked to over I2C.

Some 19 GPIO pins remained open, so naturally, I had to put in 19 LEDs.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I’ll go through some of the design decisions. At the end of this series, I’ll be giving out 10 of these, so stay tuned to see how you might be able to get one.

Duane Benson
If you dreamed you saw the silver spaceships flying
That’s a okay. They’re RoHS compliant

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/

Linc’d In

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I never worked directly for Linc Samelson, but it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have had a career writing about electronics design and assembly were it not for him. I certainly wouldn’t have many of my good friends.

Linc passed away last weekend at the age of 89 following a car accident. He was a lifelong entrepreneur, going from engineering college student to a career in the Navy, followed by a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois in 1948.

After some time in the electrical insulation manufacturing industry, Linc recognized the need for a trade publication. That prompted he and his father to launch, in 1955, a company called Lake Publishing, named after Lake Forest, the town north of Chicago where their first offices were.

Their startup magazine, Insulation, grew and eventually was renamed Insulation/ Circuits. The electronics trade publishing industry would never be the same.

Fast forward to 1991. At that time, Lake Publishing had relocated to a far north Chicago suburb of Libertyville. To his group of journals Linc had added a number of titles — Microelectronics Manufacturing and Testing (MMT), Hybrid Circuit Technology (HCT), and eventually Surface Mount Technology (SMT).

SMT started as a seasonal supplement to HCT, then grew into a standalone publication. And in 1991, just one year out of college, I joined the magazine as associate editor.

At that time Linc was in transition too, having sold the company to a subsidiary of Information Handling Services. (According to lore, IHS bought Lake with the idea the magazines would serve as a monthly advertising vehicle for its component catalogs. Unfortunately for IHS, no one from the corporate offices in Denver ever bothered to send the ads.)

As an owner, Linc seemed to understand the nature of people. He had a racquetball court installed in the building and tennis courts outside. On Fridays came happy hours, with a keg of beer tapped to celebrate the weekend. (This was a different era for a lot of reasons.) His employees were never going to get rich working for him, but he did invest strategically, be it in equipment or brand positioning, always making sure there was an army of staff representing the company at trade shows.

Linc married my former colleague at Lake/IHS and longtime friend Jennifer Samelson (nee Read), with whom he raised seven children. Besides his wife, Linc is survived by 16 children, 19 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. He continued working into the late 1990s.

Through the years, Linc remained a favorite topic for me and former colleagues, some still in the industry, most now out. He brought us together, and in many ways launched us on our careers. I will always be grateful for his foresight and vision.

Wooden Thinking

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Were you as shocked as I was Saturday when Sparton announced CEO Cary Wood had resigned?

Since he took over as president of the company in 2008 (he was named chief executive months later), the 48-year-old Wood has been a shining star in the EMS sector. He reshaped and reinvigorated Sparton. In 2006, the company’s sales were just over $170 million and the company was in dire need of restructuring. By 2011 it had turned the corner, and today sales top $430 million, with consistent profits. He led the buyouts of Electronic Manufacturing Technology, Onyx EMS, and Hunter Technology, among others, firming up its presence in the medical and defense markets.

The reason(s) for Wood’s sudden departure are murky. Sparton isn’t talking, although it did praise (albeit somewhat tersely) his contributions. The rumor mill is speculating the move was prompted by an exchange on the firm’s quarterly conference call last Wednesday between Wood and some hedge fund managers who felt the company should be far more valuable for shareholders and even suggested a breakup would be in order. One went so far as to say his “16-year-old daughter and small pack of Norwich Terriers could probably get the stock up 50% to 100% before the end of the quarter.” (Cue to the 27:50 minute mark for the quoted assertion.)

Another frankly asked why a couple Sparton customers are considering moving production in-house.

To his credit, as the exasperated fund manager called for the board buy back stock or step aside, Wood kept his cool throughout. He noted that the board has evaluated all the alternatives about how to deploy its capital, put a pause on M&A and is moving to optimize SG&A and performance.

This exchange gets at one of the tensions inherent in being a public company today. The market is controlled by institutional and hedge fund investors, not private citizens. It’s a cliche, but the goals of a short-term investor are fundamentally different than those of a manufacturer, especially one that generates a big chunk of its revenue building other companies’ products. There’s a fundamental disconnect between needing to invest for long-term survival and trying to squeeze the last bit of blood from the body before moving on to the next victim. Yet coming up with the financing to fund expansion and acquisition without ceding near-total control of the company can be near impossible without going public.

Sparton has spent north of $150 million in EMS related acquisitions in the past eight years, including $55 million for Hunter Technology last year. It is exceedingly difficult to live in the $100 million to $300 million or so market in the EMS industry today.  Companies have to grow, and they typically have to come up with revenue streams beyond just soldering components.

Sparton is in better shape today than when Wood took over, and there’s no reason to think that will change in short order. But the industry needs to take pains to protect its good managers, because just building things well isn’t enough for long-term success these days, at least not for public companies.

Addendum: Here’s a link to a Crain’s Chicago Business article on Wood’s departure.

Users Could Find New CES ‘Wearables’ Painfully Restrictive

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The early reports from CES indicate wearable devices continue to be the hot item. Among the early headliners:

  • Samsung’s WELT wellness belt, which is really a backpack that charges phones via solar panels, among other things;
  • Samsung’s Smart Suit, which to my view does fairly mundane tasks like like unlocking your phone when you take it out of your pocket;
  • Samsung’s lab also made a golf shirt that can sense the weather and UV ratings;


    Samsung’s Smart Suit

  • Under Armour’s Healthbox, which features an activity tracker, chest strap and smart scale; and Samsung’s Body Compass 2.0, a sensor-laden workout suit that performs similar tasks;
  • MadRat’s Supersuit, which is designed to play laser tag and other such games in a closed space;
  • MadRat’s SuperSuit

    Also coming from UA, a smart running shoe that tracks movement and lets users know when the shoe should be replaced.

What these devices have in common is the ability for users to track their activity — and by extension, their wellness — in real-time and on multiple platforms including their smartphones. What they can also do is amass a terrific amount of data that may or may not be used for their original intended purposes. In short, if you can collect and review the data, so can someone else.

Consider: What if health insurers were to require policyholders to wear devices that tracked such details? And what if your insurance rates were to climb simply on the basis of a weekend ice-cream binge? What if auto insurers could tell that you had activated your cellphone while in a driving, and could cancel your policy on the basis of that information? What if it was learned that you habitually played 18 holes during high ozone days?

While the ability to monitor one’s health using actual real-time data is eye-opening, are we opening a door to such data being misused, or at least, applied in a fashion that could have very real and life-changing implications for the user?

 

The Top 10 in PCD&F

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Yesterday, we reported the top 10 best-read articles published by CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY in 2015. Today we list the best-read articles from PCD&F.

The list includes features that were published for the first time in calendar 2015. Rankings are based on web site hits, and do not include — for obvious reasons — the number of reads in the print version of the magazine.

1. “Embedded Passive Technology Materials, Design and Process,” by Hikmat Chammas
2. “Beyond the Vault: The Evolution of PCB Design Archiving,” by John McMillan.
3. “01005: Size Does Matter,” by Arbel Nissan.
4. “Trace Current/Temperature Relationships,” by Douglas G. Brooks, Ph.D. and Johannes Adam, Ph.D.
5. “Microsectioning of Laminates,” by Karin Rudman Prieto, Ph.D., Peg Conn, Lizabeth Lagos and Charles Lehmann.
6. “The Changing Face of the Hardware Design Engineer,” by Steve Hughes.
7. “Refining Lean NPI at Optimum Design Associates,” by Randy Holt.
8. “The 3 Challenges Facing the Future of PCB Design,” by David Wiens.
9. “How Hot Is My Via? (Cooler Than You Think!),” by Douglas G. Brooks, Ph.D. and Johannes Adam, Ph.D.
10. “In Search of Greater Tolerance,” by Peter Bigelow.

There was a definite advantage for articles that were published near the beginning of the year. If we adjust for timing, a feature on field solvers authored by Dr. Eric Bogatin and published just last month more than likely would have made the top 10. And although not reflected here, there was tremendous and perhaps disproportionate interest in flex circuits, given the smaller audience involved to-date in flex, with pieces by Mark Finstad (“Designing Flex Circuits For Wearable Electronics“) and Ben Jordan (“Designing a Successful High-Speed Rigid-Flex PCB“) just missing the top 10.

As always, we are grateful for our loyal readers and the many authors who contribute their expertise each month.

The Top 10 in CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY

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For the past several years, we have taken a few moments at year-end to look back at the best-read articles of 2015.

The list includes features that were published for the first time in calendar 2015. Rankings are based on web site hits, and do not include — for obvious reasons — the number of reads in the print version of the magazine.

We’ll start today with the top 10 from CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY. Tomorrow we will list the best-read articles from PCD&F.

1. “How Clean is Clean Enough?” by Terry Munson, Paco Solis, Nick Munson, Steve Ring and Evan Briscoe

2. “01005: Size Does Matter,” by Arbel Nissan.

3. “Designing Flex Circuits For Wearable Electronics,” by Mark Finstad.

4. “Depaneling of Circuit Boards,” by Ahne Oosterhof and Thomas Nether.

5. “What You Cannot See Can Be Hand Soldered,” by Paul Wood and Bob Wettermann.

6. “A New SPI Tool for Defect Prevention,” by Chrys Shea.

7. “Zooming in on Digital Microscopes,” by Chrys Shea and Kristoffer Tømmergaard.

8. “China in Charge, by Dr. Hayao Nakahara.

9. “US or Mexico: Which Option Makes Most Sense for Your Project?” by Joe Villanueva.

10. “Cost/Benefit Tradeoffs of Capacitor Part Size vs. Manufacturing Efficiency,” by Chris Reynolds.

As you can see, a mix of technical and business-related pieces made up the top 10 this year. Interest was high in cutting-edge technology (multiple pieces on 01005s, wearable flex circuitry), but tutorial-type pieces on conventional technology held its own as well (cleaning, circuit board depaneling).

As always, we are grateful for our loyal readers and the many authors who contribute their expertise each month.