Research Grants Offer Glimpse of Future of Electronics

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The sums aren’t huge, and the research decidedly blue sky, but the US Department of Energy is following through on an Obama-era initiative to fund early-stage research projects aimed at innovative technologies and solutions in advanced manufacturing.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) today announced $35 million in awards to universities, national laboratories, and for-profit and nonprofit partners to a host of universities, national laboratories, and other entities

Among those with specific implications for electronics design and manufacturing:

  • The University of Maryland nabbed almost $2.1 million to improve the balance of electrical-mechanical-thermal properties in materials for electrical wiring, contributing to a future reduction in material usage and energy waste in the nation’s transmission-line networks and in microchips. These new materials could be used to make conductors for power lines with higher strength and higher current carrying capacity and interconnects with longer lifetime in microelectronics.
  • The Dana Farber Cancer Institute received a $1.2 million grant to design and build billions of first-of-their-kind molecular 2D printers, that are atomically precise, and which could produce trillions of atomically precise products to advance atomically precise manufacturing.
  • Zyvex Labs received more than $2.45 million to create and test atomically precise materials in two dimensions using a scanning tunneling microscope that can pull individual hydrogen atoms out of a surface and a coating procedure to substitute other atoms in their place. This project will significantly advance atomically precise manufacturing for applications such as quantum computing and nanoelectronic computing devices.

Many of the other grant recipients are working on concepts similar in nature to the Dana Farber and Zyvex projects whereby atoms would be pushed around and connected. While those projects are targeting clean energy and other applications, it is possible the technology would have applications in electronics as well.

On the Road at SMTA Pan Pac

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Folks,

I am giving a paper, chairing a session and hosting a panel at SMTA Pan Pacific on Feb. 6 at the Hapuna Beach Prince Resort in Hawaii.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The paper is “Using Cpk and Cpk Confidence Intervals to Evaluate Stencil Printing,” with my coauthor Chris Nash of Indium Corporation. In this paper I will discuss how to calculate confidence intervals when using Cpk to evaluate the quality of stencil printing.

By comparing the confidence intervals of Cpks one can determine whether or not there is a statistically significant difference between different samples of stencil printing data.

The session I am chairing is on “Advanced Materials.” The papers in the session are:

  • “Oxygen Vacancy Migration in MLCCs” by Dock Brown, CRE, DfR Solutions
    “Update on Cu-Ni/Sn Alloy Composite Solder Paste for Harsh Environments” by Stephanie Choquette, Ph.D., Iowa State University, and Iver Anderson, Ames Laboratory (USDOE)
  • “Resistivity Stain Analysis of Graphene Coated Frabric for Wearable Electronics” by Martine Simard-Normandine, Ph.D., S. Ferguson, MuAnalysis, and K. Manga, Q.-B. Ho Grafoid.
  • The panel topic is “Solders for Harsh Environments.” Brief presentations will be given by some of the panelists with a question and answer period to follow. The panelists are Dwight Howard of Delphi Automotive, Iver Anderson of Ames Lab, John Evans of Auburn University, and Prabjit Singh of IBM.

We expect to learn a lot. I hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Dr. Ron

 

Taking the ‘Pulse’ of Productivity

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On PCB Chat this week we talk with Mark Hepburn, the new director of product management at Cadence. Some industry veterans may remember Mark from a few years back — he was with Viewlogic, Innoveda and Mentor in the late 1990s and mid 2000s. He spent the past eight years with Perception Software, a developer of collaboration software.

Fittingly, he joined Cadence just in time for its launch of Allegro Pulse, a new web-based platform for collaboration and productivity measurement and analysis.

Take a listen here.

Is Industry 4.0 around the Corner?

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Folks,

I attended a technical session on Industry 4.0 at SMTAI in Rosemont, IL, in September. I admit to not knowing much about it, so I found the topic fascinating. Industry 4.0 begs the question as to what were Industry 1.0 to 3.0 are (were?) The image below explains the progression, Industry 1.0 was mechanization with water and steam power, Industry 2.0 is mass production with the assembly line using electricity. Industry 3.0 adds computers and automation. Whereas Industry 4.0 is the age of cyber physical systems, the internet of things, cloud computing, and cognitive computing.

Industries 1.0 to 4.0. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0#/media/File:Industry_4.0.png

One could imagine an Industry 4.0 (I4.0) workplace something like the following in an electronic assembly factory. A customer places an order in the cloud. It is received by the factory and after some analysis performed by a “Watson”-type AI, the order is accepted. The I4.0 system then goes to work scheduling the job and ordering the correct components, PWBs and hardware. It designs the stencil from a Gerber file and so on and so on. There is little human interaction and the factory runs at about a 95% uptime and is profoundly efficient and profitable.

As with self-driving cars, I am a bit of a skeptic of I4.0. To be sure there may be a few factories that exhibit some of the Industry 4.0 technology, but I don’t see this major technological shift becoming mainstream for a generation or so.

One of the reasons is that I don’t think most factories today are even at Industry 3.0 (I3.0), they are more like Industry 2.5 (or less?). Many colleagues that I chat with about these types of things, and I have toured more than 100 factories world-wide and still marvel at how inefficient they are. I was once asked to give an executive, new to our industry, a tour of an electronics assembly facility. The facility that graciously offered to let us tour had six assembly lines. In the 90 minutes we were there, not one line was running. The reasons were typical: for line 1 the team could not find the right stencil, line 2 needed a reel of components that no one could locate, line 3 had an equipment malfunction, etc., etc. These types of experiences are discussed in The Adventures of Patty and the Professor.

Another example of electronics assembly being a bit short of I3.0 was demonstrated by a student project that was recently commissioned to measure uptime on a simple assembly line. The line consisted of a stencil printer, component placement machines, and a reflow oven. The engineers that worked for the company that sold the assembly line were confident that the students would have no difficulty measuring uptime by sampling signals from the computers controlling each piece of equipment. After hundreds of hours of work by the engineers and the students, it was concluded that it was not possible to measure line uptime without adding some type of sensors on the assembly line to detect the flow of the PWBs. Industry 3.0 indeed!

At SMTAI I was asked to participate on a two-person panel on the topic, Will Virtual Reality Soon be Used in Electronic Assembly? Readers will likely guess that I was the skeptic. Watch the video and see what you think.

As with self-driving autos, I think Industry 4.0 is a great idea and encourage the many people working on it, but I believe it will be quite a while before it arrives in any meaningful way to typical factories. In the meantime, let’s all work to ensure that the factories we currently operate approach Industry 3.0 are run efficiently with high uptimes.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

 

Malingerers, or Just Millennials?

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Peter Bigelow pens a timely and salient column on the current crop of new employees and the differences in culture with the veteran workforce. (Sample comment: “Collaboration cannot exist if everyone shows up to work at a different time.”)

As usual, Peter makes some fascinating observations. I’ll add my own 2 cents.

Smartphones, video games, etc. have a demonstrable affect on users (of any age, actually, but particularly youth). The constant stimulation of the digital world is addicting, and physically changes your brain structures. I’ve had to institute rules for my kids (ages 12 and 14) about screen use for even the simplest of activities. (They actually reached the point where, when they would see me pulling up to pick them up, they would then get on their latest mobile game while walking to the car).

It’s no surprise, then, that this behavior carries over to the workplace. Young people are hooked.

Ironically, I’m the one in our house constantly fighting to get the kids away from their screens. My wife, who knows more about the brain than almost anyone, seems almost blasé about it. Grrrrr….

Laminate Companies: On the Move

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It took until the second business day of the new year for the chips to start falling in the US printed circuit laminate industry.  On the same day, Isola changed hands and Park Electrochemical announced it was putting its PCB unit up for sale.

As the East Coast braced for a winter blizzard of epic proportions, Park Electrochemical sent a cold shiver down the spines of more than a few industry observers with its announcement of a “strategic evaluation” of its core printed circuit materials business, one that could result in a sale.

Park has been paring its PCB operations over the past few years amid falling revenues and tighter margins. Said revenues have been falling despite a rebound in the overall PCB market: Even as aerospace revenues have grown, overall Park sales have fallen year-over-year in 10 of the past 11 quarters, more than half the time by double digits.

Although it generates most of its revenue from the PCB materials unit, sources indicate the firm sees more upside in its aerospace materials division, which isn’t as susceptible to the commodity pricing pressures of board-level laminate. The sale or closure of the division could further disrupt the North America supply chain, however.

Park’s long history is heavily intertwined with that of the North American PCB industry, and one of the last remaining “family” firms. Cofounded in 1954 by Jerry Shore, his son Brian is now CEO and grandson Ben a senior vice president. Its sale, whenever that day comes, will truly mark the end of an era.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, Isola completed the transfer of its equity ownership to an investment group led by Cerberus Capital Management. This deal was not a surprise: Isola had reportedly been trying to restructure a debt load of more than half-a-billion dollars since last summer.

Isola was primarily owned by the investment firms TPG Capital and Oaktree Capital Group. It’s unclear at present how the stakes in the company are now divided. No doubt Isola won’t be one of the bidders for Park, however.

Couple this with the changes at Arlon over the past two years, and the US laminate industry continues to be in flux. Many of the other major players appear stable: Kingboard, Shengyi Technology, Nanya, Panasonic, Ventec (which merged with TMT in 2016). Among US-based vendors, Rogers’ position at the high-end has enabled it to remain financially sound. It may be the only one.

Demand for lower-tech materials isn’t enough to sustain footprints in higher-cost markets. M&A can result in stronger, more viable companies. Let’s hope that the future for Park (or whomever buys it) and Isola are brighter than the present, as the North American supply chain depends in large part on their success.

Jan. 5 update: Investment bank Needham & Co. says the Electronics unit could bring $50 million to $80 million in a sale.

5 Traps to Avoid When Changing from Hand to Machine Assembly

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In the past, it was usually pretty easy to find chips in both surface mount and through-hole packages. Somewhere in the past decade or so, component manufacturers stopped introducing through-hole versions of their newest chips as standard practice. In many cases, new components can only be found in tiny QFN (quad flatpack, no leads), or wafer-scale BGA (ball grid array) packages.

The maker community, never shying away from a good hack, found ways to work with many of these parts while still hand building. There are very few components used in the pro-design world that are still unusable by a creative DIY maker.

But what happens when a maker has a great design and wants to mass-produce it?

Sometimes the techniques that make things work when hand soldering, will completely break a machine assembly process. To cure that ailment, I’ve compiled five common traps to avoid when moving from hand to robotic assembly.


5. Consider moisture sensitivity. It may not seem logical, but plastic does absorb moisture. And, it doesn’t have to be dropped in the sink for it to happen. Just sitting around exposed to the air, plastic chips will absorb humidity. In a reflow oven, these parts can end up acting a bit like popcorn. The moisture turns to steam, and if it can’t outgas fast enough, may split the chips open. Often, the damage isn’t visible to the naked eye, but with show up as an unreliable product in the field.

When we DIY folks hand-build boards, we tend to open the component packages and then just let the parts lie around without giving thought to proper storage. If you are going to send your project off to be machine assembled, you can do two things with moisture sensitive parts.

First, order the parts when needed, not before, and keep the packages sealed. Alternately, you can send in parts that have been exposed to the air; if you inform your assembly house that the parts are moisture sensitive, and ask that they be baked prior to assembly. Prebaking will remove the moisture safely.

4. Don’t skimp on solder mask. Some board fabricators offer reduced prices if you order your boards without soldermask or silkscreen. That’s not a problem when you’re hand building — you can regulate the amount of solder by eyeball.

However, when a stencil is used to apply solder paste and the board is run through a reflow oven, the solder will spread back on the exposed copper traces. This may leave your parts without enough solder on the pins to create a reliable connection.

Solder mask may add a bit of cost up front, but will increase reliability and reduce cost in the long run. Creative choice of solder mask color can also add some personality to your boards.

3. Silkscreen is important too. Lack of sIlkscreen isn’t a reliability issue, but it can make accuracy of assembly more difficult to achieve. In a perfect word, the CAD files would tell the assembly machines exactly where each part is supposed to go and what angle and orientation it needs.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world (who knew?). It’s far too common to have footprints with errors in them, or components with ambiguous marking, to depend on the CAD files alone. Clear silkscreen will help to ensure that any errors in the data are caught visually.

If you don’t want to clutter your PCB with reference designators and polarity markings, put the designators and any other important markings in the document layer in your layout software. Then, tell your assembly house to look on that layer for the information.

2. No need to fear surface mount. One of the easiest ways to ensure that a board can be hand-built is to stick with through-hole parts. But doing so puts many limits on a design, and rules out a lot of new technologies.

Little breakout boards — a small surface mount chip pre-mounted on a PCB, with hand-solderable headers — are available for a lot of new parts, but not all. That’s helpful, but they take up a lot of extra board real estate and cost more that the part alone.

If you’re hand building a prototype, or a small number of boards for your own use, go ahead use a breakout board. But, when it’s time to get a thousand built up to sell, re-layout your PC board to use the chip without the breakout board. Just don’t forget the bypass capacitors or any other required support components.

As a bonus, many breakout boards are open source, so you may be able study and use a proven schematic and layout for that part of your design.

1. No open vias in pads. QFNs and BGAs have pins/pads under the part, often completely inaccessible. That’s fine for a reflow oven, but what if you’re soldering it by hand?

A common hand-soldering practice is to put large vias in the pad. Fix the part onto the board with tape. Then, turn the board over and stick solder and a small tipped soldering iron through the via. By doing this, you can hand solder almost any leadless surface mount part.

You can probably guess that I’m going to tell you open vias in pads will not work with automated assembly. The solder will flow down the via and end up on the back side of the board. You may end up with shorts on the back side, and parts that fall off of the front side, or just don’t connect with all their pads.

If you use the open via hand solder technique, you’ll need to re-layout your board without any open vias in the pads before sending it for manufacture.

0. Go for it! It wasn’t that many years ago when the tools and services necessary to get an electronic product manufactured were so complex and expensive as to pretty much make it impossible for DIYers to turn a hobby project into a small business. Times have changed, and with those changes, the hardware startup is back — and within just about anyone’s reach.

Duane Benson
Breaker, breaker, one nine, clear the line, we’ve got boards to build