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.

Can predicting board and part flatness at critical points in the reflow/reliability profile reduce failures?

Surface warpage, or flatness, is an established source of reliability issues in surface mount devices (SMD), particularly when these surfaces are considered as they warp due to heat generated in production or real-world use.^1-6 Thermal warpage of surface mount components such as ball grid arrays (BGA) and line grid arrays (LGA) are subject to different industry standards from JEDEC, JEITA, and IPC, based on sample size, ball size and ball pitch.^7-9 Further SMD studies have proposed different methods of classifying and qualifying surface shape in hopes to improve the correlation in thermal warpage data and product reliability.¹⁰ Meanwhile, printed circuit boards are less regulated for warpage in the area where an SMD may attach. Overall PCB warpage is referenced in some industry standards and technical papers, but specific warpage limits are lacking within documentation discussing warpage of SMD landing areas.^11-12 Finally, further studies have considered warpage of both SMD and PCB landing areas together.^13-14

Match the resources that make sense in the scale of your operation.

In the early 1990s, some observers were predicting that the EMS market would consolidate and shrink to a handful of large players building the bulk of the world’s electronics products. But outsourced electronics manufacturing isn’t a one-size-fits-all equation. Even large OEMs often have higher mix, lower volume or variable demand segments of business that fit best in a regional EMS provider. Consequently, regional EMS providers continue to thrive.

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.