Opportunities like this for staffing and planning are rare indeed.

There is no doubt that many in the industry are glad 2009 is over. At the EMS companies I’ve spoken with, business trends began improving in the second half. While 2010 may show a slow recovery, it should represent improvement. Human nature what it is, it can be difficult to mentally change gears when one has been in survival mode that long, which inspired this list of “gut check” questions that managers should ask themselves.

Does my team have the resources it takes to do their jobs? Budgets have been tight; teams have been downsized, and it is highly probable that the 2010 budget was planned when business was flat or in decline. As business picks up, workload will increase, and if contingency plans don’t exist for increasing internal resources, your team may start dropping the ball.

Am I appropriately recognizing my best employees? Chances are your corporate culture has been focused on self-sacrifice and a theme of doing more with less for over a year now. As workloads increase and your competitors start hiring, top performers may decide to make a career move if they feel underappreciated. Now is the time to review top performer compensation, overall employee contributions and workload, because if you wait until a strong recovery is in place, corrective action will cost far more than it does now.

Am I making the best hiring decisions? If increasing team size, focus on individual candidate qualifications rather than the companies they have worked for. Outstanding people are looking for work, and some may interview poorly because they’ve never had to look for work before. There also were a lot of people focused on “looking busy or doing face time” rather than producing results, and were likely laid off justifiably. Not surprisingly, their “interview” skills may be quite good. Consider your requirements and look for candidates with the appropriate track record. People who have spent the bulk of their careers in mid-tier EMS companies may have more hands-on experience implementing processes and organizational change than candidates who have done a short stint at a Tier I provider. Ask candidates how they would execute their new responsibilities and choose those with the best understanding of the challenges and ways to address them. Look for track records of dealing with challenges of similar size and scope, and test that knowledge in the interview. Take your time, because you will likely never again have such a good pool of candidates.

Am I capitalizing on the right emerging opportunities? By the time something is recognized as a trend, it is likely winding down and the next big unrecognized trend is in development. Over the short term, cash for aging appliances may drive increases in “smart” appliance demand, but only for companies already serving this market. Energy and defense seem to be exciting industries today, but China is developing a lot of production capacity focused on alternative energy, and defense may be a shrinking market in today’s political environment. Aerospace is another sector with cyclical demand, and passenger traffic isn’t showing the increases likely to spur demand for planes in the near term. Companies already positioned in these sectors may do well, but they may not be the best choices for companies wishing to expand their market focus. Comparatively, medical products that link to data collection or cost control may be a better expansion choice because that should be a long-term growth market. Home health care products and prosthetic devices also may continue to be a growth market given an aging population and more focus on minimization of third-party care provider costs. A weak dollar makes US manufacturing more cost-competitive, so this also may be an opportunity to increase marketing to European customers looking for North American sources across a range of industries. There also may be pockets of growth in the automotive sector in more energy efficient vehicles and accessories/infrastructure designed to support them. Spend time reviewing business targets against the patterns you see developing in the current economy, rather than simply accepting the current business mix as unchangeable or gravitating to the emerging industries based on a follow-the-pack mentality.

Has the recession driven strategic business decisions that need to change? Strategic decisions made in survival mode are often tradeoffs, rather than the best long-term plan. Review the major strategic decisions made in 2009 and determine whether or not a change in business conditions should drive a significant course correction in strategy.

Bonus question: Are you happy in your present position? One challenge of survival mode is that it can be easy to develop resentments and toxic relationships. Sometimes those conflicts disappear as conditions improve, but other times the attitude damage is too significant to change. Recoveries tend to open the door to job change opportunities. An added plus is that improving economic conditions tend to make getting great results in the new job fairly easy. If you dread going into the office, a job change may be both good for you and your current employer.

We’ve finished a year that tested the mettle of everyone in the EMS industry. We are beginning a year that will provide opportunities for the best and brightest to shine. Enjoy the ride! 

Susan Mucha is president of Powell-Mucha Consulting Inc. (smucha@powell-muchaconsulting.com), and author of Find It. Book It. Grow It. A Robust Process for Account Acquisition in Electronics Manufacturing Services. Her column runs bimonthly.

As it recovers from the tragic death of its founder, the vision OEM is ready for anything.

Given that founder and chairman Steve Case’s name is synonymous with CyberOptics, it’s hard to believe someone else has been running the company for the past seven years.

So when Case tragically died in a plane crash last year, much attention turned to Kathleen (Kitty) Iverson, the company’s president and chief executive. Yet, while the task of replacing Case’s vision is unenviable, in fact Iverson has been in charge since January 2003. That’s a detail not lost upon many of the inspection and sensor OEM’s customers, who in several discussions at Productronica in November emphasized Iverson’s intelligence and skill to this reporter. Iverson spoke with Editor-in-Chief Mike Buetow in November.

CA: Steve Case was a legendary inventor. How do you replace his R&D vision?

KI: Steve had a lot of vision. He had big ideas. He was always an inventor. You just don’t replace Steve Case. [But] he wasn’t very involved in the day-to-day business. We’ve been working through what we want to do. The thing about Steve was, he [saw] the customers we don’t [yet] have. I see the customers we do have. Insofar as building an organization that got the work done, he left that to me. He had more fun talking to customers. We do have a very solid engineering team and will count on the vision coming from that team.

CA: How has Steve’s death affected the management of the company?

KI: Day to day, there hasn’t been much change. Steve was more interested in the next big thing, the outside world. Not too many of the current products came solely from Steve. The sensors’ improvements came from the R&D base, for example.

CA: How important is it for a tech company to have an engineer at the top?

KI: In my experience, top engineers don’t run companies very well. It’s very important to have a top engineer, but they sometimes don’t enjoy the people management as much as the invention.

We are structured in small, dedicated R&D teams devoted to customers. They work with OEM teams to come up with new products.

Tim Skunes, our director of business development and technology, is a technical genius. He doesn’t have Steve Case’s pizzazz, but he’s a top engineer. For me, coming from an accounting background, it’s important to have that person. We have reorganized so that Tim has more of the technologists in the organization. Then there’s Brendan Hinnenkamp, an electrical engineer with 20 years’ experience at CyberOptics. He opened our Singapore operations, and now heads product development. He’s a “crack the whip; get it done” type of personality. Also, Chuanqi Chen (Chen) has 5 years of CyberOptics R&D experience and he has recently moved to Singapore to run our Systems group. We have a lot of solid engineering talent and are well positioned moving forward.

CA: What have been your customers’ primary questions?

KI: Customer interfaces have been with me, Tim Skunes, and others. We’ve managed those relationships. There was concern – can you continue to bring us technology and innovate? They [customers] said, “Do you have concerns, because we’ve mainly dealt with you.” They were pretty short conversations, and I think that’s because Steve hadn’t been heavily involved with our current customers.

CA: Who will be the face of CyberOptics now?

KI: I will be. Steve and I shared very strong values, and great companies succeed because of their value systems. Ours are “Creativity, innovation, fairness and honesty. Work hard, play hard.” As a founder, Steve gave the company the gift of a very sound value system. I am very proud of how Steve and I managed the company together.

CA: Will the board makeup change?

KI: We will add to the board. I’ll look for a heavy R&D type to support me. I came from Emerson. I have experience mixing business and engineering.
CA: What are your strengths as a leader?

KI: I’m a good team builder. I’m not egotistical. I get good people. I’m achievement-oriented.

CA: Does a tech organization need a face?

KI: In CyberOptics’ case, I need to be that face, because Steve was such a strong leader. You don’t expect someone that smart to be that down-to-earth. In our case, I think it’s important. And in reality, a lot of the company is how the customers feel about [the leader].

CA: How is morale?

KI: Morale is extremely high, which surprises me some because we have had to take some tough actions during the recent downturn. We’ve had continuity of leadership, which is extremely important to get a company through a downturn and we have so many new products in the pipeline that you can’t help but to be excited.

We had a vision of where we wanted the company to go and we are focusing on what made us a leading-edge company. The restructuring we did was strategic in nature. The guys in Minneapolis are good at optical sensing. Our Singapore team is good at system integration. R&D is now catering to what they do best. Now we have more focused R&D, which should help us grow more profitably in the future. 

In the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo, the war between various government and rebel armies has raged for 10 years, fueled by monies derived from the country’s vast mines. In the West, the war over the output of those mines is heating up.

In December, a group of OEMs called the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition met with the International Tin Research Institute and a representative from the IPC Solder Products Value Council in Paris to discuss elimination of so-called conflict metals by the electronics industry. Among the topics discussed was an audit program for the supply chain, the cost of which would be shared by OEMs and solder manufacturers, among others.

Solder manufacturers purchase thousands of tons of raw materials from Congo mines. Because the revenues are used to arm renegades, some in the press have taken to calling the ores “conflict metals.” Although press attention to the matter has been nominal at best, more than five million people have died, making this one of history’s worst tragedies.

Mined ores are brought to large refineries, some in the Congo, some outside, where they are melted together. From there, the shipments are sold by distributors of the refineries, primarily via contracts on the London Metals Exchange. The material received by the solder manufacturers bears no thumbprint, no genetic markings.

Any company that purchases directly from exchanges – which is more or less all of them* – stands to be affected by this nonsense. The major bar solder companies, including Cookson, Kester and AIM, could really be in for a treat. As they get a significant amount of their material from reclaimed metal, tracing the “ores” would be like trying to deduce the origin of oxygen. As a spokesman for one of the major solder suppliers told me, “It is possible for us to ask for certificates, but we would have no way to validate.” Since the refineries are closest to the mines, they should be the ones asked to audit their supply chain, he added.

But while tin has no DNA, BS certainly does, and some media outposts are shoveling it by the truckload.

In the US, legislators are working up a bill (the Conflict Minerals Trade Act of 2009) requiring companies to disclose – and prove – the origins of the minerals they buy. The Huffington Post, an influential blog cum news and opinion site visited by some 8.5 million visitors a month, has taken up the cause, recently asserting that a process is available for tracing solder materials back to the mines. (The link is http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-prendergast/new-legislative-action-ta_b_363020.html.)

Audits, be it driven by legislation or third parties, are a misguided and untenable response. As the solder spokesman noted, “Electronics companies would never buy directly from the mines; thus, good auditing at the refineries would do the trick without pushing it upstream to companies that are a minimum of three tiers away from the conflict zone.”

As WEEE and RoHS has aptly demonstrated, the electronics industry has had it up to here with its trade groups taking expensive but politically expedient ways out. In the end, such movements have emptied manufacturers’ pockets at no benefit to the end-customer. It’s refreshing to see IPC, through its solder supplier members, fighting back this time.

The next meeting is planned for Vancouver in May. (If nothing else, one has to appreciate the places they choose to convene.) Make it your New Year’s resolution to pressure the EICC (which includes, among others, that noted worker-friendly enterprise Foxconn) and ITRI (not to mention any legislator caught advocating for such regulation) to back off on what would certainly be another hefty tax with no demonstrable return.

Selling low. A friend of mine who works in finance at a Wall Street company says an acquisition opportunity for a leading process equipment OEM came across his desk a few months back. While the improvement in the economy may spur the parent company to take this business unit off the block, what’s more likely is that the continued commoditization of electronics manufacturing will lead many investors to look elsewhere, where the potential of larger returns is greater. If a market-leading OEM with long history of profitability isn’t an attractive piece of one’s portfolio, what does that portend for those companies more prone to the industry’s rollercoaster ways? And especially now, why doesn’t Wall Street find well-run and stable conglomerates like Nordson and Dover, for instance, more appealing?

One magazine? As many readers noted, last month we co-published PCD&F and Circuits Assembly. This is not intended to be a permanent arrangement, but rather a nod to the current economic world in which we live. Either way, we’re glad you’re reading.

Speaking of last month, I wrote in this space that the TTM-Meadville deal would make high-ranking Hong Kong government official Henry Tang a 33% owner of TTM. In fact, Tang’s father would be the top shareholder.

Finally, we welcome our newest columnist, Andy Murrietta. Andy, who is a second-generation PCB veteran with experience in design, fabrication and assembly (and management), will contribute to our Better Manufacturing column.

*"More or less" may be true, but not all of them. Cookson, for one, buys direct, not through exchanges.

Optimizing x-ray tube parameters is essential to facilitate yield improvement.

The ability of x-ray inspection to nondestructively inspect components for various imperfections such as cracks and voids serves as an ongoing quality control methodology to assess materials and optimize assembly processes. Existing x-ray systems can be used for inspecting Pb-free assemblies without modification. However, because of the density variation between tin, copper and silver predominant in Pb-free alloys, it is recommended that certain x-ray tube parameters be adjusted when inspecting Pb-free BGA and chip-scale package devices to ensure optimal image contrast and enhanced analysis.

Understanding these material density variations helps explain the role that adjusting and optimizing x-ray tube parameters and test routines plays in providing a vital and sound method of investigating all aspects of device and PCB processing with respect to identifying defects in a production environment.

Any object or material within an analyzed sample that has a higher density than its surroundings will absorb more of the x-rays in that specific location. As a result, fewer x-rays will pass through the sample at that location, resulting in less x-rays hitting the capture device at that point, thus casting a darker shadow on the detector. A typical x-ray image produced by an x-ray inspection system has solder locations, device terminations and copper tracks appearing darker compared with the laminated circuit board or substrate material. The greater the density difference between the materials in question, the more clearly the contrast will appear on the x-ray image.¹

The quality of the x-ray radiation produced by an x-ray tube, and its effectiveness in discriminating the different materials within a sample to produce a useful analytical image, depends on the particular x-ray tube settings used. These settings are referred to as the x-ray tube accelerating voltage, or kilo volts (kV), and the tube power, or watts (W) used to set the tube at appropriate levels to obtain an image with optimal contrast at the detector.

The accelerating potential is the applied voltage between the anode and cathode of the x-ray tube. Electrons are produced at the cathode and accelerated striking the target anode creating x-rays. The tube power is calculated from the product of the accelerating potential and the electron current hitting the target, which is usually made of tungsten. The more power used, the brighter the x-ray source; however, there are technical limitations on the maximum power that tubes can achieve.

The kV setting is also a measure of the penetrating power of the x-rays. The higher the kV used, the more penetrating are the resulting x-rays. This means higher kV levels need to be used to image dense or thicker objects. Conversely, at lower kV levels only thin or less dense samples are inspected.

The interaction between penetrating radiation and matter, such as x-rays passing through a sample under test, is a complex relationship based on a number of factors. An important consideration is that absorption of the radiation increases with the atomic number and density of the material that is present.

Material Properties

Historically, the most common SnPb solders have consisted of 63% tin and 37% lead. The most prevalent Pb-free solder alloy in use today is the SAC alloy, which contains a mixture of tin, silver and copper. Although different alloys available from various suppliers have varying elemental ratios, the majority of SAC alloys contain approximately 97% tin.

Table 1 shows the differences in the atomic number (Z) and density between the different elements contained in SnPb and Pb-free solders. Lead has a very high Z value and has been replaced in Pb-free solder alloys with an increased quantity of tin, which has a much lower Z value, as well as a lower density. Therefore, the effect of imaging Pb-free solders using the same x-ray tube parameters used for SnPb solders may result in the image being overexposed. This is because the lower Z value and less dense materials contained in Pb-free alloys will absorb fewer x-rays, permitting more to pass through to the detector, potentially saturating it.

This difference in Z value and density between Pb-free and SnPb solders can be noticeably observed when imaging the solder joints for a variety of components with different mass and thickness (Table 2). The measurement data consist of average gray-scale readings obtained from 30 readings of each type of component with background variations accounted for, as well as the calculated differences between Pb-free and SnPb images.² The x-ray parameters kV and power level were kept the same for Pb-free and SnPb components for these readings.

To compensate for this effect, it is generally necessary to decrease the tube kV and/or the power values that have been used for x-ray inspection of SnPb solder when inspecting assemblies produced with Pb-free alloys. This will ensure suitably contrasted images are available for analysis. However, these changes are very small in quantity with decreased values of 5-20 kV for accelerating voltage and/or 0.1-0.25 for power. This also depends on the x-ray system being used, due to variations in tube efficiency, capability and brightness from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Optimizing X-Ray Parameters

When optimizing x-ray tube parameters, the actual adjustments are to a great extent dependent on the thickness and mass of the solder joint for various components. In the case of BGA components, it is suggested to lower the kV value when inspecting a Pb-free solder joint (Figure 1).

For Pb-free components that have thinner solder joints, such as a quad flat package or an 0201 discrete component, a slight lowering of the power setting and/or the kV will achieve an optimal image (Figure 2 and Figure 3).

As can be observed from the figures, adjusting the x-ray tube parameters with a lower kV or power level optimizes the image quality of Pb-free solder joints and facilitates a complete analysis of potential defects such as cracks or voids, as well as other manufacturing anomalies.

The key requirement of x-ray inspection is that hidden defects such as cracks, opens, bridges, shorts, voids, etc. can be seen so that process and quality control can be maintained throughout the assembly process. Inspecting Pb-free solder joints requires consideration be given to the implications of the material differences exhibited by the elements present to ensure that optimal image quality is maintained to enhance manufacturing process yields. 

References

1.    David Bernard, “An A-to-Z Guide to X-Ray Inspection,” Circuits Assembly, December 2007.
2.    Evstatin Krastev, “X-Ray Image Comparison, Lead-Free and Tin-Lead Boards,” IPC/JEDEC Lead-Free Reliability Conference, December 2007.

Dr. Evstatin Krastev is applications manager for semiconductor packaging and printed circuit board inspection at Dage Precision Industries, a Nordson Co. (dage-group.com); ekrastev@dage-group.com.