Rebuilding the industrial base will take time and commitment.

There has been a lot of talk, chatter, posturing and proclamations by pundits and politicians alike about the soon-to-be American manufacturing renaissance. Usually, when so much hoopla surrounds a topic, the result resembles the famous Aesop warning: “After all is said and done, more is said than done!”

Forecasts, fires and false hopes: Are you ignoring the heat?

What do you do when your train is on fire?

Imagine you are at a train stop. The train you want to board pulls up and it is on fire. What do you do?

Despite early warnings and smoke in the air, some electronics manufacturing services (EMS) companies seem to ignore the looming train fire. The results can be disastrous.

What are some of those early train fire signals?

Progress for glass-core substrates and RDL interposers highlighted ECTC’s 75th anniversary conference.

More than 2,500 attendees braved the stormy Texas weather to discuss the latest developments in packaging and assembly at the IEEE Electronics Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in May. Among the many presentations were a number focused on high-performance packaging, with clear momentum for expanded use of molded redistribution layer (RDL) packages, wafer-level packaging and updates on the states of glass core substrates. IBM announced its license of Deca’s RDL technology and outlined production plans for North America. Many presentations described progress in hybrid bonding and co-packaged optics, while others highlighted thermal challenges and metrology needs.

But can they handle tomorrow’s latency-critical applications?

From the first mobile phones and the Internet to smartphones and the mobile Internet, technical innovation has quickly expanded opportunities for people to communicate. This expansion has driven a relentless and rapid rise in the volume of traffic traveling across the networks that connect us. While the human will to communicate is at the heart of the tremendous success of these tools, the quest to satisfy this apparently insatiable desire places great importance on effectively maximizing network performance and utilization.