Features Articles
Silence may be golden, but it’s terrible customer service.
Somebody owed us money for a project we performed in October and November 2025. They needed x-rays – instantaneous, naturally – to validate a project for a large, anonymous commercial spaceflight company with a fondness for overwrought usage of the letter X. Something about qualifying a Cu-Ag braze alloy sandwiched between an alumina inner cylinder and a Kovar outer cylinder. Danger lurks within. Our job: find it.
As PCB designs grow more complex, IPC-2581 offers a different approach to manufacturing data exchange.
The electronics industry has spent decades perfecting PCB design tools, automating verification, embracing digital twins and accelerating product development using AI tools. Yet when it’s time to send a design to manufacturing, many organizations still fall back on a process that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades – export Gerbers, generate drill files, create spreadsheets, collect PDFs, zip everything together, and email the package.
High-performance computing has moved out of its niche to become a mainstream requirement and continues to rely on human skills to deliver its optimum potential.
Historically, supercomputing has been a niche discipline, the preserve of rare and almost mythical machines embodying esoteric design principles. Only a tiny number of organizations, such as national laboratories, top-tier businesses and elite universities, had workloads that justified using them. Also, there were only a few engineers and scientists in the world capable of running them.
The evolution of layer stackups, from simple constructions to sequential lamination.
Stackup, the buildup of PCBs, has grown in importance over the past few decades. In the early days PCBs functioned primarily as interconnect, and the need for stackup was minimal. On a single-sided PCB, the “stack” is simply one piece of clad material. Even the board thickness was rarely a consideration unless it had to plug into an edge connector.
Thousands of attendees gathered at ECTC to explore the latest advances in advanced packaging, AI-driven design, heterogeneous integration and thermal management.
More than 2,700 attendees conversed about the latest developments in packaging and assembly at the IEEE Electronics Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in May in Orlando.
Successful EMS companies understand their strengths, acknowledge their limitations and avoid making promises their operations cannot support.
In the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) world, it is critical for companies to understand who they are and what they stand for, rather than adopting aspirational marketing taglines that make them appear indistinguishable from everyone else in the industry. Without that level of self-awareness, mistakes can occur when pursuing new business or serving existing customers.
