As governments realize the importance of investing in domestic manufacturing, opportunities are coming for EMS firms and PCB fabricators.

It takes time to gain perspective, especially perspective on the industry you are immersed in. In my case, it’s been 30 years since I entered the printed circuit board market. During the first six or seven years, it was heady, upbeat times in North America. Growth was a bounty supporting hundreds of domestic fabricators. Materials, supplies and capital equipment were made “locally” in North America. Then, around the new millennium, everything changed.

Suddenly, work headed to Asia, and fabricators contracted at an unprecedented scale to fewer than 200 within a few short years. The collateral damage was a collapse of materials, supplies and capital equipment companies that supported the industry. Even worse was the exodus of skilled talent who sought careers in more promising industries and never looked back. The relatively few companies that survived did so by hunkering down, focusing on a niche, and investing in only the equipment they needed to support their business base, in some cases taking draconian steps that worked short term but eventually led to their demise. Over the first decade-plus of the new millennium, it was depressing to be a North American circuit board fabricator.

However, times change, and with that change, opportunities emerge – finally!

After decades of ignoring reality – and for a variety of reasons and events, many of which have nothing to do with printed circuit boards, or even electronics – government and industry leaders are “shocked” to learn so much of North America’s manufacturers are no longer globally competitive and how much more capability and capacity is required for economic and military security. Now that they understand the need to invest in manufacturing, more specifically in electronics manufacturing – everything from chips to bare circuit boards and substrates – opportunities for the North American PCB industry finally may be knocking.

Do we open the door and take full advantage, or ignore it and squander our chance?

To take advantage of the current momentum to expand and enhance North American capabilities and manufacturing capacity may require a radical rethinking, or at least retraining, in how we as an industry operate. The entire risk/reward equation in particular needs to be revisited. After nearly 20 years of operating in a hunkered-down mode to mitigate risk and maximize reward, many in our industry may need to be retrained to break old habits and embrace a paradigm shift the opportunities of the future offer.

The first step toward taking advantage of new opportunities may be a brutally honest self-evaluation of what your company does, for whom, and with what resources. Most important is understanding what government or “C-suite” investment in electronics technology may look like and how that will impact your customers. As an example, if chip plants are built in North America, what other electronics manufacturing may now become more cost-effective if done closer to those plants vs. overseas. And, what printed circuit board technology will that increased demand for capacity impact?

With investment in more advanced technology, will new materials and the processing knowhow and equipment be outside current capabilities or comfort zones? Discussions with material suppliers should include a dialogue on what to be aware of; begin experimenting to be better prepared.

If the gap in North American electronics capability points to a specific type of printed circuit board technology that will be in especially high demand, that may be the place to consider increasing capital investment to either add capacity, enhance capability or broaden product offerings to include the growth opportunity. This review should include an estimated capital equipment budget and supporting cash flow, as well as a reality check with current customers to understand if their products and purchasing demands may also be impacted and shifting.

When demand increases, what type of employees will your company need to hire? This leads to workforce development opportunities that currently exist, and in the next few years will expand with an increase in qualified people seeking jobs in electronics. More important, with the emphasis on investing in new capabilities, what talent gap might you have that would prevent being able to produce a new technology? Getting involved now may be the best way to ensure having qualified talent when needed.

To take advantage of any opportunity that a reinterest in North American electronics manufacturing may present, it is essential to stay informed and get your team ready. Nothing will happen overnight, but it will happen more quickly than anyone who has become comfortable in the current industry paradigm imagines. We all need to be aware significant new opportunities are finally on the horizon.

After so long operating in a contracting industry segment, we in North America cannot afford to let the coming opportunities be squandered. Opportunity for growth is knocking for us all. 

PETER BIGELOW is president and CEO of IMI Inc.; pbigelow@imipcb.com. His column appears monthly.

How using a thinner stencil corrected transfer efficiency.

SMT specialists are intimately familiar with the guiding rule of stencil printing: the area ratio. The correlation between stencil aperture dimensions and the predictability of solder paste transfer efficiency is well understood, and IPC has standardized design guidelines outlining ideal conditions. The accepted area ratio for maximum transfer efficiency is approximately 0.60, which is a function of the aperture open area and aperture wall area (stencil thickness). When the area ratio falls below the recommendation, challenges arise.

Reaffirmation of the relevance of the area ratio rule occurred recently when our company was asked to analyze a customer assembly where bridging was observed. The printing dimensions of the PCB’s bridging area were tight. The 01005 apertures measured 200µm x 200µm, the stencil thickness 80µm and the interspace about 150µm. So, while not at the bleeding edge like some newer-generation designs, the board was nevertheless challenging. With these aperture dimensions, the area ratio was an acceptable 0.63. The volume of paste on pad was 2.08 nanoliters (NL), and the standard deviation was less than 10%, but SPI analysis revealed bridging.

For its part, the customer had logically attempted to lessen the bridging propensity by narrowing the aperture width to reduce the amount of solder paste being transferred onto the pad. Unfortunately, doing so resulted in conflict with the area ratio rule, and taking this route ultimately impacted repeatable transfer efficiency.

The updated rigid-flex specification overhauls copper thickness requirements.

As we start a new year, it’s a good time to review what changed in 2021. In the flex world, the IPC Flexible Circuits Performance Subcommittee worked through the pandemic and released a new revision to IPC-6013. Revision E was released in September, replacing an amended Revision D from April 2018. Some updates and changes are subtle, while others are significant. Many changes attempt to increase clarity.

Let’s start at the finish – final finish, that is. Tin, silver, and ENIG/ENEPIG will not have minimum thicknesses in IPC-6013. Instead, we are defaulting to the new IPC-4552/4553/4554/4556 specs for thickness and sampling frequency. This avoids unintended differences or conflicts as the finish specs are updated.

Often questions arise related to the rigid-to-flex transition – and what is delamination versus non-lamination? In paragraph 3.3.1.3, we added an explanation about what’s happening at the transition and a new Figure 3-1B to provide a more visual explanation of what is acceptable and rejectable.

Flex circuits have always been more prone to questions about foreign material or entrapped particles. Unlike rigid boards, flex circuits are more transparent, making cosmetic anomalies more evident. Once noticed, disposition is required. We expanded Section 3.3.2.4 to provide more clarity on acceptability, including prepreg resin that may deposit on the external surfaces of flex regions of rigid-flex.

Is it possible to achieve robot ethics when humans providing the framework are inherently flawed?

It has been over 80 years since Jorge Luis Borges published his short story “The Library of Babel,” and now the virtual library is open to visit. Borges described a theoretical library of books that, together, contain all possible combinations of letters in the alphabet, with a few provisos and limited punctuation. The idea was this library would contain every book, every article, song, play, etc., that has been – or ever could be – written, among an overwhelming quantity of apparently meaningless material.

It’s a mind-boggling concept, used to explore ideas of time, meaning, the human condition – behavior, frailties, the shortness of life – and our place in the universe. It’s clear this library was imaginary. Borges never expected it to exist. Now, leveraging the computing power available to us today, the website libraryofbabel.info has brought the literary concept to life as a virtual “universe.”

Seven years from now, the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will begin, according to Ray Kurzweil. AIs trained for specific tasks such as image, pattern or speech recognition are already in the world and routinely assisting with demanding tasks in industry, medicine, financial analysis, photography and more. Kurzweil said by 2029 a machine will be able to pass the Turing test, the so-called imitation game, in which a human interrogator questioning a machine and a human should be unable to distinguish between the two based on their responses.