Consumer pressure on corporate behavior is cyclical and typically short-lived. Consider “dieselgate.” Volkswagen for years rigged the emissions testing on certain vehicles to appear to meet state and national standards. Confronted with the discrepancies, VW management lied in what would be a futile attempt to cover up its wrongdoings. The transgressions cost the carmaker more than $30 billion in fines and penalties. At the time, it looked like a major hit to the company’s reputation.

We are in an era where focused consumer pressure has the potential for immediate worldwide impact. Primed by social media, buyers have never held so much broad sway. Will this this newfound power to drive electronics industry decision-making?

The nongovernmental organization China Labor Watch routinely pummels Chinese-based manufacturers for mistreatment of workers and labor law violations. The leading media companies in the world pick up its investigations. Yet its efficacy in changing corporate behavior is murky.

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Getting machines to talk to each other enhances output and yields.

It’s common sense, really, and probably one of the most familiar sayings of mankind: Communication is key. Good communication is central to productive relationships, effective business strategy … just about everything, honestly. It’s not just communication, however, but communication quality and transparency that result in informed decision-making. This is especially true in the manufacturing setting and is the basis for Industry 4.0. Machines have been cranking out data for decades, but applying them in a meaningful way is, at the core, what Industry 4.0 is all about. Until recently, however, data exchange was largely supplier-specific; proprietary equipment system software could manage tasks rather seamlessly, but communication among disparate equipment brands in relation to PCB movement and traceability was challenging. The IPC-SMEMA-9851 standard provides a solid foundation and is still successfully employed, yet enhancements are required to progress toward a nimbler, automation-friendly solution that permits open and uniform machine-to-machine communication.

How it started. While several stencil printer platforms and everything within their respective ecosystems – board handling equipment, SPI and closed-loop feedback tools – are data rich, self-correcting and optimized for the printing operation, the data generated by printers relating to the PCB characteristics must be passed down the line. That, of course, means the data must be vendor-neutral. Moving beyond simple board recognition from one system to the next, true traceability is required for smart factory effectiveness. Consequently, the Hermes Standard Initiative (IPC-HERMES-9852) was born as the result of more than a dozen equipment vendors unifying behind the cause for an improved open communication protocol, which speaks volumes for the requirement and the customer desire for such a solution. By simplifying the transfer of PCB data between machines regardless of supplier, efficiency and productivity improvement are a given. And, with scalability options, board data can be customized so that when the PCB is passed from, say, the printer to the placement machine, each machine is compelled to recognize the data set, potentially add to it, and transfer that record through the assembly line, making for a more holistic view of the PCB. In fact, these data represent the digital twin of the physical PCB, and Hermes transports the PCB and its digital twin consistently down the SMT line. Integrating Hermes with IPC’s Connected Factory Exchange (CFX) standard broadens this line efficiency and communication transparency to the factory, while other MES systems can extend that to the global enterprise.

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Gold boards are susceptible to the defect.

This month we look at solder spotting, which is often seen after first- or double-sided reflow, most commonly on gold boards. The two examples below illustrate what happens. FIGURE 1a shows two spots on a nickel/gold pad, and FIGURE 1b shows one spot on a copper OSP pad finish.

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Stronger, faster and more robust networks will be one of the positive legacies of the pandemic.

Hopefully, we will soon be able to start living our post-Covid-19 lives. Going forward, some of us want fundamental changes. Others are keen to return to the way things were. Although we will be pleased to put this situation behind us, some things are here to stay. One, obviously, is the lethal group of coronaviruses that will surely continue to take lives after lockdown (we hope at a greatly reduced rate). Another, I believe, is the tendency for many of us to continue working from home (WFH) to a much greater extent than before.

WFH has been one of the headline trends of this crisis. Although clearly not to everyone’s taste, it could turn into a revolution founded on the internet technologies that allow us to meet with colleagues online, access data and tools remotely, and benefit from high connection speeds wherever we are – wired or wireless. That so many can do meaningful work this way also reflects the soft nature of many tasks associated with getting things done in developed economies. These soft deliverables liberate us from location and will be critical to our economic survival of this pandemic.

Many are keen to recover the social dimension to our working lives. While physically working together in the same space and time to achieve shared goals is a powerful part of team building and cohesion, we can also take advantage of the flexibility to ease some of the more stressful aspects, such as traveling and being away from loved ones.  

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