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Tom RovtarIs there a single approach to harmonizing MES and traceability procedures?

The electronics manufacturing services industry is a form of controlled chaos. Each factory supports multiple customers in multiple industries with a variety of regulatory, industry-specific and company-specific data collection requirements. Demand among programs also varies. Some programs may be high volume and very predictable, while others have varying demand or high product mix. Not surprisingly, most EMS companies address these challenges with a combination of third-party and internally developed systems that automate data collection and analysis. This effort to address a wide range of evolving customer requirements can drive system redundancies over time, however, particularly when an EMS company has multiple facilities.

From a Lean perspective, a streamlined approach with standardized equipment and processes both inter- and intra-facility is desirable because standardization minimizes the non-value-added work driven by variation and can increase available capacity in automated processes. The challenge when standardizing internally developed software among multiple EMS facilities is that often the needs of a particular group of customers influence internally developed system design at each facility. Consequently, focus on system standardization among facilities often requires focus on process standardization as well.

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A few well-placed cues make “true” design-for-test.

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Peter BigelowAre we about to return to an era of rapid inflation escalations?

When you have been around the block as many times as me, events eerily remind you of similar events from a different time. Or, as legendary baseball player Yogi Berra supposedly said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again!”

I began my career in the mid-1970s. Those were very different times. Technology was primitive compared to what we take for granted today. “Social media” was confined to writing a letter (on paper!) or picking up a phone (tethered to the wall!). Another distinction was something called inflation. For the span from the early ’70s through the mid-’80s, the annual inflation rate ranged between 12% and 20%.

Working for a large, global, electronic connector company at that time, one of the jobs I held was that of division “pricing administrator.” When promoted to the position, I remember feeling heady about so much responsibility. I soon realized I was going to be a very busy guy.

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E. Jan VardamanTSV has become reality. How many ways can it be used in 3-D packaging?

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Electronics additive manufacturing can output the same result as conventional PCB methods, but getting there is a much different process.

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Mike BuetowThe arrival of a new stock exchange for Silicon Valley tech companies raises the profile of the tech industry’s best and brightest (and perhaps notorious) even more – as if that were possible.

It also is a significant reminder of what – or whom – is not represented in the public markets: the printed circuit sector.

Has it really been 20 years since the investment banks surrounded our industry, sniffing out hot new buys and running up hearty banking fees – along with tremendous amounts of debt – while encouraging players to buy or sell? Scale and exit strategies were the name of the game then. It made multimillionaires out of folks who only years earlier were pumping gas on the graveyard shifts.

Reality was bound to re-clutch those out-of-body experiences, and it did.

In the years since the Tech Crash of 2001, however, something approximating sanity has returned. If anything, perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other direction. The number of publicly traded PCB-related companies has been trending down for years. Often, this has been due to merger activity. Valor was acquired by Mentor, which in turn was consumed by Siemens, which previously nabbed UGS Tecnomatix. Amphenol digested Teradyne’s PCB operations. TTM now owns the formerly public DDI, Coretec, Merix and Viasystems. Circuit World disappeared as part of a reverse merger with Firan Technology Group.

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