Keep talking – your customer is listening.

If I were to list deadly sins in sales, at the top would be failure to stay in touch with good prospects who are not yet ready to buy. The top deadly sin in program management is failure to stay abreast of what challenges are keeping customers up at night.

In both situations, the outcome is a sale goes to the company keeping a better tab on what that prospect or customer needs. It drives home the need for what I call mindshare maintenance. Mindshare maintenance involves regular contact with prospects and customers to remind them you are out there. When it involves prospects in the sales pipeline, it can be a periodic phone call, a link to an article or white paper the prospect might consider relevant, or a free pass to a trade show in the prospect’s region. The goal is to find a way to share useful information and remind that prospect your company is available, if they are getting ready to outsource. The benefit of doing it at regular intervals is it eventually catches companies just as they enter the ready-to-buy stage.

The pursuit of a vision, such as a driver-free car, has invaluable benefits.

Technology development has been on a tear in the global automotive sector, an industry that could be leading all others in the development of sophisticated electronics. Event after event, the globe has been laser-focused on developments, trials and efforts underway in transportation to make this newly developed technology robust and ruggedized to operate – safely – in the varied and harsh environments automobiles operate. Virtually every system has been redesigned, with electronics and electronic sensors displacing electromechanical and mechanical components. The automobile of today is safer, quicker and more fuel-efficient than was imaginable even a decade back.

In the auto’s transition from a “hunk of bolts” to “elegant high-tech machine,” no aspect has sparked the imagination of engineers, or the greed of investors, more than the development and commercialization of the autonomous vehicle. On one level, I am amazed we are on the verge of harnessing an array of technology that could more safely transport people and cargo than a skilled, experienced driver. But on a different level, I am highly skeptical of the commercial viability of autonomous vehicles. This skepticism is rooted in a simple question: Who really wants an autonomous vehicle?

Head-on-pillow and head-in-pillow look different under x-ray. The distinction is important.

Void size and location can predict future failures.

Perhaps quad flat packages are not as fashionable a package choice as they once were because of their limited I/Os compared to BGAs, but they continue to be a staple in electronics (FIGURE 1). As such, they are still a source of problems to assemblers. With their typical gull wing joint style, located on the outside of the package rather than beneath it, these devices can be inspected optically. This can identify some issues that may arise but, as with other packages, if you can’t see the problem optically, it does not mean it is not there! Therefore, x-ray inspection of QFPs can complement any optical inspection, not only by helping confirm issues raised optically, but also providing wider fault coverage through identifying and helping mitigate a range of optically invisible issues that QFPs can provide.

Figure 1. X-ray image of QFP from the top down.