Features Articles
Are 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.
TSV has become reality. How many ways can it be used in 3-D packaging?Electronics additive manufacturing can output the same result as conventional PCB methods, but getting there is a much different process.
The 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.
Old fabrication equipment never dies. It keeps getting reengineered for the future.
How far can you push the envelope? I have asked myself that question for years as I watch the advancement of technology and the fabricated PCBs that anchor that technology. And just when it appears a new and insurmountable challenge has come along, our industry devises a creative solution that catapults us even further ahead.
So, I continue to wonder. I have seen processes and equipment developed when 12/12 spacing was cutting-edge honed and dialed in to reliably produce 2/2 spacing. Drilling equipment that once could drill no smaller than 12 mil holes now regularly forms holes half that diameter. “High aspect” was once defined as 5:1. Now 10:1 is low aspect. All this on old equipment. Install the latest generation of equipment and capabilities exponentially improve.
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