The balancing of “intelligence” and “smart” is an age-old conundrum.

The rage these days is something called “Industry 4.0.” I have been invited to scores of presentations designed to show how Industry 4.0 is not just the next generation of manufacturing, but a must-do next step to produce higher quality product, faster, on-time, and at far less cost. Industry 4.0 sounds exciting and novel, so I have participated in webinars, attended seminars and read up on this must-do phenomenon.

Spoiler alert: It’s not all that new!

Last month, a California jury awarded a resident $289 million, finding he had developed cancer from exposure to a popular brand of herbicide.

What, you may ask, does a guy who used Roundup to kill weeds around school buildings in the San Francisco Bay area have to do with me in the printed circuit board industry?

A lot, potentially.

I had the pleasure in August of interviewing Brenda Baney for our PCB Chat podcast. As some readers may remember, Baney previously was a regular in these pages. She was an excellent columnist: knowledgeable, opinionated and articulate. After two decades at Delco, she now runs B Cubed Consulting, where she provides expert guidance on conflict minerals, RoHS and REACH product stewardship, and the International Material Data System.

There are times increasing inventories and AVLs makes sense.

A constrained supply chain represents a challenge to Lean manufacturing processes, but in the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) market, the bigger challenge is often OEM misperceptions about strategies to address this. From a Lean perspective, navigating a constrained supply chain often requires taking one step back to move two steps forward.

Our November 2017 column discussed several areas where the best strategy was “at odds” with Lean manufacturing principles, including:

• Plan further out;
• Hard orders beat forecasts;
• Increase the number of suppliers; and
• The marketplace dictates it is smarter to carry more inventory.

Microvias have a domino effect, increasing available copper and lowering resistance.

Today electronic devices typically use designs with complex requirements that only high-density interconnect (HDI) technology can meet. Component manufacturers support the move by making components with smaller pitches. Because they are using more I/O connections, larger FPGAs and ASICs operate at higher frequencies, and the sharper rise times require smaller PCB features. The HDI PCB process supports these requirements exceptionally.

HDI PCB designs use microvias that offer a number of electrical benefits, and they also improve the power integrity of the assembly. This enhanced integrity comes from such sources and enhancements as decoupling capacitors, presenting a smaller mounted inductance, and chip pinouts requiring fewer perforations, thus delivering better performance from planes. The HDI PCB process also uses dielectrics of different thicknesses that reduce plane capacitance compared to conventional design.