As material supplies loosen, the winners and losers will change.

The biggest trend I’ve seen in the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) industry this year is that OEM customers are starting to move. Materials availability has improved enough that OEMs are starting to move from EMS companies or regions they consider problematic, plus source new projects. The dynamics of this type of market are different from a normal EMS account acquisition cycle for two reasons. First, the past three years represented the worst material constraints that this market has ever experienced. Second, the labor shortages driven by Covid have created service issues on top of the material availability issues.

If past is prologue (and in the EMS industry it usually is), OEMs will change their sourcing behavior. They will be more secretive about intent to change suppliers and they will make decisions faster. EMS companies that adapt to this situation will have a banner year in acquiring new customers. EMS companies that have been underperforming or fail to speed up their responsiveness on inquiries and quotes will lose existing business and opportunities for new business.

“Bargain” materials can result in subpar outputs.

We’ve covered understencil cleaning topics in this column many times. Admittedly, if the stencil printing process were perfect, understencil cleaning wouldn’t be required. But it is not an ideal world; we have board stretch, interspace challenges, and the compromise of printing speeds versus pressures to achieve balanced aperture filling.

Here is the basis for some of these challenges: If all the apertures were identical, the filling process (print speed/print pressure) could be optimized around one architecture. But, with the reality of different aperture shapes and sizes, the filling process must have a middle ground. The larger apertures fill more efficiently; thus, the filling process can deliver slightly too much fill on certain apertures, causing excessive material which may lead to solder paste bridging.

Conversely, the smaller apertures have a lower filling efficiency and, under the same speed and pressure setting, can be starved of solder paste, causing an insufficient fill. Insufficient deposited material can also result from an aperture with a low/tight associated area ratio. A low area ratio aperture has a lower transfer efficiency, which means that some of the material may remain in the aperture after filling. Eventually, this unreleased material can block the aperture, requiring understencil cleaning.

And will capital equipment makers stay put, relocate or – shudder! – exit the business?

In many ways, the past three years have seemed very much like a dream, with life shifting from normal to masked panic and social distancing, to light at the end of the tunnel, to where we mostly appear to be now: back to normal! But while most faces are uncovered, businesses have taken down Plexiglas separating cashier from customer, and retail floors have only a few faded "stand here" decals visible on the floors, not all is truly back to normal.

Geopolitical strains have developed in Asia and an unprovoked war is taking place in Europe. Both series of events – combined with the pandemic – put unprecedented strains on a global supply chain that for decades relied upon political stability and free access to countries around the globe. While the pandemic focused most of us on the here and now, it also caused companies – and countries – to pivot on where and how they source product.

Can your preferred choice be dropped in?

Let’s set the scene. You have been using the same vapor degreasing fluid to successfully clean complex circuitry and printed circuit boards (PCBs) for years, only to learn that your trusted line of cleaning fluids will soon be discontinued. What do you do? How do you choose a replacement that meets the PCB cleaning challenges that you and many other fabricators face?