PCB Chat

Cadence and Dassault Systèmes in late February announced the combining of the former's  Allegro platform with the latter's 3DExperience platform in a joint solution that enables  customers to perform multidiscipline modeling, simulation and optimization of complex, connected electronic systems. The firms say this new multidisciplinary approach can accelerate customers’ end-to-end system development process while optimizing their design for performance, reliability, manufacturability, supply resilience, compliance and cost.

Today’s guests are Stéphane Declée, CEO of the Dassault Systèmes ENOVIA brand, and Michael Jackson, corporate vice president of R&D at Cadence's System, Package, Board Group.

They address a range of topics related to the integration, including how this could help users working in both environments, the manufacturing elements that can now be simulated, the functionality updates, and how other partnerships with ECAD and MCAD providers will be affected. 

In early May the Printed Circuit Board Association of America held its first annual meeting, at which they shared progress on their overarching goal, which is to advance US domestic production of PCBs and base materials.

Coinciding with that meeting came an announcement from a pair of US legislators that they had introduced a bill to incentivize purchases of domestically produced PCBs as well as industry investments in factories, equipment, workforce training, and research and development.

The bill, known as the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act of 2022, is aimed at helping to level the playing field for US-based electronics companies by incentivizing investment in capabilities and training.  

Travis Kelly, president and chief executive of Isola and chairman of the PCBAA, joins PCB Chat host Mike Buetow to discuss the new bill and the highlights of the annual meeting. 

Mike Konrad speaks with Dr. Ron Lasky and Jim Hall, authors of the SMTA SMT Certification Courses (along with Phil Zarrow) about the content of these courses. He also speaks with course students, Claire Hotvedt of Indium Corp. and Tom Watson of Kimball Electronics about their experience taking the courses and the value they received.

Dr. Ron Lasky talks about the many books he has authored on SMT processes and production efficiencies.

Kunal Shah, Ph.D., is president and chief scientist at Lilotree, a manufacturer of novel surface finishes for circuit boards. He explains the advantages of surface finishes utilizing the thinnest thickness of gold as well as Ni-Less ENIG surface finishes to Mike Konrad.

Jack Fisher is project facilitator of the High Density Packaging User Group, also known as HDP, and Madan Jagernauth is marketing director and project facilitator.

They discuss HDP's new technology direction initiative, which focuses on projects to support enabling technologies, and share details of some of those new programs.

They also invite nonmembers to their first face-to-face meeting in two years, taking place May 18-19 in Austin, TX. Nonmembers may attend the May 18 session and the facilities tour of Novacentrix.

On this episode of PCB Chat we discuss the fourth quarter 2021 market numbers from the ESD Alliance, which were released the week of April 4, 2022.

Our guests are Wally Rhines, who spent more than 45 years in in semiconductor and PCB design as an executive with Mentor Graphics and before that, TI; and Merlyn Brunken, whose is the longtime market intelligence director with Siemens Digital Industries, formerly Mentor.

This podcast is brought to you by PCB East, the original conference for the #electronics #design, #manufacturing and #assembly industry on the East Coast. Coming to Marlboro, MA, on April 11-13, with the one-day exhibition and a day's worth of free technical sessions on April 12. Visit pcbeast.com for details.

Recorded at IPC Apex Expo in San Diego, Mike Konrad has conversations with two guests.

Marco Sanchez from SMT North America talks about thermal control of reflow ovens. [email protected]

Colin Harper of BPM talks about automatic device programming.

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Mike Konrad talks with four guests:

Jesper Lykke from Viscom talks about inspection systems.

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Greg Papandrew from Direct PCB talks about PCB buying and his new book "PCB Basics for Buyers": [email protected]

Kevin Huo from EM Solutions talks about fast-turn contract assembly.

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And Michelle Ogihara from Seika USA talks about the advantages of joining trade associations.

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Michael Kirschner is president of Design Chain Associates, where he helps manufacturers understand and ensure that their products comply with health and environmental regulatory, customer and market requirements.