Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1083315
32 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2019 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE Tesla Automotive. Before the keynote, John Mitchell, IPC president and CEO, announced the Best Technical Paper winner, "Reduc- ing Dust Deposition on Electronic Equipment by Optimizing Cooling Air Flow Patterns" by Chen Xu of Nokia, and the five IPC APEX EXPO 2019 Innovation Awards for exhibitors—Green- Source being one of them. The exhibits were larger than last year—the largest in a long while. Business is strong and it showed in the attendance for all three days. See the video of the show floor as well as the time-lapse from our booth in our Real Time with… IPC APEX EXPO 2019 series. What was also really outstanding was the emphasis on smart factories with the IPC's Connected Fac - tory Exchange (CFX) initiative and IPC-3581 data format. CFX demos and equipment were everywhere outlined by a special flag and booth border. There was no missing CFX at the show. On Tuesday evening, I attended a press briefing by Siemens with SMT007 and PCB007 Managing Editor Nolan Johnson on their new initiative called "smart manufacturing for elec- tronics." This is a new effort by Mentor, a Sie- mens Company, and the Valor Division to com- bine their knowledge and put together a series of new products that will lead to the smart fac- tory for electronics products from IC design to finished, tested products. The first group of products includes the Camstar Electronics Suite. Siemens is one of the world's largest industrial products com- pany, and their reputation and expertise in automation are renowned. Figure 1 shows an overview with Fram Akiki explaining their "lot-size-of-one" concepts and Figure 2 dem- onstrates the Camstar Electronics Suite. You can hear more about Camstar by watching two interviews with Oren Manor and Fram Akiki. I-Connect007 will also cover smart factories and manufacturing in future publications. Wednesday included more activities like Tuesday, but I spent most of my time work- ing on a special industry problem the IPC has tackled—weak microvia interface failures. For the past year, a small IPC committee of experts has been addressing the failure and root-cause analysis of a new HDI failure that is escaping our testing and ending up in the field. There Figure 1: Lot-size-of-one concepts.