PCB007 Magazine

PCB007-June2022

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8 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2022 Proper Plating Joe Fjelstad once joked that if someone working in a board shop 50 years ago were placed in suspended animation and woke up today, they would recognize almost every- thing in today's board shop. ey could theo- retically go right back to work because so lit- tle of their work environment changed in those five decades. (Aer five decades, I'd probably want to take a week off and catch up on reruns of MASH and e Bob Newhart Show.) True, the basic fab- r i c a t i o n p r o c e s s h a s n ' t c h a n g e d much since 1972, but there have b e e n t w e a k s along the way, e s p e c i a l l y i n p r o c e s s c o n - t r o l a n d m e a - surement. And if you mentioned " e n v i r o n m e n - t a l l y - f r i e n d l y waste processes" in a board shop before the 1990s, p eo p le probab ly would have looked at you funny. Yes, many of the processes in our industry are what analysts like to call "mature." Take plating, the focus of this issue of PCB007 Mag- azine, for instance. In our research, we learned that plating technology predates the pyramids. e Egyptians developed a fairly advanced method for plating about 5,000 years ago. ey loved gold, but they really could work with anything. In the mean- time, they also became experts at mining, refining, and met- alworking. Mining is dan- gerous now; how would you like to be one of the miners working a few mil- lennia ago? The Eg yptians, much l i k e t o d a y 's p r o c e s s engineers, were con- stantly exper imenting and tweaking their pro- cesses. I wouldn't be sur- prised if we were to dis- cover Egyptian picto- graphs t h a t t r a n s l a t e i n t o "Plan, Do, Check, and Ac t ." The y al s o wound up developing some of the first metal wiring in history. Our industry owes more to the "technologists" of ancient Egypt than we realize. The Shaughnessy Report by Andy Shaughnessy, I-CONNECT007

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