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10 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2023 Alex Stepinski, principal and president of Stepinski Inc., and principal of Smart Process Design, has designed leading-edge PCB facili- ties and introduced a variety of novel systems and technologies into PCB manufacturing. We asked Alex to share his thoughts on high-reli- ability fabrication techniques, where manufac- turers go wrong, and what fabricators need to do to step up their reliability game. Barry Matties: Where does high reliability intersect with bare board fabrication and what should readers be thinking about? Alex Stepinski: It's about service life. at's what the clients want. ey want high reli- ability so it doesn't fail in the field, and when it does, it's very far away in time. You must do accelerated testing to confirm that your prod- uct will be reliable for "X amount" of time, and that it also de-risked from white rhino/black swan events and T0/latent fails. I would break down high reliability manage- ment into two influential categories: process design and product design. During the product design, what do they control? Fabricators con- trol KPIs to get high reliability. ey should have a model, or a set of rules based upon prior history, as to what works and what doesn't work. ey should also have these rules cor- related to qualification methods, because one OEM might use IST, another uses a different type with different conditions, and so on. Reliability is a subset of the test conditions, and the higher the reliability, the higher the High-reliability Fabrication Overview Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team