SMT007 Magazine

SMT-Sept2014

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10 SMT Magazine • September 2014 Philadelphia in the 1930s, and his first words of English were curse words. He loved to tell the story about a store owner who paid him to stop cussing in front of her store. The more he swore, the more money he made. I first met Dieter at a trade show when I started covering the industry in the 1990s. I mentioned that I was still learning about the technology. He laughed and said, "So am I!" He was so down-to-earth about himself, and barely impressed with his dozens of awards and indus- try accolades. I think he found the "living leg- end" badge mildly amusing. No, Dieter was usually much more interest- ed in talking about an upcoming DFM presenta- tion. He enjoyed working with PCB designers, identifying their challenges, and helping them stay ahead of the game. That's what really ani- mated him. I last interviewed Dieter a few years ago on the last day of IPC APEX EXPO. We were sup- posed to talk after his Design Forum keynote speech on the morning of the first day of the show. Unfortunately for me, he was surrounded by designers after his presentation and enter- tained questions until he was late for his next meeting, so he took off at a trot. I finally found Dieter on the last day of the show, rolling his bag down the hall, trying to get to the airport. I tried to catch up to him, walking, then power-walking, but to no avail. He may have been 30 years older than me, but Dieter was pulling ahead! After a week at a trade show, I was exhausted, but Dieter seemed ener- gized. He was walking faster and faster, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and he really didn't want to be interviewed. I finally ran and caught him, and then, of course, he did a great interview. It's hard to believe Dieter's gone now, be- cause he seemed to defy the laws of aging. He shook your hand like he was 50 years younger. He was always quick-witted, always on the ball, and very sharp, even after a week at a trade show. Dieter moved fast because he always had somewhere to go. One year, I saw Dieter at APEX, and a few weeks later I ran into him at a conference in Quebec. He was everywhere. Who wants to travel that much? He even joked about how he might keel over in an airport one day. I see this a lot in the PCB community, espe- cially in the design world. People just keep on working well after they reach 65. Some things just get into your blood and become part of your DNA. The design world needs more people like Di- eter, people who are willing to devote their lives to PCB design, and to IPC. We'll miss him. Smt The ShAuGhneSSY rePorT GOODbye, DIeter continues Andy Shaughnessy is manag- ing editor of The PCB Design Magazine. he has been cover- ing PCB design for 15 years. he can be reached by clicking here. Typically, chips are made in bulk on semicon- ductor wafers and then cut into individual units and placed on motherboards inside computers and other devices. But researchers at PArC, in Palo Alto, California, envision doing something different with the wafers: chopping them up into hairs-width "chiplets," mixing them into an ink, and guiding the tiny pieces electrostatically to just the right spot and orientation on a substrate, from which a roller could pick them up and print them. The technology could lead to novel kinds of computing devices, such as high-resolution imag - ing arrays made from tiny ultrasensitive detectors assembled by the million. The technology marshals chiplets into place us- ing software-controlled electrical fields generated by arrays of wires beneath an assembly substrate. for a printing system to handle different kinds of chiplets, PArC envisions differentiating them with unique charge-based bar codes or creating multiple printing steps, with one type of chiplet set down at each step. PARC: 3D Printing electronic Components Within objects

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