Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/612684
36 The PCB Magazine • December 2015 bers and our industry. One of the key changes that IPC has undergone is that they have made a concerted effort to grow its membership base of OEMs. In the past three and a half years IPC has added 153 OEM members as well as three seats on their board of directors for OEM resources with Peter Cleveland VP of Legal and Corporate Affairs/Global Public Policy for Intel joining in Q3 of 2015. IPC has also grown its membership and presence amongst the assembly compa - nies. They continue to expand their reach into new markets with the addition in 2012 of the D61/62/63 standards committees which are de- fining standards for printed electronics (led by Chris Jorgensen and Scott Gordon), as well as beginning a push into the European market. The net result is that IPC is moving towards a more vertically integrated hardware position and set- ting the organization up as the go-to source for interconnect technology in the supply chain. As one would expect, given the sheer num- ber of trade organizations out there, many of them overlap and intersect in their missions and membership. In some cases, this opens the door for effective collaboration between differ- ent segments of the technology chain. Good examples of this include HDPUG and iNEMI which focus on both technical testing as well as roadmap programs. HDPUG has done a great deal of work to characterize the relationship be- tween boards and packaging such as HDPUG- SAC aging studies (Figure 2) or the correlation between different signal integrity test vehicles and test methods such as the example present- ed by Karl Sauter of Oracle at PCB West. However, as often as you have good collabo- ration between IPC and complementary techni- cal organizations, as you get closer to the topic, you learn that trade organizations can compete for membership, compete for trade show at- tendees, compete for control of technology ini- tiatives and even be at odds with each other on policy decisions. One example is the challenge that I have observed between the objectives of IPC, repre- senting the bare-board PCB and assembly in- dustries, many of whom are engaged in military and aerospace work in North America, and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), spon- sor of the giant CES tradeshow each year in Las Vegas, representing some of the same OEMs but with a decidedly more commercial perspective on their directives. IPC's member companies need controls like International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) and DoD oversight and backing to ensure that they can protect technology and intellectual property critical to national security. CEA, by contrast, seeks to minimize government over- sight, reduce tariffs for overseas suppliers and allow the large OEMs to define much of what they need to minimize their global cost foot- print without the logistical drawbacks of nation- al boundaries. It is clear that these two organiza- tions, that on paper appear aligned, are coming at topics from opposite ends of the table. IS IPC THE PAST OR THE FUTURE OF OUR INDUSTRY? Figure 1: Ipc president and ceO John Mitchell addressing the 2015 Ipc apeX eXpO audience. Figure 2: hdpuG—tin, silver, copper, colder aging characterization test cross section. (Source: hdpuG) puTTing iT All TogeTher