PCB007 Magazine

PCB-Sept2016

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50 The PCB Magazine • September 2016 Recently, I reviewed the new 7 th Edition of the Printed Circuits Handbook, which for the first time, includes a section on "Managing the Print- ed Circuit Supply Chain" (Part 2, Chapters 3–8 by Tim Rogers, including a contribution by Happy Holden). I was delighted to see this important is- sue addressed explicitly for the first time in this handbook since it is essential to the commercial success of PCB manufacture. The viability of a supply chain infrastructure has many aspects: evaluation and selection of suppliers, contract manufacture considerations, design for manufac- turability, data formatting and exchange, process and quality control, auditing, testing, inspection, performance management, proximity of suppli- ers, warehousing, and many more. Coming from the material and processing side of PCB fabrication, I tried to find a suit- able and important material example to dig into, and I picked one of the most ubiquitous materials used in electronic packaging, namely epoxy resin. Needless to say, the above men- tioned chapter on supply chain management cannot cover such a specific example but must focus on higher level issues. So I did my own digging. Since I planned to invest a limited time into this little study, I have to apologize for the somewhat anecdotal character of my findings and the fact that some supplier information may not be up to date due to recent mergers, acquisitions, name changes or other vagaries of the market place. by Karl Dietz EPOXY: Supply Chain and Use in Electronics KARL'S TECH TALK

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