Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/855901
72 SMT Magazine • August 2017 In fact, we have plans in South Asia to ex- pand the Zestron Academy. Not only do we want to train the engineers of our customers, but we want to extend it to technical colleges because cleaning is not part of their syllabus of studies. When these graduates eventually get hired, they will already be able to handle clean- ing. We will extend Zestron Academy, but it is not something that will happen tomorrow. It is in the pipeline, maybe two or three years down the road. We also want a dedicated acad- emy team. Right now, we use the application engineers to do the training. But what we want to do at the end of the day is to have a sepa- rate Zestron Academy team, so that it can stand alone by itself. Las Marias: In which end-markets are you see- ing strong growth? Yeoh: We have seen very good growth in the au- tomotive and semiconductor industries. The lat- ter is very wide, we have power module and au- tomotive electronics, we can cover IoT, we can cover mobile phones. Even aerospace industry is a growing market. If you talk about the auto- motive and the aerospace industries, there's no compromise. Cleaning is a priority. Las Marias: From a cleaning standpoint, what challenges are your customers facing? Yeoh: Basically, most of the challenges are very closely related. Our customers don't have a lot of equipment, because these are all invest- ments. Some customers have one or two clean- ing machines. In some cases, these customers, especially the EMS providers, may have 20 dif- ferent products to run. It's a big challenge be- cause the pastes are different, a lot of their flux- es are different, there are variations in products, and they need to run. They need to clean with just one machine, and they need to clean with just one chemical. That is a challenge for them. And it is a part of our duty to make sure we go in and optimize and help them, with one chem- ical solution, to clean all their boards. The market now is driven predominantly by two trends: one is IoT, the other is hybrid ve- hicles. These two will be very significant going forward. When we talk about hybrid or electric vehicles, these are very European and American driven. This industry is growing and will con- tinue to drive the market. When you have more and more electronics in the vehicles, there is a need for more cleaning. Meanwhile, things have become narrow- er and smaller. At one point, you can no lon- ger put a lot of components into the board. So probably, the ICs or packages will be 2D or 3D. In the future, the ICs will be so small that there will be an even lower standoff height. Now, it's CLEANING THAT MATTERS James Yeoh