Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1000349
18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 to move some of the complex or more experi- ence-based products, this becomes a challenge because that experience is not there because individuals are not with companies. Regarding equipment, minus some of the leading-edge applications, equipment has been pretty well on par meeting newer demands about miniaturization. Some of these lead technologies are outside of the scope of micro- electronics, I'd say. We at Celestica were aware of this challenge several years back and we've been investing people, space and equipment, so we can get to that new advanced articles for technologies for equipment. Now, I think the biggest challenge is manu- facturing technology. Not because of simi- larities because the manufacturing knowl- edge does the same in the path as equipment both getting smaller components and higher quality targets. The trends that I see that are putting the challenge on the electronic assem- bly industry is one of transition from tin-lead to lead-free, electrification and miniaturiza- tion. Miniaturization, we cover really from the equipment point of view. Let's say when we talk about transition from tin-lead to lead free, there's a challenge that was well taken both by equipment and cross technologies, a lot of new materials developed, new placement and equipment manufacturers and new reliability curves and review. But that last part, the new reliability curves to discuss more in recent years. What I'm refer- ring to is tin whiskers. When we start looking at some of the high-reliability products such as satellites, radars, pace makers, nuclear power plants, some of that technology we can't really move forward to lead free because we don't have those reliability curves in place. Now, the other thing around manufacturing technologies, which is more at my heart, is the challenge of electrification. It's not that we're not aware of how to do ruggedization. Many companies in the industry have been doing it for years, decades, even almost a century protecting components from harsh environ- ment conditions. But, with the transition of these components into these non-historical harsh markets where you previously had no electronics or now we're adding additional electronics that weren't present before, this is a challenge that I see a lot more customers asking how and what to do. Examples are products that were not previ- ously in harsh conditions were a lot of datacen- ters and telecommunication switches—they were always in embedded, closed environmen- tal structures, which now they're opening up and going into different geographies. Then you look at other things where we're now adding electronics to products that were already designed for harsh environments, such as new sensors in automobiles, a lot more displays in goods like washing machines and dishwash- ers. There's now these added electronics that weren't there before. Bob Willis: Steve has highlighted a lot of the issues. My take on a lot of this is really we lack the depth of education in many different sectors. We find that in a lot of companies, you have some highly qualified people working in design and manufacturing, but we don't have Bob Willis