Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1007258
16 FLEX007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 to help us out, and I'm fortunate. I get to go to these suppliers at least once a year, sometimes multiple times a year, in New England, Califor- nia or Asia. Getting to see the plants and look at the processes and what's involved in achiev- ing some of these technologies has really been important. A lot of the industry is going to roll- to-roll now to accommodate high volumes, and also some form factors. They can do some really creative and interesting things now on a roll-to- roll format versus panel. You can make it really long. I've seen them—these super-long flex cir - cuits that can be used in ways that people prob- ably never even dreamed of 10–15 years ago. Our automotive division by necessity tends to be a little more conservative. They have to answer to the OEMs, and in this case, Bose becomes the supplier rather than an OEM, and tends to be a little more cautious. They've been resisting going into the flex world. But we're seeing that flex circuitry really does well in harsh environments. Shaughnessy: Are you seeing young people coming in at Bose, or in the industry? And how do you think we can attract young people to this industry? MacFadden: Yes, I've been at Bose for 15 years, and I've watched this transformation. Bose has always been a place where people come to work and stay for their whole careers. We had a lot of people who recently retired after 20, 30, 35 years, so there's a history of longevity here. At the same time, we have a really strong co-op program, and near our office in Framingham, Massachusetts, we're surrounded by great uni - versities. Bose has a very strong relationship with area universities, par- ticularly with MIT, which is where the founder of the company, Dr. Amar Bose, studied and then taught for 40 years. So we have a lot of co- ops, interns, and new graduates that come through Bose. We've started a new program recently called the PACE program. It's a way for a junior engineer to enter Bose and do a series of four 6-month rotations, and each rotation is usually in a different division of the company, so that they get a very broad exposure to the kinds of roles and engineering opportunities that there are within the company as well as getting to know people and how things work. Every year we get more and more people in these programs. Sometimes you don't know what you're good at or what you want to do until you start doing it. Shaughnessy: So what do you think is the big- gest challenge, whether for you or just people working with flex in general? MacFadden: From my perspective, the biggest challenge for me coming from a strictly rigid PCB background was understanding not just the potential of the materials but the limita- tions. The registrations are different, because the materials are flexible. They're sloppy, and there's just more movement. When you try to sandwich together two flexible materials, they're going to move. We have seen some issues that when the design was not good the materials didn't work as well, and similarly, if we tried to push too hard, we could get into trouble for that. Fortunately we found out a lot early in the design stages partly because of the close relationships we've had with our fab- ricators. The other thing is that we often can be very successful assembling a flex circuit, or populating it with your SMT components, but assembly into the product can present chal- lenges, particularly where there's a lot of folding and a lot of movement and there are sometimes blind insertions. In an assembly environ- ment where time is of the essence, there are going to be mistakes on the line, so designs must be robust. People are going to force things that prob - ably shouldn't be forced, and things are going to break. It's Figure 3: Bose QuietControl noise-cancelling earphones use a combination of rigid-flex and flexible circuits.