Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1022231
30 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2018 "Mega" is a fun word to use because it elic- its thoughts of grandeur and impressiveness regarding the topic at hand. From megaton to megalomaniac, when you use "mega" as a pre- fix, you know it's going to be big. A simple trend can only speak to two or three things going in the same direction, but a megatrend is a completely different ball game. In my exhaustive research (one hour on the Internet, so I am officially an expert), I found this fact in a paper by two researchers from Finland: "It took 38 years for radio to get 50 million users, television made it in 13 years, Internet in four, iPod in three, and Facebook in only two years" [1] . As a dad of a 10-year-old son, I would guess that Fortnite made it to 50 million in about 12 minutes. What these numbers mean to our indus- try is the need to create electronics at blaz- ing speeds that we haven't seen before. I have seen customers increase their demand on throughput without any thought to how that will affect reliability. If it takes one hour at 350°C to bake a cake, why can't we do it in 30 minutes at 700°C and get the same quali - ty? I wish it worked that way, but it doesn't— trust me. When the demand is higher than normal, you can't simply increase the belt speed on your soldering equipment and expect to make the same high-quality product. To be fair, the majority of handheld or consumer electron- ics fall into the Class I category, which aren't necessarily that reliable to start for long term, Quest for Reliability Feature Column by Eric Camden, FORESITE Are Megatrends Putting Your Product at Megarisk?