Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1083315
88 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2019 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE by Happy Holden I-CONNECT007 I sat down with Dr. Chen Xu, distinguished member of technical staff at Nokia, and one of the authors of the paper titled "Reducing Dust Deposition on Electronic Equipment by Opti- mizing Cooling Air Flow Patterns," which won the Best Technical Paper Award at IPC APEX EXPO 2019. Xu's co-author is Jason Stafford, a researcher at Imperial College London. Happy Holden: I'm here with Dr. Chen Xu about his award-winning paper. First, can you tell us a little bit about yourself to put everything into perspective? Chen Xu: Thank you very much. You may not remember this, but we have run into each other quite a few times. I started in '97 in Bell Labs, and I left Lucent to join Cookson Electronics for approximately four years between 2002 and 2006. Then, I came back to Lucent again. I was a member of the technical staff, and even- tually a distinguished member of the technical staff at Lucent (which became Alcatel-Lucent), and eventually Nokia a couple of years ago. My responsibility is understanding material- related issues impacting the performance and reliability of our products. I received my Ph.D. in Germany many years ago in physical chem- istry, so that is my background. More recently, I have focused on environmental impacts on product performance and reliability such as corrosive gas, temperature, humidity, and par- ticularly the dust of the environment. That was the focus of my research for the last 10–15 years. Holden: What led you to do this particular research in dust deposition on electronic equip- ment? Was that an assignment from Nokia or just the evolution of all of your work? Xu: It's more of an evolution of all of my work, and also, as I said, I have been working on improving the reliability of our products spe- cifically related to the impact of environmen- tal conditions. We have products deployed worldwide. We make the telecommunications equipment, so we have products deployed everywhere in all kinds of environments. As you can imagine, some environmental condi- tions in developing countries such as India and China are not as good as in North America. The dust concentration can be very high, and you are probably familiar with the air quality index, which among others, is also a reflection of the dust concentration in the environment. Best Technical Paper Award