Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1161956
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2019 Prasad: It's a big effort to get younger peo- ple involved in the leadership of the commit- tees. I am getting some newer, younger people involved so that they can be the next chairman of these committees one day. Pedersen: It's difficult to get the younger gen- eration interested in manufacturing. They are much more interested in developing other things, like IT. Prasad: And it's a global problem because man- ufacturing is not as glamorous as those other things, especially because a lot of the manufac- turing is getting outsourced to low-cost coun- tries. Holden: On a side topic, how do leading research organizations select projects? In many ways, they're one of the institutions that takes what OEMs and young designers want to design for next-generation products and relate it back to what are the gaps that we need to build it and have it reliable and survive for its intended use. Pedersen: When you talk about NASA or ESA in Europe, the big difference is that they are conservative; they're not tuned for new tech- nologies and exceeding standards. I had some designs yesterday that had 30–50 layers and a 2.5–3-mm board with a 0.2-mm hole. You can't call it even Class 2 because there's almost noth- ing left. These boards should work, but they were not made to standards, so what do we do? Should we rewrite the standards so these people can have the standard to follow? Yes, we should. Prasad: I disagree. Part of the reason is that there are all of these requirements, and if there are some unique people who need to do that, they will have to take the risk and design it. Not everybody has the capability to do that, and by definition, it is not going to become a standard because not everybody cares about that. Pedersen: But you can still produce reliability while violating standards. Prasad: I don't think they are violating stan- dards; they're creating a unique product for that segment of the market at a high cost where cost is not an issue. So, you have to keep that separate; it's not a standard. If the standard is something the majority of the people are using, they will all buy into this as a global thing. But on the other hand, for somebody who doesn't care about the yield of the board and 10% yield is okay, whether the cost is $10 or $1,000 is also fine. I have worked on a board with BGAs, and each one was $25,000. Pedersen: Sure, if you're in that kind of seg- ment. But we have a lot of electronics that cannot follow IPC Class 2 or 3, for example, because the designs are too tight, but they are produced globally every day. I think we need to revisit the standard and update it more fre- quently than we are doing today.