Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1193979
74 PCB007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 sible with international flights and the high- speed train. We're also looking into some key areas in Asia-Pacific and potentially in South America down the road. Nolan Johnson: What sort of capacity does the new manufacturing facility add, Chris? Minard: Currently, it's at about 500,000 square feet per month. It was able growing that capac- ity already this year, with plans to significant- ly grow over the next five years with further investments and expansion. There are already measures taken that would allow us to grow the capacity by multiples. The current production area is about 15,000 square meters. Of course, it's ISO-qualified for 9001 and 14001 and with the automotive space, as well as certified for IATF-16949. We have VDA 6.3 6.5 auditors that conduct onsite trainings and audits on-site and with all of our partner suppliers. We also have certified IPC-600 and IPC-6012 inspectors as part of our outgoing quality inspection. Being from Germany, and with many of our customers in the automotive space, quality is always a critical deliverable. We're steeped in almost 20 years of making sure that all of our factory partners, suppliers, and teams are ful- ly qualified, inspected, and audited to main- tain very high levels of quality. The company has won the Mianyang City Technology Award in 2019, which was an acknowledgment of what has been achieved since investing in the production equipment, infrastructure, and headcount. We've also launched a new venture called CML Chemistry, which is a partnership with Innotech; they are an immersion tin surface finish company. We partnered with them to bring more immersion tin solutions for our customers, and we found ourselves being en- gaged with Innotech hand-in-hand over time. It seemed to make sense to do something a lit- tle bit different that would benefit our custom- ers, so why not do a joint venture with them? It allows us to have R&D and product inno- vations based on-site and pass these benefits onto our customers directly. Johnson: Does CML offer design and engineer- ing services as well? Minard: We do. We recently took a step to ex- pand our global engineering resources by add- ing head counts in both our German and Shen- zhen offices. Our goal is to have the availability of our engineering teams to our customers at the very early stages of the design launch. We can provide DFM and DFX inputs in the NPI stage, and we hope to drive our customers to a commercially and technically sound solution; that's a value-add. We also want to engage more ro- bustly at this early stage of the design so that we don't get in after the fact when boards are in production sta- tus. We're hoping to remove costly re- spins and re-qualifications and offer a more complete solution to our cus- tomers, so we've put some resources into that. And we've had customers, both in Canada and the U.S., col- laborate with our engineering teams in Germany and Asia to review their designs; therefore, we can help make recommendations on materials and surface finishes, etc. Hand-in-hand with the expanding of our global engineering resources, we have further been actively sourc-