Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1197000
58 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2020 with it. But then, in the case of IEC, it has to be translated into French, for instance. By the time you've gone through that pro- cedure and had the document printed, pub- lished, and submitted to the committee, you cannot produce that in less than five years based on my experience. The demand is to do it faster; the requirement thrust on the com- mittee is to do it in three years. But don't lose sight of the fact that everybody on the commit- tees is doing this work voluntarily, and push- ing them to do it as a matter of priority to the day job isn't going to happen. It's not a simple exercise, but every standard has a five-year breakpoint at which it has to be at least considered for revision, and if the committee controlling it believes that it is still extant, leave it alone. If it isn't broke, don't fix it. The committee meetings, both with IEC and IPC, are only twice a year—one in the early part of the year, and the other at the back end of the year; one of the difficulties we have is trying to find the appropriate locations to con- duct those, which enables people to do more than talk about standards. They want to be able to talk about day job problems, so having an exhibition attached to the conference and the committee meetings is important. Johnson: You can get double duty out of one trip. Naisbitt: Exactly. When there are discussions— especially in the U.S. with IPC, and I've been involved as a chair of committees for quite a few years—one of the biggest challenges is, "Let's do the meetings in Las Vegas." But when most engineers go to their boss and say, "I'd like to attend these committee meetings to help develop standards going forward," they are asked where it's being held, and once the engineer tells their boss it's in Las Vegas, the answer is usually, "No." Johnson: That's a good point for why there is an exposition to accompany the IPC meeting. IPC APEX EXPO puts the two together so that you have maximum value out of that one trip. You're quite involved in what's going on with multiple standards committees. What do you see coming up for us at IPC APEX EXPO 2020 in February? Naisbitt: I love coming to San Diego in the win- ter from the U.K. We'll be looking at helping companies determine acceptable objective evi- dence of what they are doing in their process control—that process evolution. We have ever- increasing miniaturization, which is a double entendre, and the drive to miniaturization goes hand in hand with two extreme conditions. If you're talking about space and medical appli- cations, it needs to operate at ultra-low voltage. But when you think about the drive to reduce the impact of CO 2 for environmental reasons, everybody's talking about electric vehicles. Now, I'm not even going to attempt to get on my soapbox and say anything about environ- mental challenges, except that you still have to have electric power no matter where you are, and that electric power is going to consume a huge amount of fossil fuel right now. There's no escape. The alternative is to go nuclear, and everybody I know is working frantically to develop and approve nuclear fusion. When we get to nuclear fusion, the world will be a far better place, but in the meantime, govern- ments around the world want and encourage people to have electric cars. When you're talk- ing about electric cars, the demands on energy for those are rather extreme, to put it mildly. The two routes being followed are either to go low-voltage, high-current, or high-volt- age, low-current. If you go down the route of low-voltage, high-current, once an elec- tric vehicle is delivered to the customer, it is switched on for the rest of its life. Thus, with those electric vehicles, if they're low-voltage, high-current, they may have a residual current of around 1200 amps. If emergency services attending you in an accident don't handle the car properly, with 1200 amps, there will not be much left apart from a pair of smoldering boots. Do they know whether it's a high-cur- rent or a low-current application? These chal- lenges are enormous. And when you're deal- ing with high-current loadings, it means that when you're manufacturing the circuit boards,