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JUNE 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 43 Conclusion There is a lot of overlap between HP's pursuit of excellence in the 1980s and the situation in which companies find themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Process and procedures will have to change. Now is the ideal time to start to (re)implement Dr. Deming's 14 points. Documenting your process, looking for obvi- ous areas for improvements, guaranteeing the safety of all employees, eliminating all forms of "waste," deciding what functions can be permanently left "at home," and (re)focusing on retraining/skills were all part of Dr. Dem- ing's teaching. I consider TQM and DOE the two most important skills for any engineer in printed circuit design and manufacturing. If you want further reading on TQM and DFM, from someone that comes from PCB/A, check out Dr. Sammy Shina's books. Sammy Shina, Ph.D., was an HP engineer in PCB and PCBA who went back to school for a Ph.D. and is now a professor at the University of Massa- chusetts-Lowell. PCB007 References 1. Deming, W. Edwards, Quality, Productivity, and Com- petitive Position, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1982, p. 373. 2. Deming, W. Edwards, On the Management of Statisti- cal Techniques for Quality and Productivity, early draft of a planned book, duplicated with permission by HP Corpo- rate printing services, March 1981, p. 349. 3. Gitlow, Howard S., Planning For Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, Dow Jones-Irwin Press, 1990, p. 164. 4. Kohn, Alfie, No Contest: The Case Against Competi- tion, Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 1986, p. 82. Further Reading • Shina, Sammy G., Concurrent Engineering and Design for Manufacture of Electronics Products, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991. • Shina, Sammy G., Six Sigma for Electronics Design and Manufacturing, McGraw-Hill, 2002. Happy Holden has worked in printed circuit technology since 1970 with Hewlett-Packard, NanYa/Westwood, Merix, Foxconn and Gentex. He is currently a contrib- uting technical editor with I-Connect007. To read past columns or to contact Holden, click here. Nuclear energy is a low-carbon energy source that is vital to decreasing carbon emissions. A critical fac- tor in its continued viability as a future energy source is finding novel and innovative ways to improve operations and maintenance (O&M) costs in the next generation of advanced reactors. The U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA- E) established the Generating Electricity Managed by Intelligent Nuclear Assets (GEMINA) program to do exactly this. Through $27 million in funding, GEMINA is ac- celerating research, discovery, and development of new digital technolo- gies that would produce effective and sustainable reductions in O&M costs. Three MIT research teams have re- ceived APRA-E GEMINA awards to generate critical data and strategies to reduce O&M costs for the next genera- tion of nuclear power plants to make them more economi- cal, flexible, and efficient. The MIT-led teams will collab- orate with leading industry partners with practical O&M experience and automation to support the development of digital twins. Digital twins are virtual replicas of physi- cal systems that are programmed to have the same prop- erties, specifications, and behavioral characteristics as actual systems. The goal is to apply AI, advanced control systems, predictive maintenance, and model-based fault detection within the digital twins to inform the design of O&M frameworks for advanced nuclear power plants. (Source: MIT News) Making Nuclear Energy Cost-Effective