Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1293772
OCTOBER 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 9 Nolan Johnson is managing editor of SMT007 Magazine. Nolan brings 30 years of career experience focused almost entirely on electronics design and manufacturing. To contact Johnson, click here. had any doubt that you should navigate your business to a roadmap in the same way that Napoleon moved his troops, I'd wager that 2020 has changed your opinion. It's best not to wait until you're lost to check your maps. iNEMI recently released its 2019 Roadmap, and then IEEE announced the publication of the Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap (HIR). These were followed by an announce- ment that iNEMI and IPC would be collaborat- ing on roadmap work in the future. We real- ized that October was the right time to discuss roadmaps across all three magazines. We reached out to a number of organiza- tions doing roadmap work, as well as indus- try professionals volunteering during their per- sonal time. It became quite clear that creating a technology roadmap is not an easy task. The key difference between a technology and a tra- ditional roadmap is that traditional roadmaps report on what has already been measured while technology roadmaps gaze into the pro- verbial crystal ball. Ultimately, much of our roadmapping discus- sion came from our conversations with IEEE HIR participants. We start with two excellent overview features from Rita Horner of Synop- sys and IEEE's Paul Wesling. Rita provides a conceptual walking tour of future markets with heterogenous integration that was so compre- hensive we've broken her presentation into installments for all three October magazines. Paul's conversation detailed the motivations and purpose for the HIR and gave us insight into the process for creating such a futurist doc- ument. Then, we dive into detailed discussions with multiple committee members, exploring the details of some key chapters for PCB fabri- cation and board assembly folks. There is more gold to mine from the HIR, as well as iNEMI's roadmap and the roadmap work of others. If you aren't already choosing and tracking your route to the future to at least one roadmap, we hope that this month's issue will help you to see why you should. Further Reading I highly recommend Edward R. Tufte's books, published by Graphics Press: The Visual Dis- play of Quantitative Information (1983); Envi- sioning Information (1990); and Visual Expla- nations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997). SMT007