Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1355791
16 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2021 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE McConnell: I heard about IPC when I started a new job at UNISYS aer graduating college. I moved from ASIC design to printed circuit boards. At the time, in the late '80s and early '90s, there were rumors going around that printed circuit boards were going to disappear, and ASICs were going to take over the world. But something in printed circuit boards fasci- nated me. I minored in robotics in college as an electrical engineer and the data used to fabri- cate, assemble and test the boards is actually all robotic language. I was hooked! It sounds dumb, but I was really hooked. I was hooked on the data and not just the soldering, the hardware, and things like that. I worked for a while as a PCB designer actually trying to fig- ure out how to use all the newer tools that were coming out, the autorouters and things like that. I didn't attend any IPC meetings until I joined Lockheed Martin. My boss was present- ing at an IPC meeting. ere were a number of us at a Lockheed Martin meeting which was near where the IPC conference was being held. e entire group went for the day, toured the show floor, and that really kind of attracted me to IPC. But what really got me involved was— and I'm going to mark myself with my age—the GenCAM/ODB++ data wars of the 1990s. You can still search the web and find some arti- cles on that issue. ere used to be a quarterly article in trade magazines as to which is better. IPC decided to host the peace talks. I ended up on the management team of the peace delega- tion. And somehow from that, Dieter Bergman snatched me for the 2-10 and 2-16 committees that were dealing smart data transfer and even- tually became the IPC-DPMX (IPC-2581 Digi- tal Product Model Exchange). Oen it was just Dieter and me writing the initial document for data with the man from Valor. We would argue, discuss, and compromise, asking continuously "Well, why is that in there?" Valor would say this company needed this and that. at's how I got started with IPC. Lockheed Martin was very much embedded and linked with IPC and many of their docu- ments. We actually held joint reviews of IPC documents. I facilitated the Lockheed Mar- tin team that would review design documents and decide, "ese are the changes we need to make." en the changes would go in front of the IPC committees. e committee would accept those changes many times and the doc- uments improved. Because I went to the IPC meetings, the Lockheed Martin IPC Working Group always needed somebody to cover some meeting because everybody was double, and triple booked. With Lockheed Martin, the team prioritized the committees and the meetings. ere was always a high-priority meet- ing that no one could cover. I had the task to attend those meetings with instructions such as, "Don't let them word it this way. Try and get it worded that way." And they'd give me what I had to do because I was going to assem- bly meetings, fabrication meetings, and I'm in design, I kind of know the rules. I know what I'm outputting... but at the time I didn't know any of that stuff [laughs]. I'm fortunate that my current company, Northrop Grumman, has encouraged and sup- ported my involvement with IPC, recogniz- ing that our active participation benefits all, especially as we pioneer new technologies and embrace enterprise-wide data. Goldman: So, you've learned a lot, right? McConnell: Well, when you sit at an IPC meet- ing you do, and I'm not afraid of asking the dumb question. Everybody I have met at IPC cares about the industry, cares that things are done correctly, and cares that it costs their company less. But I would ask these dumb, very basic questions, and by the time every- body explained it to me, whoever was scribing up in the front would say, "You know, guys, I think we just solved this problem that we talked about last week, or last meeting." Finally, I made my way to committees where I feel very comfortable, but I always belong to a committee where I feel very uncomfortable.