Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1476200
46 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2022 ness. You look at the trends across industries, whether it's mobility, min- iaturization, Internet of ings, con- nectivity, wearables, packing more electronic capability into tighter spaces—it all lends to the need from product developers for the type of specialty interconnects that we pro- duce. ose trends are pushing peo- ple to our types of products and ser- vices. With all our production facilities being in Asia, we focus on the com- mercial markets including medical, consumer products, automotive, industrial, telecom data, and more; and we see continued growth across all markets. e significant growth in the need for specialty interconnects has led to a shortage of true engi- neering design expertise within our industry. To help customers get to cost-effective solutions quickly, one must have an understanding of the materials and materi- als properties, including how they will func- tion and perform. Further, how many proj- ects, designs, successes, and failures does your design expert have related to specialty inter- connect designs? e fact is, specialty inter- connects are oen utilized in challenging appli- cations, and by having expert design support one will increase the project success rate while getting to a cost-effective design that performs within these challenging applications. Given these facts, some good questions a customer may want to ask include: Who is helping me with my design? What level of experience do they bring to my project? Mark Finstad, our director of application engineering, is one of the top flex experts. He is vice chair for all the IPC flex circuit commit- tees, a lead educator on flex, and a noted col- umnist. Mark has built a team here at FCT where all our senior application engineers offer 30-plus years of experience in designing flex, rigid-flex, and flex heaters. ey under- stand the materials, the material properties, and what can and can't be done; they've liter- ally addressed thousands of applications. at expertise helps our customers get to cost-effec- tive designs that will perform. From there, it is about delivering quality products at competi- tive prices, on time. Our FCT China team does an outstanding job, and our facilities offer the following certifications: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 13485, and IATF 16949 for automotive. Further, we perform product box builds for FDA-registered product programs for medi- cal companies, where we must meet stringent traceability requirements. Our quality sys- tems are robust, and we offer deep expertise as one of the top assembly-on-flex companies in the world. We have built our organization, FCT USA and China, together over the past 20 years. Our team in China works with an incred- ible sense of urgency and does an outstanding job of producing high quality products for our customers. Certainly, expert design and the ability to build quality products that we deliver on Carey Burkett