Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1494936
54 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2023 Do you think India can make a play to be competitive? It could be what happens. Unfor- tunately, they're getting all their raw materials from China, so that's one of the big issues. China has done a great job of setting up the entire infrastructure in the coun- tr y, from laminate to the whole supply chain. at's why they can produce at such low cost; it's all right there. We hear a lot about Connected Factory 4.0 on the assembly side. What's your take on the fab side? We have ideas on that. With all the soware we've put in, now we have a closed loop between the smart drill and our engineering system to be updating the scaling factors automatically. For example, we want to get to a point that you can actually do a virtual cross-section on the X-ray machine, so if you have a bad board, just throw it out at that step in the process. Don't even bother to put any more value on it at that point. We are talking about serialization, of course—getting it to the point that we have complete traceability of every panel that's run- ning through the factory. We had some interns work on an IoT project where you put sen- sors on your etch/strip processes to figure out what's going on with the chem- istry, temperature, and pres- sures, and recording that data. Our long-term strategy is to understand what has happened to every panel as it's processed through the factory. Sensors: The Smarter/ Smartish Factory (Industry 3.75) In terms of all the data, what's the most important data to you? I would say the data in under- standing the customers who are growing and the custom-