IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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IPC COMMUNITY 26 FALL 2024 because there were no other fac- tories besides a Kerry dairy co-op. The bigger companies all settled around Dublin. Everything else was just farms, which meant we had to recruit people from the farms who had never worked on an industrial site. It required a lot of training and IPC-A-600 was our bible. Additionally, I was a found- ing member of the Rotary Club of Listowel in 1985. How has the industry changed since you started your career? One could write a book about this. You absolutely should! I remember attending my first IPC standards committee meeting with Dieter Bergman in 1984 in Hauppauge, New York, for IPC-A-600, Accept- ability Criteria for Printed Circuit Boards. I had paper pictures of PCB defects for the selection of good pictures for the IPC specification. It was a totally different world and young people today do not understand how one could have worked in those days. We didn't have digital photogra- phy or email to send picture files. For example, some companies were still communicating by Telex, a small paper strip where a wired message was printed from a reel. Now, all our technical developments, whether it's mobile phones, dig- ital photography, communication via email, or navigation systems, are so common that one hardly remembers ever having lived with- out them. Let's talk about your connec- tion to IPC. Why is it so important to the industry? I have known about IPC for more than 40 years. In 1984, I became the quality manager of a PCB fac- tory in Cologne, Germany. It was a nightmare when customers showed up with their own specifications carrying the specific "hand- writing" of another quality manager. I never understood why products used for similar appli- cations could not have one common specifica- tion on which one could train the operators in manufacturing. IPC and its standards were a great achieve- ment for the electronics industry. Each person, considering himself an expert and wanting to influence the specification with their own opin- ions, could participate in developing the speci- fications and discuss it with colleagues from the industry. This has saved the electronics indus- try significant money and helped electronics become better every day. Every electronics man- ufacturer should carefully consider lending their experts to help develop the standards further as technology and products advance. This is not only about sharing knowledge but also about gaining knowledge. Working together with IPC is the best investment an electronics company can make. At IPC, we consider your expertise indispensable to the industry. Tell us how your research provides the industry with a means to benchmark its work. For good reason, the industry is very suspicious about statistics, as many reports are simply wrong and misleading. Some companies look at statistics in a way that allows them to occa-