IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527867
IPC COMMUNITY 53 FALL 2024 somewhere. Once I was able to get out there and see how close the ocean, the mountains, and the forests were, it really turned my life around." It hasn't been a hindrance to his work either. When he first started his career in the early 1990s, his company was still using draftsmen with drafting tables, paper, pencils, T-squares, triangles, and redlines when you needed to make an edit. "But it's the 21st century, and we're all digital," he counters. "All the same test equipment that used to be in a big lab I literally have in a little digital box. It's got all the templates, and I can do almost all the same testing. Maybe not the high-frequency testing as some of the profes- sional stuff, but for 90% of what I do, that laptop and plug-in box are everything I need, even for designing a new product. We can go all the way into the 3D rendering of what a board and the product will look like, and have the whole thing ready to go without ever physically touching anything other than the keys of your laptop." Teaching for IPC connects him with students around the world. "I love working for IPC and I love teaching," he says. "Being able to share knowledge with students around the world and watching them grow and excel is an amazing opportunity. I fully support it. We get a lot of pos- itive feedback; that drives you when you know you're inspiring the next generation." Kris's courses range from introduction to PCB design to designing for flex/rigid-flex, RF, and mil-aero, and he's currently designing new courses on signal integrity and advanced concepts. "With embedded components, we actually form the resistors and the capacitors in the traces on the inner layers, rather than soldering a phys- ical part onto our boards that have the HDI and wire bonding capabilities," he says. "So, how do you do sequential lamination and circuit geom- etry as we start using smaller physical parts? That leads us to the problem of why my standard rout- ing techniques don't work because the parts are too small." Another area he will tackle is battery power— addressing the consumer need while dealing with packaging, heat, battery life, and safety. It's the perfect metaphor as we wrap up our conver- sation about Kris's sustainable lifestyle. "I'm always thinking about the big picture," he says. "This lifestyle is about being more con- scientious of your impact on the environment, your impact on the world, and about being in the moment. I think about it from both a sustainabil- ity point of view, but also the cultural interac- tion of being able to see all the different cultures and not be siloed into this group or that. This is exactly where I want to be." Ready to sign up for an IPC course? Learn more here.