IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1531444
IPC COMMUNITY 25 WINTER 2025 AJ's story: As a new member of the elec- tronics manufacturing industry, I have an oppor- tunity to always be learning from some of the most experienced leaders in the industry. I work as a chemical process engineer at Summit Inter- connect in Hollister, California, where we build prototype printed circuit boards for well-known companies in Silicon Valley and across the United States. Building a circuit board is an intense and complicated process, with each step affecting later steps. These interactions are understood only after many years of training and experience, so I feel lucky to work with and learn from colleagues who have decades of experience. My line of work fits well with my curious per- sonality. I'm always looking to learn and try new things. I love to innovate along the way. This is one reason I joined the IPC Emerging Engineer program. I wanted to work with industry experts to develop my professional knowledge and skills. In my two years in the program, I've done my best to take full advantage. Being part of the EE program means attending IPC APEX EXPO, where I've met other industry experts, attended professional development courses, and participated in standards meetings, where we get to amend and vote on IPC stan- dards. My mentor in the EE program is Brian Chislea, an electronics application engineer at Dow. I met Brian in person at the trade show this year, and he introduced me to many of his colleagues in the IPC community, all of whom happily shared their experiences and offered their advice to a young engineer like myself. Brian is chair of the Conformal Coatings Task Group and invited me to attend. There, I learned the ins and outs of joining a task group and, ulti- mately, how to lead one. It was a pleasure work- ing with and learning from Brian during APEX EXPO, and I look forward to continuing our inter- actions during my final year in the EE program and beyond. I also enjoyed attending the standards develop- ment meetings, where I saw how manufacturers and end-users work together to find common ground in the IPC specs as they build reliable products that suit the users' needs. Another advantage of the EE program is the access to PD courses, which allow me to dive deep into specific topics of interest. Some courses I've taken include PCB Fabrication Basics, Process Flow and Associated Defects, and Design for High Reliability. I've used information from all these courses in my work at Summit. In fact, two weeks after attending my first show, there was a sudden and random increase of voids inside plated through-holes which led to us scrapping a lot of product. I used information I had gained from the courses to identify that the problem was due to photoresist lock-in. The