Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1533904
66 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2025 working relationships, and share the latest industry information, then the summit team raised the bar again this year. I highly recom- mend attending next year's daylong event. e developments in adjacent tech sectors will change our manufac- turing techniques. It has always been the case that adjacent industries—semi- conductor manufacturing, for example— influence our industry. New component packages are an obvious example. Devan Iyer, IPC chief strategist for advanced packaging, and Dr. Ahmed Bahai, chief technology offi- cer at Texas Instruments and one of the key- note speakers, discussed the new develop- ments in packaging with me at length. e themes in the conversation suggest not a trickle-down but rather a cascading chain of events that will change the components we will handle. Another key development is shrinking feature sizes on the PCB, for which some of the older semiconductor manufactur- ing technologies come increasingly into play—for example, interposers. Conse- quently, some of our PCB fabs are starting to look like the early semiconductor fabs— and they should. We're fabricating in those same feature sizes on the board nowadays that used to be on the chip. New materials require new methods, while some require minor tweaks, and others require the instal- lation of entire lines. New soware tools for process control, sensing, tracking, inven- tory management, scheduling, and more, continue to move us deeper into the real- ity of Industry 4.0, which leads me to AI. Artificial intelligence is staying and will earn its keep. I discount generative AI, however. It's getting all the hype in the mainstream and will likely follow the traditional hype curve. Sure, it has a place, but all we have to do is look at Ben Rachinger's award-winning paper from this year's conference to see that AOI data sets not only can be shared between multiple com- panies through a federated library to build a more powerful large language model, but that the data can also be stored in tokens, protect- ing the proprietary nature of the source data. e unexpected insights coming from AI LLM implementations which are properly used is nothing less than mind-boggling. In focused industrial applications, predictive analysis— based on seeing patterns in past data so sub- tle that humans cannot identify them—will be disruptive (and in a good way). Regional diversification seems t o be unstoppable. Sure, opinions dif- fer on whether regional develop- ment is good for the industry, but it seems like those who are building up infrastruc- ture are bullish, while those losing market share are bearish. India, SE Asia, and Mex- ico continue to build out. While it's true that much of the investment in these three regions was originally to support automotive and EVs, the available capacity outside China seems attractive to OEMs looking to reshore. Another sign of regional vibrancy is the 3 4 5 Mark Wolfe chatting with Tracy Riggan at the EMS leadership dinner.