Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1534953
8 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2025 Nolan's Notes Feature Column by Nolan Johnson, I-CONNECT007 The Next Killer App in Component Manufacturing For quite a while, I've been wondering what the next "killer app" will be in electronics man- ufacturing and why it has been so long since the last disruptive change in EMS. I believe the answer lies in artificial intelligence, which has exploded as the next disruptor. AI is in everything these days, and while it's been the disruptor we predicted, maybe not in the ways we initially feared. For example, I no longer pay much attention to the hype about jobs that will disappear because of AI. Comput- ers replaced some jobs but created new ones. When EDA tools came on the market, for exam- ple, the Rubylith® draing jobs disappeared, but those very same folks simply shied their exper- tise to a new medium. Instead of using Rubylith film as their medium, they used CAD tools. e expertise was, for the most part, preserved. Not only that, but they became more productive because they completed layouts more quickly; the computational power of the workstations dramatically reduced the drudgery of hand cal- culation. Removing the constraint of cutting Rubylith accelerated our technology develop- ment curve. When used in industrial situations and driven by factor y data, AI can go beyond number crunching into some pretty sophis- ticated pattern matching and analysis. e right tools can leverage AI's strengths to pres- ent ever more sophisticated reporting on the mundane stuff so that engineers can focus on