IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1544398
56 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 It is always interesting how we end up doing the exact thing that becomes central to our careers. I eventually moved to Southern California for a job where they needed someone with a mechanical background, which I had. At that point, my work went beyond just PCB design to more of a full mechanical system design, including the PCBs. At my next company, they needed somebody who could design PCBs for volume manufacturing. This company was getting into automation and needed all its PCBs redesigned accordingly. Eventually, I moved back to Northern California (South Bay Area) and pretty much stayed there. As one's career progresses, though, you end up in manage- ment, and I wanted to be back on the engineering side. Finally, I started my own small design com- pany, NuGrafix Group, in Los Gatos, focusing on surface mount technology, which was becoming an important technology in the design and fabrica- tion of PCBs. I was ahead of the curve, as the industry main- stream was still puzzled about what surface mount actually was. (Originally, we had called this type of connection technology "hybrid technology.") For my customers, everything needed to be miniaturized. Instead of designing boards at a 2:1 scale, we were designing at a 10:1 scale. At the time, the disk drive industry was emerging from Silicon Valley, and they wanted to make their boards smaller. The only way they could do that was to use surface-mount components, which had become more widely available. At one point, I was designing boards for several disk drive companies in Silicon Valley. You have been involved in design for manufactur- ability since the beginning of SMT in the U.S., talking about design and fab. That has to be interesting. If you don't design for manufacturing, you get in- stant feedback when you go out on the production line and see the expressions on people's faces. I had designers who worked under my management who were afraid to go on the production floor, but I'd tell them, "Just be casual about it. They will give you valuable feedback on your design, and if there is a problem, they will let you know, and that is a good thing." SMT is your expertise, which you have expanded now to include microelectronics. You've also re- cently published a book about design guidelines for surface-mount microelectronics technology. When did you decide to evolve the surface mount discussion to include microelectronics, HDI, UHDI, and even substrates? When the industry began to move over to surface mount technology, suddenly everybody was very interested in why they had made the components