Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/895789
18 SMT Magazine • November 2017 for what's up to date, and then next year do it again and then do it again, because things are changing so quickly. The best thing we can de- liver to the engineering community? Put together a package that is properly vet- ted, that you know is stable, all of the delamination and via mi cro-crack- ing, etc., address all of the reasons that people say why we shouldn't do it (challenge all paradigms). This means that we have to have DOEs going continually to make sure that we didn't just jump off the cliff. I'm always jumping off the cliff. You really need to own it, and owning it is doing the look-aheads that you talked about— talk to your assembler, talk to your fabricator, and talk to the guy on the plating line. Talk to the guy who's run- ning the laser drill. So, this position two years ago did not exist and it does now, and the reason was because we were failing some of our substrates. Now, with proper vetting in place, we can ex - plore just about anything that makes sense to us, as long as we qualify it before production. At this advanced level, PCB and flex technology road- mapping, PCB reliability, and the DFM process cannot be separated." Burns concludes, "One of the best com- ments I've heard today was just more commu- nication and better communication up front. For the design and the fab end of it, the readers should consider contacting not just the OEMs but some EMS man- ufacturing facilities and ask them up front what their capabilities are. If we go smaller and smaller, what do we need to do as an in- dustry to be able to manufacture things at that level? This also goes to the component manu- facturers because now we're also looking at components that have to be mounted on these boards. We need the designers and the fab guys to understand the conditions that these boards are going to go through when they get to our end and a lot of it is heat. We're concerned about the num- ber of heat cycles we can run a board through, and how we can keep from damaging things as we go through the heat cycles. From the mate- rial aspect, we need to make sure that the mate- rials are robust enough to withstand the things that we're going to put them through at our end." SMT COMMUNICATION STILL THE BEST TOOL At the recent SMTA International 2017 event in Rosemont, Illinois, I-Connect007 Managing Editor Patty Goldman sat down with Tanya Martin, SMTA executive director, and Keith Bryant, global director of sales for YXLON International and Chairman of the SMART Group to discuss current events within the association, and to learn more about their upcom- ing merger. They talked about the rationale behind this partnership, and their upcoming event, branded under SMTA Europe and titled "Electronics in Harsh Environments," to be held in Amsterdam on April 2018. Read the full interview here. Joining Forces: SMTA and the SMART Group in Europe Keith Bryant Tanya Martin Paul Petty