CircuiTree - July 2008 - (Page 33)

[ CircuiTree 20-Year Retrospective ] example of what happened with just some of the legislation and marking requirements. Japan started promoting the concept of the three Rs (reuse, reduce, and recycle). That’s where we all need to be heading. Reusing the materials and not wasting them; reducing the amount of energy that is consumed as we build new products; and recycling electrons so that the restricted substances do not wind up in landﬁlls. If surface mounting was the problem of the ‘90s, legislation, material, and process alternatives are the challenges of the next few years. The most promising solution seems to have been developed by a single pioneer who was very disturbed about the rationale for doing the many things that seemed all wrong. Taking the lead out of the solder joint after all the years of reliability analysis drove him right up the wall. Joe Fjelstad contemplated how he could connect things without hurting the environment, or dealing with the madness that has captured the industry attention, and, thus, the Occam Process was born. The major difference is that this process can make a difference, just like the transistor made a difference; however, the infrastructure of the existing processes will not go away, and they really shouldn’t. Hopefully the idea will grow and others will build on the concepts. Here is a chance to work together to make a difference. Think about the ﬁrst transistor and the wafer that it was produced on. It was very new technology at the time, and we are now at very large wafers and still our yields are not really what one expects of board fabrications yields. The interesting thing about the new idea is that much of the technology is already in place and it captures and provides solutions to many of the problems of combining electrons and photons without the stress of a 250 °C soldering exposure. The next few years, up to 2010, promise to be very exciting. Building on consumer desires, the amount of new implementation concepts are outstanding. The ideas come from a global pool. The industry will continue to take on grand challenges and, as already reported by Ken Gilleo, another pioneer, expect telecom personal products to be much more compact, loaded with features, highly efﬁcient, and truly friendly. During the next years, the smart phone that replaced the cell phone will evolve into a completely wearable personal interface product set. The personal interface will adopt form factors from today, such as sunglasses, watch/bracelets, pens, and rings. Medical electronics will also evolve and methods of care will allow the consumer much more freedom of choice and information regarding the status of the individual body functions, thus providing many early warning signs of conditions that can be treated, provided we pay attention to the unbiased assessment. ■ Dieter Bergman is director, Technology Transfer, with IPC. Email: DieterBergman@ipc.org circuitree.com • July 2008 33 http://www.marchplazma.com http://www.marchplazma.com http://circuitree.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CircuiTree - July 2008

CircuiTree - July 2008 Contents My Line Industry Review Tech Talk Flexible Thinking Toward a PCB Production Floor Metric for Go/No Go Testing of Lossy High-Speed Transmission Lines Intelligent Design 20-Year Retrospective Ask the Flexperts Environmentally Speaking BPA Growth Curves Considering Design Variants to Maximize Process Efficiency Market Outlook Technical Product Spotlights Classified Ads Upcoming Events Ad Index

CircuiTree - July 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.