CircuiTree - July 2008 - (Page 6)

[ My Line ] Say Goodnight, Gracie y this time perhaps many of you have learned that I am leaving CircuiTree. My tenure with the magazine may have been abbreviated, but I am still reeling from all the things that took place over the past 18 months. Not only was I able to rekindle so many relationships with people I worked with when I was in the industry with IPC years ago, I made many new friends and enjoyed some great experiences bringing the best of the best in the PCB industry to your desks and desktops every day. And I leave the magazine in the best of hands to keep moving along. I chose the full-time staff I hired for a reason: they get the job done. They will continue to do so. So as I pondered what I would cover in my ﬁnal column with CircuiTree, just one thing kept coming into my mind, and although I am a very private person by nature, I felt this experience warranted a brief, thoughtful note of what PCBs mean to me. On May 8, my wife gave birth to a girl. This would typically be a celebrated occasion, but due to complications we were forced to deliver seven weeks premature— in emergency surgery. Both my wife and child were monitored—and baby kept alive—by all kinds of electronic medical devices I never would have imagined. Machines breathed for my daughter, monitored her heart rate, checked her blood pressure, reported her blood oxygen level, and gave up-to-the-second temperature readings. It wasn’t until all was said and done, when I was thinking about a topic for this column, that I remembered some recent ones by Joe Fjelstad and Ken Gilleo on PCBs for medical devices. In their articles they took the technology approach, explaining how ﬂex packages work in high-reliability medical devices. They explained the stack-ups, constructions, materials used, and design considerations for the PCBs—Ken even went somewhat sci-ﬁ with his write-up on the package you can swallow so doctors can monitor all sorts of things. I’m still pretty sure Dennis Quaid is not in those devices. As I thought about all those devices, I thought about the designers who thought out the circuits, the manufacturers who built them, the materials suppliers, and those guys and gals sitting in those IPC committee meetings ﬁghting over Class 3 requirements. Know that when all is said and done, the products you make do matter to people. So with that, I now bid adieu. I thank you for reading, and for caring to write when you read something controversial. I also thank all the contributing columnists and feature writers who keep a steady stream of high-quality content coming to the magazine. Say goodnight, Gracie. Goodnight. Group Publisher • Tom Esposito (610) 436-4220, espositot@bnpmedia.com Publisher/Chief Editor • Chris Jorgensen (248) 786-1647, chris@circuitree.com Senior Editor • Stephanie J. Church (734) 997-9235, stephanie@circuitree.com Technical Editor • Karl Dietz technicaleditor@circuitree.com Technical Packaging Editor • Ken Gilleo Ken@ET-Trends.com India Editor • Muniswamy Anil Kumar Editorial Advisor • Happy Holden Global Sales Manager • Christopher Wilson (248) 244-8264, wilson@circuitree.com West Coast Sales Manager (AZ, CA, CO, NV, OR) • Ed Lohmann (925) 648-2562, lohmanne@bnpmedia.com Art Director • Mike Holmes (412) 306-4358, HolmesJ@bnpmedia.com Production Manager • Nann Barkiewicz barkiewiczn@bnpmedia.com Send to: Nann Barkiewicz, BNP Media, 2401 W. Big Beaver Rd., Suite 700, Troy, MI 48084 Marketing/Reprints Jill L. DeVries – Editorial Reprints, (248) 244-1726, devriesj@bnpmedia.com Marketing Manager Senna M. Shehadeh, (248) 786-1604, shehadehs@bnpmedia Audience Development Christine A. Baloga – Corporate Audience Development Director Christina Gietzen – Audience Development Coordinator Megan Unsworth – Multimedia Coordinator Catherine M. Ronan – Corporate Audience Audit Manager For subscription information or service, please contact Customer Service at: Tel. (847) 763-9534 or Fax (847) 763-9538 or e-mail: CTR@halldata.com www.circuitree.com Contact Info for List Rental Customers: POSTAL: Robert Liska, List Manager 800-223-2194 • robert.liska@edithroman.com EMAIL: Shawn Kingston, Account Manager 800-409-4443 • shawn.kingston@epostdirect.com Back Issues – Ann Kalb – (248) 244-6499, kalba@bnpmedia.com 6 July 2008 • circuitree.com http://www.circuitree.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.