Printed Circuit Design & Fab - May 2008 - (Page 38)

CPCA/IPC EXPO REVIEW A GLIMPSE OF CPCA’S GREEN AGENDA Many messages this year were focused on raising awareness of environmental issues. A futuristic booth on display at CPCA. A Tale of TWO TRADE SHOWS Can 75,000 people in one place be environmentally friendly? by KATHY NARGI-TOTH For a second time in recent months, nearly back-to-back trade shows, worlds apart, have provided visitors with the stark contrast of East and West. CPCA was held this year at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre. This is the second year the event has been held here, and while the location is outside of city center, the facilities are excellent and transportation to and from hotels plentiful. Like 2007, the CPCA Show shared the massive fair grounds with allied electronics events, Electronica and ProductronicaChina and Semicon China. The reported attendance at these simultaneous events exceeded a staggering 75,000 during the week of the show. What sets CPCA apart from other PCB exhibitions is the number of companies that come to show exclusively PCBcentric products. Unlike IPC Printed Circuits Expo/Apex, where the bulk of the exhibitors are assembly vendors, at CPCA over 500 PCB fabrication companies and PCB fabrication-specific suppliers are on display. The exhibition covered 350,000 square feet this year, up Sunstone’s Ecosystem offered PCBs from design through assembly. 38 100,000 square feet over last year. Attendance for the three-day event reportedly topped 40,000. Exhibitors represented the global complexion the show has taken, coming from U.S, UK, Canada, France, Japan, Korea, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. This year the focus was on green manufacturing methods and equipment for water and air purification. Some 12% of the exhibits featured products for clean water, air and improved environmental conservation. Companies like Duraflow (duraflow.biz), in partnership with a local company, are bringing state-of-the-art environmental management solutions from water treatment to full water-recycling equipment into China, to meet the increasingly stringent wastewater treatment demands. The theme of environmentally friendly processing permeated the event, and was a carryover from the 11th Electronics World Convention earlier in the week. Laminate and process chemical companies alike touted environmentally aware messages, from lead-free and halogen-free materials to semi-additive and fully additive fabrication processing. As in previous years, the first hall was dominated by a handful of large suppliers. WKK, Mania, Hitachi, Schmoll and Schmid occupied over 1000 square meters of prime floor space. Equipment dominated, as is typical for these events. Over 44% of the booths featured equipment, ranging from drilling machine manufacturers like Timax Electronics & Machinery of Hong Kong, to laboratory measurement tools from the Fischer Asia-Pacific Group. There was an increased number of local Chinese equipment manufacturers as well, supplying a variety of PCB fabrication tools for cleaning, plating, etching, scrubbing and even testing. Improving quality of construction and competitive cost from some local manufacturers has led to increased use of this equipment in the past 12 to 18 months. Some global PCB suppliers were missing from CPCA MAY 2008 PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & FAB

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Printed Circuit Design & Fab - May 2008

Printed Circuit Design & Fab - May 2008 Contents Our Line Market Watch Around the World Happenings ROI EMC For the Real World PCB East Conference Brochure Positive Plating Don't Let your Signals Stub Their Toes Improve PCB Layout With Skill Utility Programs The Next Generation Design Tool Challenge Thermally Conductive Microwave Materials PCB Dielectric Degradation in Lead-Free Assembly Applications A Tale of Two Trade Shows Eliminating Board Defects Off the Shelf Marketplace Ad Index BGA Bulletin

Printed Circuit Design & Fab - May 2008

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