PCB Chat

Teresa Huber is president and CEO of Intervala, an EMS company based in Pittsburgh. She has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering technology from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MBA in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon. Prior to helping launch Intervala, she was chief executive for TMG Electronics, vice president of operations for the commercial electronics division of LaBarge/Ducommun, chief operating officer of Pinnacle Electronics, and spent 10 years with Sony Electronics in engineering, manufacturing and supply chain, including vice president of operations for Sony’s Pittsburgh Television Group. She explains Intervala's strategy and reasons for acquiring Princeton Technology Corp., its expanding target end-markets, and the M&A environment for EMS companies today.

Do you purchase boards overseas or domestically? What questions should you ask your board vendor? PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY columnist Greg Papandrew answers these and other board-buying questions. Papandrew is cofounder of Better Board Buying and the author of PCB Basics for Buyers. 

Some 39 episodes after Bob's first appearance on Reliability Matters he returns to discuss life as a consultant in the electronics assembly industry.

Luminovo is a Munich-based startup working on applying machine learning to electronics development and production processes. Cofounders Sebastian Schaal and Timon Ruban have worked with major automotive companies like Audi, Volkswagen and Daimler on shop floor parts kitting, quality control and inventory tracking, and with Infineon on machine learning for semiconductor manufacturing. They are now focusing on accelerating electronics manufacturing from printed circuit board design through assembly. 

Dave Trail, vice president of sales for the SMT & Electronics Business Unit of Critical Manufacturing, has over 25 years of experience in electronics manufacturing equipment, processes, and manufacturing executions systems software. Throughout his career, he has been a pioneer and proponent of the evolution of manufacturing from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0, Big Data Analytics, and the Industrial Internet of Things, and he has helped to bring those tools to some of the world’s largest multinationals. Dave talks about the use of MES and augmented reality (AR) in electronics assembly with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

During this interview, Mike Konrad and guests Mark Hughes and Greg Ziraldo of Advanced Assembly discuss two papers: Introduction to Reliability in Electronics: Tools and Metrics for Anticipating Device Failure by Mark Hughes https://tinyurl.com/rxmntru Cosmic Mishaps: How Cosmic Rays Can Disrupt Your Design Part 1: https://tinyurl.com/smccuf7 Part 2: https://tinyurl.com/ro4e5nt Part 3: ... See More

Mike Konrad and Mike Buetow discuss the state of the industry amid the Covid-19 crisis. Mike provides a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of our industry and provides his view from Productronica and IPC Apex.

It was a banner quarter -- and year -- for printed circuit board design software. ESD Alliance spokesman Wally Rhines joins Mike Buetow for his quarterly update on fourth quarter EDA market statistics, and gives his thoughts on whether Covid-19 will move the needle toward cloud-based PCB applications.

John Mitchell talks about the state of the industry, COVID-19 (coronavirus), and the future of the electronic assembly industry with Mike Konrad.

We bring back two previous guests, SMT consultants Phil Zarrow and Jim Hall of ITM Consulting. Phil and Jim host Board Talk, a popular broadcast where they field assembly-related questions and provide answers in a style only they can deliver. We’ll discuss how they go about “fixing” their customer’s problems and their new upcoming book, “Trouble Shooting Electronic Assemblies, Conversations from the Board-Talk Crypt.”