The captive shop used to be the rule, not the exception. Until outsourcing caught on, that is. North American captive shops went the way of the dodo bird, and the PCB market hasn’t been the same since. Even R&D went out the window, or offshore, if you want to be technical about it. But Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) is something of a wild card. The company recently opened a new captive facility in Idaho, and the industry is paying close attention.
At the end of 2022, NCAB's Ryan Miller completed IPC’s six-week IPC training certification, PCB Design for Military, Aerospace and Other Extreme Environments. This in-depth course provided me with the knowledge and tools to provide support to customers who are designing within these harsh and/or extreme environments. Whether it is for applications such as aerospace, military, or industrial, harsh environments can expose the PCB to extreme temperature, humidity, vibration, shock, and other conditions that can affect its performance and reliability.
Many electronics engineering groups have a hierarchical structure, with senior-, mid-, and junior-level engineering personnel possessing various depths of subject matter expertise. The head of an engineering group is usually one who...
The ongoing retirement of many of our colleagues has cast a spotlight on this month’s topic: tribal knowledge. As designers and engineers with 30 or 40 years of experience start pricing condos in Boca Raton, the entire industry...
Electrical characterization of high frequency circuit materials can be done in a variety of ways. Some characterization methods use a fixture to test the raw dielectric material, while other methods use circuits. The Dk and Df results...