Episodes

Tuesday Jul 07, 2020
PCB Chat Episode 62: Kevin Walker of Benchmark Lark Technology
Tuesday Jul 07, 2020
Tuesday Jul 07, 2020
Benchmark Lark Technology this month opened the doors to its 122,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art factory in Phoenix. The new site is significant because it includes both a fabrication and assembly capabilities, making Benchmark a vertically integrated manufacturer and creating one of the few greenfield fab shops in the US in the past 20 years.
PCB Chat speaks with Kevin Walker, product line director, RF & High Speed Circuits at Benchmark Lark, which is a unit of Benchmark Electronics. He has spent more than 30 years in the electronics manufacturing industry, including 10 with Rogers, Dynaco, the flex circuit fabricator, NEE, Micro Systems Technologies, and AVX. He explains the background and strategy behind the new plant, and gives listeners an auditory walkthrough of its features and capabilities.

Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
On this episode of Reliability Matters, Mike Konrad joins Dr. Jennie Hwang, Phil Zarrow, Bob Willis and Ray Prasad to discuss several industry topics including the pandemic, common technical issues, training and support, and other interesting topics.

Friday Jun 26, 2020
Episode 45: A Conversation with Dr. Chris Jackson about Reliability
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Dr. Chris Jackson is founder of Acuitas, a company dedicated to electronics reliability. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of New South Wales, and a master's and Ph.D. in reliability engineering from the University of Maryland. He is an American Society of Quality Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE), and a Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) from Engineers Australia.
He has been senior reliability engineer for the Australian Defence Force, and director and founder of multiple research centers at the University of California Los Angeles. He has authored or coauthored multiple textbooks on reliability engineering and implemented several RAM programs across multiple industries.
Chris discusses his five-part article titled "Three Ways to do Reliability Allocation." This article may be viewed here:
https://accendoreliability.com/?s=3+Ways+to+do+Reliability+Allocation
Additional technical works by Chris may be viewed at https://accendoreliability.com/page/2/?s=jackson

Tuesday Jun 23, 2020
PCB Chat Episode 61: InspectAR Discusses Electronics Debugging Tools
Tuesday Jun 23, 2020
Tuesday Jun 23, 2020
Inspectar is a startup company whose signature product is a tool for fast debugging of electronics hardware. The novel system highlights the nets on a board and captures and shares the metadata with other engineers, regardless of the native tool environment. Mihir Shah (CEO), Darryl Day (CTO) and Matt Noseworthy (CIO) talk about Inspectar’s origins and highlights of the just-released InspectAR 2.0.

Thursday Jun 11, 2020
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
Dr. Jennie Hwang's wide-ranging career encompasses international business operations, sustained leadership in worldwide manufacturing and technology services, innovative research, intellectual property management, global leadership positions, as well as corporate and university governance.
Dr. Hwang has held senior executive positions with Lockheed Martin. SCM Corp., Sherwin Williams., and was the CEO of International Electronic Materials Corp. as well as co-founded entrepreneurial companies. Currently, her company provides business, technology and manufacturing solutions to the global industry. She has served as an advisor to many Fortune 500 multinational companies, as well as the US government programs.
Her formal education includes Harvard Business School’s Executive Program, Columbia University Business School Corporate Governance program, and four academic degrees (Ph.D., MS, MA, BS) in engineering & sciences from Case Western Reserve University, Columbia, Kent State-Liquid Crystal Institute and Cheng-Kung University, respectively. She was the first female to earn a doctorate from Case Western Reserve University's Engineering School - Materials Science & Engineering and has served on the university's board of trustees since 1996.

Monday Jun 08, 2020
PCB Chat Episode 60: Audrey McGuckin on Corporate Talent Strategy
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Monday Jun 08, 2020
To execute a business strategy, you need to figure out your talent and people piece. So says Audrey McGuckin, a global HR executive, who for more than 25 years has lived and worked across the globe in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, Spain and the US.
Audrey spent more than 20 years at Jabil, rising to vice president and chief talent officer. Today, as head CEO of Audrey McGuckin Talent Solutions, she consults with top CEOs and CHROs to solve complex business challenges through innovative talent and people solutions. Her client base includes a broad spectrum ranging from startups to Fortune 100 organizations.
She discusses her approach to helping businesses attract and keep key talent with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
PCB Chat Episode 59: John Davignon of the HDP User Group
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
The HDP User Group is a nonprofit consortium that conducts electronics manufacturing research. Its members run the gamut of the electronics supply chain, from suppliers of raw materials to fabricators and contract manufacturers to OEMs. John Davignon, a project facilitator with HDP, explains the organization's structure and approach.

Thursday May 28, 2020
Thursday May 28, 2020
Dr. Christopher Tang is a UCLA Distinguished Professor and the holder of the Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration and editor of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, the leading journal for the operations management research community.
His research spans across different areas including: global supply chain management, retail operations, and social business operations. He has co-authored one book and co-edited four more, and published over 100 academic articles in research journals and management articles in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and The Guardian. He also spent a combined 13 years at HP and IBM in supply-chain management, specializing in lean and just-in-time processes.
He offers his view on how the electronics supply chain might respond to the Covid-19 disruption -- and how it might not -- with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

Thursday May 28, 2020
Thursday May 28, 2020
With so many people out of work, Reliability Matters speaks with friend and colleague Dr. Mike Stull about entrepreneurship. Dr. Stull is a professor at California State University San Bernardino. He is the director of the Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship (IECE) at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). He also serves as Chair for the Department of Management in the Jack H. Brown College of Business and Public Administration and academic director for entrepreneurship.

Wednesday May 27, 2020
Reliability Matters Episode 42: A Conversation with X-Ray Expert Keith Bryant
Wednesday May 27, 2020
Wednesday May 27, 2020
Keith Bryant discusses the advantages of x-ray technology, its practical uses, and common mistakes made when using x-ray technology. A fully qualified engineer, Keith has over 30 years’ experience in electronics manufacturing. He is well known and respected for presenting technical papers at many high-profile events around the world and for his many published articles and interviews.
He started his career in this industry with bare printed circuit boards in the early days of high-count multilayer technology, moving through to running contract manufacturing operations. He had 10 years’ experience with advanced materials and soldering systems before working with high technology x-ray and AOI systems, again for 10 years.
Then for almost three years Keith worked as a technology and business consultant, assisting many of the major industry names. From 2017 to 2019 he was global sales director of a leading x-ray manufacturer. Last year reverting to a technology and business consultancy role allowing him to pursue other interesting projects, including i4.0 and working with an advanced x-ray tube manufacturer.
Keith was chairman of the SMART Group for 11 years and is now chairman of SMTA Europe, and in 2018 he was presented with the SMTA International Leadership award.

