By Sanjay Huprikar, President, IPC Europe and South Asia Operations 

As the electronics manufacturing industry continues its recovery from the COVID abyss, IPC has been actively engaging the European electronics community on numerous fronts:

Standards

Aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial, and medical verticals continue to highlight numerous areas for the development of standards and best practices for printed circuit board fabrication and printed circuit board assemblies to serve a wide range of new products and applications. To handle the volume of inquiries and opportunities, IPC was thrilled to recently hire Fran Fourcade to be our Electronics Technology Standards Manager in Europe. Fran’s vast knowledge of the market, the key players, and the needs of the industry uniquely qualify him to lead our liaison activities in the region. In just his first few weeks in the new role, Fran has facilitated meetings for the 3D Plastronics group and an IPC Design group in Italy.  In other news, IPC was called on to facilitate a new European working group looking to address reliability issues with PCB microvias. The group kicked off their work in March 2022 with IPC’s Vice President of Standards and Technology, David Bergman, as the main liaison. The group is co-chaired by the European Space Agency and imec, and has more than 30 participants from numerous OEMs and PCB fabricators across Europe.     

Events

As we saw at productronica in late 2021 and IPC APEX EXPO in early 2022, participation in trade shows is once again gaining momentum. IPC is thrilled that we will be meeting our members at smtconnect May 10-12 in Nürnberg, Germany, and at Global Industrie May 17-20 in Paris, France.  IPC’s European Director of Operations, Philippe Leonard, will be leading our team’s activities at both events. The Hand Soldering competitions focusing on IPC-A-610 will be a prominent feature at both events. In addition, the German event will showcase a keynote address from IPC’s President and CEO, Dr. John Mitchell, on the state of advanced packaging, and a discussion on EMS statistical programs moderated by Dieter Weiss, the CEO of Weiss Engineering; the French event will showcase important technical seminars on ultra HDI technology and PCBs for harsh environments, and a meeting with the French-based IPC Design group, which has grown to nearly 100 engineers. A big thank you to both show organizers for their incredible dedication to the industry and for providing IPC with important venues to help us execute our vision to help companies Build Electronics Better.

Education 

Quality products start with a well-trained workforce. To assist with the OEMs and EMS companies hiring new engineers and technical staff into urgent DFM, product, manufacturing, process, and quality engineering roles, IPC launched the fully online and self-paced “Electronics Assembly for Engineers” training course in 2021 to provide a practical and fundamental understanding of PCBA processes and electronics manufacturing. Several members of the European community played a prominent role by suggesting ideas for content during the course design stage and by adopting the program in 2022 as part of their normal onboarding processes.  We look forward to calling on this community again in the latter half of the year as we start designing the intermediate and advanced modules.