To drive digital transformation and leverage the power of data through analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, enterprises need secure networks that provide mobility, real time visibility to operational data, and the ability to instantly communicate with “man or machine” via voice, video, and data. Unfortunately, broadband connectivity at most enterprises today is a hodge-podge of wireless cellular connectivity, wired internet access, enterprise owned WiFi networks, and walkie-talkie style two-way radio communications. As a result, enterprises face uncontrolled costs, indeterminate security risks, and unmanageable operational complexity.

With the release by the Federal Communications Commission of 150 MHz of Citizen’s Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS Band 48, 3.55 – 3.70 GHz) on unlicensed/lightly licensed basis, enterprises large and small can now afford secure, lightning-fast, private broadband wireless networks that deliver the control, predictability, and security of wired connectivity with the mobility, scalability, and ease of implementation of wireless.

Using a case study from enterprise operations, this paper discusses the pros and cons of cellular versus WiFi technologies, cost-benefit analyses of the technologies, and the benefits of private enterprise owned versus carrier owned networks for digital transformation of enterprise operations to Industry 4.0 standards.

Recently, there has been an increase in production stoppages due to cyber-attacks on suppliers. Criminals attack the weakest point of your supply chain. However, little progress has been made in increasing the level of trust in the supply chain, as an essential countermeasure, especially in SMEs suppliers . In this paper, we explore how-to step-up supply chain trust in two ways.

The first method is to raise the cybersecurity awareness level of small and medium-sized suppliers that supply parts and materials. Supporting security personnel and addressing general weaknesses in the IT system itself is usually provided by large companies and security firms. The definition, however, of critical information that must be protected, and the analysis of current threats, are not well advanced, as this knowledge is internal to SMEs. Imagine this. If you walled off your village, what treasures would you protect, where would you put them? Who would control the locks, how would you post guards, etc., or they would be stolen by bandits in no time? In other words, they are not progressing due to bottlenecks in areas that cannot be recognized by large external companies. Our experience will show you how to move your internal personnel forward to find the core knowledge that affects the functional quality of your products, the critical first step, and then to identify threats from a criminal's perspective.

The second method is the advancement of logistics and maintenance, which involves more people. From our experience, we will show how we understand the difference between a factory and a logistics and maintenance supplier in terms of trust, and how we have advanced our logistics and maintenance suppliers.

We believe that increasing supply chain reliability in the above two areas will increase mutual trust and promote supply chain trust, essential, for example, for smart city security.

IPC-TR-587 technical report, ‘Conformal Coating Material and Application ‘‘State of the Industry’’ Assessment’ [1] outlines an IPC study of major conformal coating types, coating application techniques, and coating cure technologies, characterizing the final film thickness on common component surfaces. In many cases, the film thickness, although visually not zero, was below the limit of measurement. In ‘Conformal Coatings: State of the Industry Vs of state of the Art’ [2] it was clearly demonstrated that conformal coating coverage and thickness are clear performance indicators of the propensity for a coating material to provide protection in harsh environments, e.g. condensing, salt-spray, immersion and mixed flowing gas etc.

Whilst state of the art materials improved protective performance by at least two orders of magnitude compared to the legacy materials, the paper highlighted areas for improvement, especially with regards to component tolerances. A natural, slight shift in position of components during soldering could yield very different coating patterns and coating coverage, resulting in inconsistent protection from one board to the next.

In this paper, we show how the creative use of liquid coating chemistry can permanently solve coverage issues within the current application paradigm, leading to improved ruggedization performance outcomes in immersion and condensing environments. The results clearly show consistently improved results for the new approaches providing significant enhancement of ruggedization performance.

Contamination of electronic assemblies can occur at any process steps and can be of different natures such as oxides, organic residues, or dusts. Those contaminations could reduce the reliability of PCBA through time. At the same time, miniaturization and new component typologies require ever-higher performances with ever-increasing functionality. Moreover, the industry is looking for solutions to improve cleaning efficiency, reduce costs and limit environmental impact. Thus, developing cleaning solutions become a challenge to guarantee the reliability of the electronics assemblies.

This paper introduces a new technology of cleaning solution developed to be compatible in several processes. After a short description of co-solvent and aqueous process, the cleaning results concerning the new technology that can work in both processes are shared. The cleaning efficiency is evaluated using IPC standards: visual inspection under microscope, ionic contamination, and SIR test. Surface tension is also measured.

Then, a scoring method based on the GHS labelling system and REACH regulation is used to evaluate the environmental impact of this innovative cleaning solution technology.

As a conclusion, the new cleaning solution does show promising results. For aqueous processes, this improvement allows to lower the cleaning time and/or the cleaning temperature. For co-solvent processes, the cleaning performance is similar with an improvement of the safety and the environmental footprint.

As new materials have been developed over the last few years, including the increasing use of thinner dielectrics and spread glass to help improve electrical performance, new issues have been introduced into the fabrication process.

Some of the issues with these new materials include increasing thickness variation due to low pressure areas and uneven copper distribution through the stack, and voiding due to lower resin flow. More complex designs can include thin drilled and plated subassemblies requiring hole fill, which can be a challenge for the fabricator due to scaling or stretching of the materials during the planarization process. This issue becomes even more exaggerated with softer RF materials.

This study looks at solutions to these problems and includes via filling without the planarization step. We also look at methods to produce very flat surfaces to enable more accurate back drilling and produce a flatness tolerance acceptable for large ball grid array packages during the assembly process. Spread weave glass materials have limitations due to low resin flow through the glass and can cause voiding. This limits the designer and can force the addition of more layers using lower copper weights for power planes. Micro cracking is caused by resin rich and resin poor areas having mismatched CTE values. The heavy weight of the copper is a challenge to produce without some level of voiding. This study looked at a 20-layer 4oz copper planar magnetic design in which a high flowing non-reinforced material is employed to overcome these challenges.