On Wednesday of this week I attended the annual Central Texas Electronics Association Vendor Show in Austin. The event took place at the new Norris Conference Center at Northcross Mall. This was my first visit to Norris, and I was favorably impressed by the facility.
The technical program was very good with informative presentations by local professionals on a variety of topics. The first presentation I attended was on “X-Ray Inspection for Electronics Quality and Reliability” by Glenn Robertson of Process Sciences. Glenn discussed various X-Ray technologies and visual inspection. He also answered some common concerns expressed by clients about the effectiveness of X-Ray inspection in RoHS-compliant assemblies.
The second presentation I attended was presented by David Carey, the “Chief Wrench” at Portelligent. David and I first met in about 2000 when I was at the Flextronics Austin Design Center and he was just starting Portelligent. He has a fascinating job. He and his colleagues at Portelligent tear down products and study them from a Bill of Materials standpoint and to understand the packaging and assembly of the devices. This kind of information has a variety of uses. His topic was High-Density Packaging Trends in Portable Electronics. He discussed the state of the art of packaging for mobile devices like cell phone, iPhones, etc. The discussion included a comparison of System in a Package (SiP) and Package on Package (PoP) approaches to high density packaging. It is amazing to see under the hood of the devices that we know and love and to see that engineers and designers continue to push the envelope to give us more connectivity at our fingertips. I love the fact that you can also get to their website by going to www.teardown.com (no longer active). That is fairly descriptive of what they do at Portelligent.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the final two presentations of the day, but I want to list them in case readers want to look into the information that was presented. Presentation #3 was by Cheryl Tulkoff and Jim Lance of National Instruments on Electronics Reliability Prediction Using the Product Bill of Materials. Presentation #4 was given by Bert Haskell of HelioVolt on Thin Film Photovoltaic Technology and Solar Cell Module Design.
I enjoyed the event and next year Baselodge Group hopes to participate as an exhibitor in the vendor show. Thanks to all those in the CTEA who made this program happen.