PCB Chat – Details, episodes & analysis

Scott Bright is co-founder and COO of Cadstrom IO, a new company that is coming up with tools for resolving some of the engineering problems that designers and engineers are encountering daily.

Bright has more than 35 years of technology and management experience, including three years at IoT company Jiva, where he was CEO, and 13 at the engineering firm Synapse, which he co-founded and was CEO.

Bright has designed hardware from back of the envelope sketch to high volume manufacturing for everything from commercial to the highest-reliability applications. As a career hardware developer, he understands the software problems endemic to product development.

He discusses Cadstrom's new platform for catching errors the ERC flow misses with Andy Shaughnessy and Mike Buetow of PCEA.

In electronics manufacturing, defects don’t usually announce themselves. They happen in milliseconds, far faster than human perception, and often long before anyone realizes a process has drifted out of control. By the time failures show up in test, inspection, or worse, in the field, the root cause may be buried deep inside machine behavior that no one thought to question. When machines are assumed to be accurate instead of proven to be accurate, and when force is set but not verified, hidden variation creeps in. That variation can translate directly into cracked components, misalignment, latent damage, and long-term reliability risk. Michael Sivigny is SMT productivity & profit strategist and owner and general manager CeTaQ Americas, a company that has spent decades doing what most factories don’t, objectively measuring machine performance under real production conditions.  Sivigny's work has repeatedly shown that even well-maintained, recently serviced equipment can operate outside of specification, quietly generating defects at high speed. In this conversation, we’ll dig into how accuracy validation and force measurement expose problems traditional troubleshooting misses, why OEM calibration alone is no longer enough for today’s miniaturized electronics, and how statistically sound measurement practices improve not only yield and uptime, but long-term product reliability. If you believe reliability starts long before functional test, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

This is the third of four episodes on the subject of soldering materials.

Today, we’re continuing our deep dive into the world of soldering materials, from advanced alloys and flux chemistries to global manufacturing strategy and materials innovation, with one of the industry’s most respected leaders. Joining Mike Konrad is Ross Berntson, president and CEO of Indium Corp.

Berntson has been with Indium for nearly 30 years, starting as a product specialist and rising through the ranks with leadership roles in product management, technical support, and international operations. He even spent time leading Indium’s Asia Holdings while based in Singapore, strengthening the company’s presence across Southeast Asia. In his current role as CEO, Berntson sets the strategic direction for a global materials powerhouse, one that’s known not only for its high-performance soldering products but for its commitment to innovation, collaboration, and engineering support through the company’s “One Engineer to Another” philosophy.

Berntson holds degrees in chemistry, teaching and an MBA from Cornell University, where he earned several prestigious academic awards. He’s also deeply engaged in both the electronics industry and his community, serving on multiple boards and leading with a strong emphasis on culture, opportunity, and respect, the core of what Indium calls “The Indium Way.”

In this episode, we’ll discuss how soldering materials are evolving to meet the demands of modern electronics, from miniaturization and harsh environments to UHDI and advanced packaging. We’ll also talk about Indium’s unique positioning in the industry, the challenges of global supply chains, and what the future of soldering looks like from the vantage point of a company that’s helped shape it.

Flux says every step of the electronic design process is slow, expensive, and error-prone. The startup company’s engineers think they have a solution: a browser-based PCB design platform and programmable simulator. 

Matthias Wagner, CEO and cofounder, and Kerry Chayka, product expert, both veterans of PCB design with companies like Facebook and Apple, discuss the problems that led them to develop an all-encompassing tool that includes a programmable SPICE simulator for testing circuits with real parts and environments. 

The subjects of Industry 4.0 and Big Data have been widely discussed on this podcast. What is Industry 4.0? What data is our industry collecting? And, perhaps more importantly, how can we sift through all of that data to make it useful and actionable? To help answer these and other data-related questions, Mike Konrad interviews Ryan Gamble, CEO and Founder of Intraratio. Intraratio is a company that provides on-premise and cloud hybrid software with platforms to track, manage, control, and automate the manufacture of advanced electronics. Intraratio serves the semiconductor, SMT, space/military, medical device and EV markets. Ryan earned a dual electrical and computer engineering degree and spent many years in the semiconductor industry. He’s responsible for improving product manufacturing and testing of commercial and space/military product lines including multi-core DSP, RF and silicon photonics devices. During this period he developed software systems to automate and manage quality and reliability of complex electronics, extending this to hyperscale web-based platforms that interconnect factories globally. His passion is working with all levels, to identify and recommend solutions to business problems, based on a deep technical understanding of operational processes and product complexities.

Eric Camden (lead investigator with Foresite) and Mike Konrad discuss electrochemical migration (ECM) and other failure modes caused by residues on circuit assemblies.

On this episode, Mike Konrad speaks with Mark Goodwin, COO of Ventec Europe, a supplier of copper-clad laminates and prepreg bonding materials for the circuit board fabrication industry, about supply chain challenges.

The Printed Circuit Board Association of America, or PCBAA, was founded in 2021 to advance US domestic production of PCBs and base materials. The organization is made up of corporate members of all sizes, and includes fabricators, assemblers and suppliers.

My guest today is David Schild, executive director of the PCBAA. We discuss government investment in printed circuit board manufacturing in the US, the just announced allocation for PCBs as part of the Defense Production Act, and how innovation can't stop at design.

This episode of PCB Chat is sponsored by PCB East, the Electronics Industry’s East Coast Conference and Trade Show. Coming to the Boston suburbs May 9-12, and registration is now open at pcbeast.com.

VVDN Technologies is perhaps best known as a provider of end-to-end engineering and manufacturing of hardware, mechanical and electronic assemblies, and embedded software, among others. Founded in 2007, it now has 11 product engineering centers worldwide, plus seven manufacturing plants across India where its capabilities include SMT, injection molding, tooling, die casting, and metal stamping, among others.

The company in February announced plans to invest $100 million over the next five years in a new 100-acre factory in Tamil Nadu. That plant will add PCB fabrication capability, rounding out the firm's vertical integration strategy.

Vivek Bansal, co-founder and president of engineering, discusses the company's plans and future expansion in India and elsewhere with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

This episode of PCB Chat is sponsored by PCB East, the Electronics Industry’s East Coast Conference and Trade Show. Coming to the Boston suburbs May 9-12, and registration is now open at pcbeast.com.

Metallic Resources is a developer of high purity solder for electronics applications, making paste, bar, and cored wire products, among others.

Metallic Resources’ slogan is “not your typical solder,” and one big reason for that is the high purity solder it supplies. This is credited to the company’s electrolytic refining process.

David Bao, Ph,D., director of New Product Development, Erik Ozan, senior manager and head of the recycling division, and Jeff Giles sales manager of Metallic Resources talk about that refining, reclaiming, the pros and cons of risk aversion, and why some companies are wasting money stuck in higher cost solder assembly processes with PCB Chat host Mike Buetow.

This episode of PCB Chat is sponsored by PCB East, the Electronics Industry’s East Coast Conference and Trade Show. Coming to the Boston suburbs May 9-12, and registration is now open at pcbeast.com.