HI,

 If you wanted to repair one of today's cell phones and you had solder wick and a 40W iron would it be possible? Not really IM/HO.

 I wonder if that same model applies to the use of rework systems in the future?  As the complexity factor goes up and the size goes down the assembly technology sky rockets. It is like a piece of glass, once it breaks it is into the trash.  Not that glass is not recyclable, it just is not economically feasible. 

  If it's a major expense to get a PnP machine running today don't look forward to tomorrow!

 Then there are systems. Folks might have noticed that today's FPGAs have serial IO streams at over 5 Gb/s. A PCI bus is only 1 or 2 Gb/s. And the FPGA has several of these links and each link is two wires? 

 So I see many more major high level components being made by a very small number of "Assemblers" and a lot less small assembly outfits.

 Many of today's assembly houses will be empty or will look like "Appliance Repair Shops" where a little through hole and SMT work for specialized items is provided.

Bob K.

-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Drew meyer
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 10:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [TN] What is the future of electronics assembly?

Dave,  

All the responses I read it brought to mind my time at Hawkeye Institute of Technology earning an electronics technician associate degree.  Keep in mind this is 1978-1980.  

We are learning on training computer systems both programing and debugging.  One day an older model training computer is set up at the front of the classroom.  Immediately everyone wants to know why.  We are informed that we will be learning the function of core memory systems.  The first response of all the students is that's antique (dinosaur) and no one uses it.  The instructors respond that when we graduate at least 25% or more of us will be working with it.

Graduation comes and I go to work at a company in Iowa that sells industrial process control equipment.  Their computers run with core memory 56k of R/W core and a 2k wire ROM.  Why core/wire based systems?  They are non-volatile memory.  A power failure does not result in data loss.

 I repair every thing on the core memories but the core stacks.  The wire ROM, I must repair everything including re-wiring bad wires as the manufacturer of it will no longer service it.  For the next eight years the systems are fully serviced and I repair all their cards.  Cards that include DTL parts.

I believe that older technology dies a little faster today but you can never count a technology that works well and is still available out of the mix that will be present in the future.

To this day I can remember core memory function.  Sense/Inhibit lines, X and Y lines, Data Register to capture the data for output and to re-write the location.  The read cycle was a destructive cycle (the location was erased during a read an had to be automatically re-written to restore the data).

Drew Meyer

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