It’s amazing how much you learn when you reach out to others. My father often told me figuring out what I would do with my life was a quandary to him. Though incredibly shy, I simply had to communicate and had boundless curiosity. By the time I was 12, Dad claimed that he could have picked at least 10 professions for me, because I knew so much about each subject and would chatter for hours with any interested party. Perhaps his confidence that we could do anything gave his children the will to try anything.
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Sharing your knowledge is a choice, but a worthwhile one that, when you consider it, is part of being human. At IMAPS in San Diego, for instance, we (L – R: Gail Flower, David Barach, Andrea Roberts, Françoise von Trapp) hopped in a rickshaw and crossed the street to have lunch with Irwin Jacobs, Ph.D., co-founder and chairman of the board of Qualcomm. We already knew about his leadership in developing and delivering innovative digital wireless communications products and services based on the company’s CDMA digital technology. During the press interview we learned that he is concerned about technical education in the U.S. and has been instrumental in working with High Tech High. He is quite an educator. He applied what he knew and then spread that philosophy to his son, who now spearheads this work.
Just knowing something is not enough. In each issue of Advanced Packaging you now see the Roadshow (page 8), our back-stage approach to learning about people in our industry in their environment. The next time I produce a webcast, I may need an expert to present information, and relationship building on the road is part of this process. People like working with those they know and trust.
Last week we visited Chunghsin Lee, CEO at Wakefield, MA-based SEMIgear, Inc. Years of experience with different people in the industry have taught him that tools for the back-end must be specifically designed for the back-end. In the back-end, costs may be controlled easily because there are many variations in the human element, as opposed to the front-end where many of the processes are automated. Cost is an essential part of everything, and in electronics, the back-end is where you can control that cost. His tool for reflowing bumped wafers is the STP 300C, which consolidates several wafer-bumping steps in a serial thermal processing method that eliminates the flux step, and combines the clean and reflow steps in the process.
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Though shy when posing for our camera, Lee fairly bubbled with ideas. Impossible things happen every day, and when we communicate these ideas they grow. Stay well. Share your good works. Stay in touch.
Gail Flower, Editor-in-Chief