What APEX EXPO Award Recipients See for the Future of Electronics Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Jan Vardaman of TechSearch International Inc., who received the President’s Award, is helping the industry understand the complexity of packaging. “It’s my role to be a bridge for communication and understanding the role of packaging in our industry,” she says. “It is a complex subject, and I hope I am contributing to greater understanding.” She especially enjoys speaking at conferences and organizing panel discussions that dive deep into challenges and barriers.

Chislea demonstrates leadership by encouraging his early-career colleagues to participate in committee meetings, working groups, and even speaking events. “Time and time again, I’ve seen an acceleration in their careers and long-term credibility amonst their peers,” he says.

Standards That Support Innovation
Both Chislea and Cooke chair IPC standards development committees and emphasize the need to keep documentation moving at the same pace as the industry. “If current trends hold, I see us eventually moving to a fully integrated set of standards that approach design, assembly, workmanship, test, and hardware life progression and life extension of electrical and electronics technology from a systematic perspective,” Cooke says. “This would be evolutionary, but necessary as our hardware designs evolve, becoming more complex, intelligent, and self-healing.”

Compounding the challenges is a lack of purpose-built standards in the forefront of emerging technology, Chislea says, which has been occurring on a global scale for the past several years.

Sood’s work in standards development is “not the kind of foundational work that makes headlines, but it genuinely shapes where the electronics manufacturing industry is headed,” he says. He is helping update the materials, reliability, and manufacturing standards that next-generation electronics will need, “particularly as advanced packaging, new interconnect technologies, and multi-chiplet architectures push us toward thinking less about physics of failure and more about physics of degradation.”

At NASA, he is steering a technology investment strategy focused on low-power, mission-ready designs, while building partnerships with agencies that can make a difference. “It’s slower work than it sounds, but there’s a reason this industry says ‘promising’ and ‘proven’ are two very different words,” he says.

Pasquito also believes working on standards is moving the needle. “As committee members, it is in our hands to make the standards and training materials the best and highest quality possible for all of us to incorporate and utilize in our businesses.”

Finally, Caputa believes that contributing to several standards development initiatives that focus on establishing forward-thinking initiatives related to PCB design, fabrication, and engineering documentation, “lays the groundwork for an electronics industry focused on both the new capabilities of today and the future capabilities of tomorrow.”

Working Together Across the Ecosystem
Collaboration across the Global Electronics Association is another theme many winners emphasized. “We are all working to the same goal of improving the standards and training materials,” Pasquito says. “From my first meeting in 1998, listening to real people discuss real scenarios in real time, I experienced the collaborative spirit.”

“I like that we work with people from all parts of the industry value chain and from all over the world,” said D’Souza, who lives in Paris. “Most people are very bright, creative, and collaborative, trying to make the industry move forward as a whole.”

Nishimori enjoys the opportunity to have technical discussions with assembly experts from around the world, and he thanks everyone involved in the Japan task group. “This is not the result of my efforts alone,” he says.

Vardaman says working with the Association provides time to educate the community on the importance of packaging and why just building semiconductor fabs is not a solution.

For Sood, whose background is in PCB reliability, failure analysis, and electronics qualification for high-reliability applications, the biggest benefit of his membership has been the “cross-pollination of perspectives. Sitting in a room with materials scientists, manufacturing engineers, OEM quality leads, and end users all debating the same requirement, you quickly realize how differently people interpret the same technical requirement, and that tension is where the useful work happens.”

Mentorship and Knowledge Transfer
Cooke believes he holds the record for the briefest IPC mentorship at 10 weeks. “Everyone thinks I frightened the mentee into quitting,” he says, laughing, but it was much more benign than that. However, it does speak to his approach to mentoring. “I use a hands-off approach where I’ll give the mentee the freedom to explore the Association largely on their own, while providing guidance and recommendations when requested.”

However, he remembers his most influential mentor, Dr. Toliver, his senior design instructor at the University of Houston. “As department chair, he had the power to advance your development or recommend that you choose an alternate career—like pumping gas.”

Cooke distinctly remembers one class where Toliver forcefully set down his briefcase, pulled out Cooke’s project, and began ripping pages from it, “all while stating that in all his years of teaching, he had never had a student do what I had done.” Cooke sank into his chair and silently reviewed his life choices. That is, until Toliver held up the drawings for the class and declared there was nothing else he could teach Cooke because, with all the drawings he had delivered, the project could be built. “My entire academic trajectory changed at that point,” Cooke says.

Baranyi says he focuses as much as possible on developing high-capability engineers who will be prepared for the upcoming waves of manufacturing challenges.

“As I see it, the long-term impact comes from the use of digital tools and analytics in everyday engineering behavior, embedding Six Sigma discipline to make data-driven thinking second nature, and protecting knowledge transfer between senior experts and emerging talent,” he says.

Pasquito is a self-described perpetual student and learner. In her classrooms and interactions outside the classroom, she is “constantly discussing the newest, latest, coolest technology that I have read about, saw on television, or experienced first-hand. I love sharing trivia about space travel, computers, circuit boards, etc.”

When it comes to leadership principles, Sood relies on pacesetting, where he’s setting high performance standards and then modeling them himself. “I tend to lead from the front,” he says, understanding that technically-strong people tend to thrive in that environment, but it can be overwhelming for others. “That shift, from delivering results to developing people who deliver results, is what I think actually defines a change catalyst, and it’s a lesson I’ve carried into every leadership role.”

Gratitude for the Award
Even with all their tech talk, their award winners expressed gratitude for the recognition of a job well done.

“I did not expect it for even a second,” D’Souza says, adding that he has put a lot of work into the past 18 months, and the recognition “made me proud but more determined to contribute even more in the future.”

Caputa was humbled to be selected. “The Rising Star Award is a significant achievement and it is an honor to receive it. I want to express my deepest gratitude to God and the Global Electronics Association for this recognition.”

Chislea says, “Appreciation is infinitely divisible, and receiving appreciation from the Association highlights my long-standing commitment to the advancement of the industry.”

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