It’s Only Common Sense: When the Cheapest Board Becomes the Most Expensive
The Chemical Connection: Employee and Operator Empowerment in the Age of AI
The Big Picture: Not One, But Three Grey Rhinos
Dr. Stanton Rak spent the better part of this past year taking readers inside the electronic systems that enable electrification through his “Road to Reliability” series, to find out what it takes to make them reliable. Now that the series has concluded, he explains his motives for writing it, his holistic approach to covering EV reliability, and how it can become an important technology driver for high reliability electronics more broadly.
Nolan Johnson: Stan, your series has been a fantastic read, I have to say. Now that it’s concluded, I’d like to look back and discuss it. Please summarize the series and what you set about to accomplish.
Stan Rak: In the series, I wanted to take readers inside the electronic systems that make electrification possible and ask what it takes to make those systems reliable over the life of the vehicle, rather than focusing primarily on batteries, range, and vehicle performance, like many publications do. I want to acknowledge the invaluable help I received from Tracy Riggan at the Global Electronics Association, who kept this train on the rails, so to speak. We started this series with an overview of the EV landscape and then moved through power electronics, vehicle controls, high-voltage auxiliary systems, ADAS and connectivity, charging infrastructure, and the materials and manufacturing technologies behind them.
The final article brought those topics together through field failures, monitoring, qualification, and standards. You can certainly choose an individual article that interests you, but when you read the series as a whole, I think you begin to see how interconnected EV reliability really is.
Johnson: That was a major takeaway for me: the holistic approach you applied to the entire system, looking at the car not as a bunch of subsystems but as a whole, and discussing how that interaction made a huge difference in identifying the design and power management challenges that we face in an electric vehicle.
Rak: Thank you for saying that. I saw a gap between the tremendous attention being given to EV innovation and the little attention paid to the long-term reliability of the electronics that make that innovation possible. We hear a great deal about battery range, charging speed, high voltage architectures, autonomous features, and software-defined vehicles. But every one of those advances places additional demands on electronic components, materials, interconnects, PCB assemblies, and manufacturing processes; all things that SMT007 readers are interested in.
My background has been in automotive electronics materials, manufacturing, and reliability, so I wanted to look at electrification from that perspective. I also thought this series was particularly relevant to the SMT007 audience because many of the answers ultimately come back to what this industry knows very well: material selection, PCB design, soldering, cleanliness, coatings, interconnects, process control, testing, and failure analysis.
EVs may be changing operating conditions, but electronics manufacturers already possess much of the knowledge needed to address the reliability challenge they face.
Continue reading this interview in the October 2026 issue of SMT007 Magazine.
