Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

New Normal. What is the New Normal? For those of us who work in electronics, most days it feels like a foreign concept. When you consider what our collective industries have gone through since 2018, when the U.S. vs. China trade war started, and the Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs went into effect, now into this Chinese New Year (CNY) and the global Coronavirus pandemic, it seems like the answer to that question is: normal is something we may never see again.

Anyone who has been in the business for more than five minutes understands that the rate of change in electronics hardware development can sometimes be overwhelming. Just this year at the University of Michigan, a team has developed the world’s smallest computer, measuring just 0.3mm to a side, smaller than a grain of rice.

Running production operations is a daunting task for manufacturers. You want your operations to be highly productive, flexible with the changing needs of customers, and to run efficiently. At the same time, you want to develop ways to reduce process costs without reducing the quality of works-in-progress (WIP) parts or finished contracted products.

Every year, post Labor Day, most of us are focusing on getting “back to work” and recovering from whatever the summer holidays brought our way. As the weather starts to cool, and the sports start to change, those of us who work in supply chain management, procurement, and shipping immediately turn our eyes to what has become the constant fourth quarter challenge: getting our companies through peak season with no delays or surcharges.

Maybe you have heard of technical writing before, or maybe this is your first-time hearing about it. The chances are good, however, that you have seen or experienced technical writing already in your life. It is an established practice within the industrialized world, but what is it?

At Epec we work on such a varied and technical catalog of products, so our engineers must be comfortable leveraging every manufacturing technology available to them in order to create solutions in design and production. One of the most important technologies that we use is 3D printing.

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) have become an integral part of everyday modern life, both at work and at home. PCBs were at one time found primarily where you would have expected them to reside inside computers, calculators, televisions, and other such obviously electronic devices, but now they present nearly everywhere.

Working in the manufacturing industry, you’ve probably noticed the letters RoHS or REACH on various documentation or even browsing our website. But, have you ever wondered what these letters stand for or what the certification that comes with them entails?

While it's true that The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has long issued a series of recommended standards for electrical and electronics design, those standards do not actually specify wiring color purposes in the way that a lot of people think they do. This is surprising given that those standards do contain extensive discussion on wiring and power cables.

If you were to ask 5 separate people to explain the definition of keypad, likely you would receive 5 completely different answers that all center around the same basic concept. According to Wikipedia a keypad is a set of buttons arranged in a block or "pad" which bear digits, symbols or alphabetical letters (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypad). While this definition is correct, when communicating to a potential user interface supplier the term keypad requires further elaboration.