Jabil Technical Project Manager Talks Electronics Manufacturing Services

The January/February issue of Medical Product Outsourcing featured a story on electronics manufacturing services (EMS). As is the case with feature stories, there is always extra information that does not make it into print. Here is the full interview with Girish Wable, technical project manager at Jabil Inc. Jabil is a manufacturing services provider headquartered in St. Petersburg, Fla.

MPO: What are some of the new technological trends and innovations that have emerged in the past year connected to EMS?

Wable: Four manufacturing themes have become to represent recent trends in EMS in the medical device industry: miniaturization, integration, ruggedization, and automation.

Contract manufacturers had a good business model. They were mass procuring discrete parts manufactured by several separate electronics and mechanical parts supply chains and assembling them. Along the way they were offering aligned services in design and repair as required by the customers. Portable 3-D printing and infrastructure of embedded electronics including integration on the component side has gained significant momentum over the last year.

EMS has had to address emerging trends that are pulling the “value add” aspect of the parts away from the assembly stage to the electronics component or mechanical assembly (integration of silicon, embedding of components by semi/printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing versus point of use manufacturing by consumers) by embarking on service offerings beyond traditional assembly and design services. Customization and personalization of integrated industrial products  to ensure performance differentiation or market placement or warranty assurance is one of the options that can be realized with additive manufacturing innovation.

Contract manufacturers have been challenged to manufacture and deliver compliant products at speeds and costs hereby reserved for fast moving smart electronics. The EMS industry has responded by digitizing their supply chains, incorporating big data analytics from design through procurement to manufacturing processes and thereby assuring the required traceability at competitive costs and agility typical of a contract manufacturing environment.

The EMS industry has established a solid foundation for intelligent robotics and adaptive automation. Contract manufacturers have been readily staffing with experts from the automation industry and securing strategic acquisitions. The use of these captive but mature engineering resources will enable the EMS industry to adopt widespread automation into manufacturing, making it possible to minimize sensitivity to escalating labor and transportation costs. it also allows them to redeploy their most important assets, their people to high value creating functions in safe operating conditions.

While not new, some significant progress has been made on embedding components with a lot of module manufacturers using this technology. Several leading edge PCB manufacturers have begun offering production capacity for this surface-mount technology integration in a PCB fabrication process.  Embedding of active dies in Fr4 [a composite material composed of woven fiberglass cloth with an epoxy resin binder that is flame resistant] and of passive components in flexible substrates is emerging as a topic of interest.

3-D printing has received some significant press has made the most amount of progress in terms of commercial availability of solutions. The EMS industry has rapidly adopted this trend and has begun to offer services and to initiate standards in this space.

With the ROHS [The Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive] legislation firmly in place requiring a majority of the medical device manufacturers to convert, activity has been high on stepping up on product conversions or launching of new products manufactured using lead free solders.

Integration of electronics in passive devices has seen a big increase in the last year in everything from glasses to wrist watches. With an increasing trend towards miniaturization, integrating functionality through cross technology pollination is becoming a key ingredient of innovation. EMS can leverage from the experience gained through the manufacturing of smart electronics and adapt it for medical device integration. The emergence of wearable electronics for daily consumer use promises a great vision for medical devices. As these devices become ubiquitous they have the ability to propel health monitoring and awareness beyond human comprehension. The wearable devices can help feed a huge amount of data into intelligent analytics making it possible for prognostic and strategic medical care while minimizing the need for tactical and reactive treatments. It is also exciting to see SMEs that have had years on experience in their respective fields of PCBA and diversified engineering work together to make the integration happen

Other technology topics that have emerged over the past few years but seem to realize significant press over the last couple of years are microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and printed electronics

MPO: There has been a trend towards miniaturization over the past few years in electronic and other devices. Is that trend continuing, and what implications does that have for your industry?

Wable: While the trend is very much continuing to emerge there is also some dialogue happening on “right sizing” of devices. Products don’t just have to be smaller and smaller but, instead, could be small enough. In some cases, in fact, the sizes have been growing in order to deliver more functionality over miniaturization, e.g. larger screens for smart phones.

And there are still a lot of areas where the trend of miniaturization continues. This is requiring our industry to handle smaller and smaller components.

Editor’s note: Wable provided examples of extremely miniaturized components such as these chip resistors from Rohm Corporation, and right sized finished medical devices such as Tandem Diabetes Care Inc.’s t:slim insulin pump.

This means that the EMS industry has to manage extremely small components in huge volumes and at the same time remain flexible enough to adapt to changing designs and fluctuating volumes. This has required the EMS to investigate flexible manufacturing using automation and robotics where it makes sense, and most importantly, inline inspection systems that are capable of inspecting tiny parts at very high speeds. EMS is able to provide a unique perspective as they understand the aspects of manufacturing and handling both the electronics parts and mechanical parts (plastic or metals), so involvement of EMS during the design stage of such integrated products ensures timely exit to high volume manufacturing without major DFX issues.

MPO: What market segments of the medical device industry are seeing growth in terms of electronic innovation? Conversely, are any segments taking a back seat in terms of electronic innovation?

Wable: Wearables are exploding.

Smartphone-like data communicators for all body-mounted or home-use devices such as monitoring systems, drug delivery pumps, actual pills (embedded RFID, regulated release), pills bottles (regulated/authenticated dosage) and single use devices.

I don’t see any devices taking a back seat in terms of electronic innovation—anyone who is able to convince management and/or investors is able to innovate with regards to to electronics in their respective field.