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‘Soldering and Cleaning in Electronics’ international conference, including an exposition, took place in Brno on 12–13 October 1993. The conference was organised by SMT‐Info, together with the ISHM‐Czech and Slovak Chapter. The purpose of this common action was to bring together the professionals in surface mount technology and thick film technology. In the framework of the conference, in which 130 home and foreign delegates participated, the annual meeting of the ISHM‐Czech and Slovak Chapter took place.

The conventional wisdom in economics is that resources are limited, wants are unlimited, and the business of the economist is to understand how limited resources are allocated to satisfy unlimited wants. Typically, poverty or unmet physical need is addressed apart from consumer behaviour. It was not always so. Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson as recently as 35 years ago, for example, were explicit about the direct linkage between needs and wants. The changes that have taken place over the years are attributable to a shift away from an Aristotelian perspective on the nature of economic studies towards the Enlightenment view. Challenges the conventional wisdom that wants are virtually unlimited, resources are limited, and poverty is best addressed apart from wants. Presents need fulfilment alongside want satisfaction in the context of the principle of subsidiarity which helps define the role of the state in provisioning unmet need.

A recent meeting involved co‐operation with the organisers of the Canadian High Technology Show and the local Chapter of the SMTA. The programme included an inspiring keynote address by Mr Frank J. Pipp, Xerox Corporation. The topic of the address was ‘Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Control and the Evaluation of Total Quality Control in Xerox Corporation.’

The Nordic countries have not escaped the effects of the economic recession currently experienced by much of Europe as well as other industrialised continents. In the high technology electronics area, the opportunity is being seized by many Nordic companies to use this time to combine know‐how, consolidate existing expertise and concentrate efforts on developing advanced production techniques. Such an approach can help to ensure competitiveness in leading edge technologies.

The paper presents the application of two advanced thick‐film techniques: etching of fired thick‐films and photoimaging of photosensitive thick‐films for fabrication bandpass microwave filters operating in the frequency range from 6 to 14 GHz. Modified screen printing through ultra‐thin calendered screens is used for comparative goals. Advanced techniques are combined with novel thick‐film conductors including photosensitive pastes and etchable pastes.

As announced in the May issue of Hybrid Circuits, ISHM‐Benelux is organising a one‐day conference on applications of hybrid circuit technology.

Critical processing steps of COB manufacturing, as implemented at Epitek, are reported. They include testing of incoming boards, cleaning, bonding parameters, bonding defects and statistical process control.

Automotive electronics, after 1995, will be similar to aerospace electronics because there is a demand for low weight and volume together with very high speed and ultra‐high reliability. What is different is that automotive electronics must achieve all those properties at very low cost. It will be shown that when using ASIC chips the chip area is determined by the number of pins instead of the number of components of the active circuit. As ASIC technology proceeds towards line widths in the submicrometre range, the ratio of active Si area to total chip area is becoming much less than 1. This means that on the ASIC chip there is Si area which is ‘empty’. This ‘empty’ Si area can be used for designing self‐test circuits and redundant functions on the ASIC chip at a cost penalty slightly higher than the design cost. It will also be shown that these ASICs can work in the order of 100 MHz at the chip level. Such ASIC chips will therefore have a very high reliability at the chip level due to the inherent properties of the Si and the built‐in redundancy. At the same time they can work at very high speed. From a performance point of view the best solution should be a highly miniaturised packaging technology. With self‐test circuits on the chip, there is a good correlation between wafer test and final test. Therefore, from an economical point of view, working with chips will then have an economical advantage compared with working with packaged circuits. From a reliability point of view it will be shown that the solder joints are the limiting factor. A critical review is presented of the reliability problems plaguing the SMD and soldering technology of today. It will be shown that, if SMD technology is to meet the reliability demands in a future automotive environment, it will have to have solder joint failure rates better than 30 ppm over the life, 17 years, in automotive applications. The conclusion is that a multi‐ASIC chip approach has the best potential as the solution for the future, post 1995, automotive electronics, provided there is a highly reliable chip interconnection technology available at that time.

Scandinavia is always one of my favourite destinations for a number of reasons. First of all, I like the cleanliness of the atmosphere which certainly helps to keep one fresh at the end of a long day. Then on some days it gives that incredible clarity and luminosity so admired by artists and which in turn may have led to the clean lines of Scandinavian design. The striking memorial to Sibelius is a tribute to both Finnish design and her most famous musician. In fact, ‘Finlandia’ is the first piece of classical music I can remember and 1 first heard it on earphones using a crystal set. In those days virtually all receivers were hand made, even to hand‐wound coils. Loud‐speakers were an expensive rarity.