A Look at the High-Reliability Interconnect Market
July 15, 2015 | Barry Matties, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I-Connect007 Publisher Barry Matties recently met with Mark Cormier of Miraco Inc. to discuss the latest trends and drivers in the high-reliability segment, and their customers' increasing demand for quality.
Barry Matties: Mark, let’s start with an overview of Miraco.
Mark Cormier: We design interconnects and source interconnects. Most of our business is created from the need for a custom interconnect. The vast majority of our opportunities (~85%) are in the medical and military fields that require Class 3 high-reliability solutions. Our commercial business is only 15% of our total business.
The military designs we do are mostly avionics. We've had history in the past with doing a lot of ordinance, but right now that's not our big driver. Our ITAR registration has helped improve our visibility to more military designs.
Our medical designs are predominately medical device types of products. We seem to do very well in that area. It is long lead time, long design cycle.
Matties: What sorts of needs do your customers currently have?
Cormier: Typically they need an interconnect and they are short of time, short of manpower, or short of material knowledge. Miraco’s advantage is we're unbiased in the approach. We don't care if the design requires a flexible printed circuit, a flat flex cable or a wire harness. We can design and source any of the three options and have the capability of building the complete solution at either our North American facilities located in Manchester, New Hampshire or in Tijuana, Mexico. When volumes dictate, and with customer approval, we also have the option of building a full turnkey solution at our off-shore partner’s facilities. In summary, our customers benefit from our local design capability, our global sourcing network, and our multiple assembly options while keeping the quality assurance group in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Matties: When we look at medical electronics, that's a fast-moving market with a lot of changes being made.
Cormier: Yes, it is fast moving, and it slows down because the design cycles are so long from when you do prototyping to actually getting it into production. We just delivered a prototype that got a first-time order for something that we've been working on for eight years. We understand the material traceability requirements that our medical customers operate under.
Matties: When you say design, are you talking about from concept?Page 1 of 2
Suggested Items
Altium to Exhibit Latest Innovations at Embedded World 2024
03/15/2024 | AltiumAltium (ASX: ALU), a global leader in electronics design systems, will be at Embedded World 2024 to reveal its latest innovations across its ecosystem, spanning Altium Designer,
OrCADX: High Performance That's Easy to Use
03/14/2024 | Andy Shaughnessy, I-Connect007During DesignCon, I spoke with Chris Banton of EMA about the newest developments around OrCADX, which provides PCB designers with more design automation capability across the whole design process in an easy-to-use GUI. As Chris says, this tool is designed for agile design teams, and features an updated PCB UX, an enhanced 3D engine, SolidWorks integration, and AI for a superior user experience.
Cadence Collaborates with Arm to Jumpstart the Automotive Chiplet Ecosystem
03/14/2024 | Cadence Design SystemsCadence Design Systems, Inc. announced a collaboration with Arm to deliver a chiplet-based reference design and software development platform to accelerate software-defined vehicle (SDV) innovation.
Happy’s Tech Talk #26: Balancing the Density Equation
03/14/2024 | Happy Holden -- Column: Happy’s Tech TalkPrinted circuit design and layout is a creative process that has profound implications for electronic products. With the need for more parts on an assembly, or the trend to make things smaller to be portable or for faster speeds, the design process is a challenging one. The process is one of “balancing the density equation” (Figure 1) with considerations for certain boundary conditions like electrical and thermal performance. Unfortunately, many designers do not realize that there is a mathematical process to the layout of a printed circuit
Seika Machinery to Present Solutions to Optimize Production Processes at APEX 2024
03/12/2024 | Seika Machinery, Inc.Seika Machinery, Inc., a leading provider of advanced machinery, materials and engineering services, is gearing up to showcase its latest advancements at Booth 4012 during the 2024 IPC APEX EXPO, slated to take place April 9-11, 2024 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California.