Dallas Chapter
Faye Bilger Chair

 

The Dallas Chapter held the following meetings recently:

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Title: "Reliability Management for Passive Component Technologies "


Date:       Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Speaker:    Chris Reynolds, AVX


Program Summary:
Faster, Better, Cheaper has long been the mantra for many "High Reliability" industries, often citing use of best manufacturing practices, "six-sigma" and COTS approaches.  But here we hit a snag before we've even got into full swing with the abstract - "six-sigma", which is at the heart of COTS and best practices, is actually a quality discipline and, strictly speaking, is independent of reliability.  Quality systems (and process controls) do play an important part and will be discussed, but the focus will be an in-depth look at many different passive component technologies, their respective reliability models and how these do - or don't - tie into their parametric characteristics.  We will also discuss the role of passive circuit protection devices in circuit designs as well as passive failure modes - which will bring us into some fundamental questions, such as - "If a part fails, is it unreliable?" or "How do I tell if a Circuit Protection
device has failed?"  Putting all these aspects together will bring us to a discussion of strategies how circuit designers can be effective Reliability Managers to maximize the lifetimes of their products.

Speaker:
Chris Reynolds is a graduate of Birmingham University, England, with a BSc in Physics and Astrophysics.  Currently residing in South Carolina, Chris has been involved with the passives industry for approaching 30 years with AVX Corporation in the UK and US, during which time he been associated with tantalum, ceramic, metallized film, thin film, varistor, EDLC which will all feature in the course of the presentation.

 

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In October, the Dallas Chapter hosted a student outreach in conjunction with the University of Texas Dallas (UTD) Computer Science Colloquium.

 

Title: "Building and Monitoring Trustworthy Software"

Speaker:    Professor Mohammad Zulkernine,

Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

 

 

Information on the Colloquium is contained in the attached brochure.