Lew Wagner, President, Surface Mount Technologies, Inc.

Express Manufacturing, Inc. (EMI) recently celebrated 30 years in the EMS Industry. Our company has  come a long way since its humble beginnings operating out of a garage. According to the Orange County Business Journal, EMI was cited once again, as the largest contact manufacturer in Southern California, employing over 850 team members in the Santa Ana and over 500 in our fully owned China facility.

During the past 30 years, we have experienced many changes in the industry; EMI's focus on Total Customer Satisfaction has enabled us to continually adapt to the changes and maintain a steady growth.

In 2013, EMI has seen the market demands products with smaller packaging. These include many medical devices. EMI announced the implementation of the Package-on-Package (PoP) process which stacks two components together to reduce foot-print. This process has become more mainstream in multiple applications.

The Package-on-Package process is a sophisticated assembly packaging technology that vertically stacks a discrete controller and memory Ball Grid Array components. It allows multi-chip packages to be integrated for greater space savings on the printed circuit board (PCB). Instead of occupying multiple flat surface areas on the PCB, PoP allows the components to stack up. The overall benefit of the PoP method is that it significantly reduces real estate on the PCB while increasing overall speed.

In an effort to support the customer's need of reducing the turnaround time in bringing new products to market,EMI has launched a multi-level New Product Introduction (NPI) and the Quick-turn prototyping program to provide customers with substantial cost savings by eliminating multiple re-design cycles while ensuring product manufacturability.

EMI looks forward to a strong 2014 focused on: customer satisfaction, lowest total cost of acquisition, manufacturing flexibility, and the creation of successful supply chain relationships.