The sequence of events which led to the writing of this book started at a seminar on Manufacturing Technology in the Electronics Industry given by the Institution of Production Engineers in 1987. The seminar identified that the field of manufacturing engineering for the electronics industry was effectively missing from the vast majority of production engineering degree courses. The reason for this was that production engineering departments typically spring from mechanical engineering departments. This leads to a mechanical bias in the practical aspects of such courses. The consequence of this was that electronics companies could not recruit graduates with both relevant production engineering and electronic engineering backgrounds. This necessitated either recruiting production engineering graduates and giving them the necessary electronic engineering training, or giving production engineering training to electronic engineering graduates. A consequence of the lack of courses in a subject is that there is also a lack of relevant textbooks in the area, as most textbooks are intended to tie into courses. In the field of manufacturing technology for the electronics industry, existing textbooks tend to be highly specialized and mainly concerned with the fabrication of semiconductor devices.
