Summit Interconnect, North America’s largest privately held printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer, today announced that veteran manufacturing executive, Sean Patterson, has joined the company as Chief Operating Officer. In this position, Mr. Patterson will oversee all facets of operations that serve Summit’s growing customer base.

“Summit Interconnect remains focused on sharpening our execution and expanding our services to meet the circuit board manufacturing needs of companies around the world,” said Shane Whiteside, CEO of Summit Interconnect. “We welcome Sean to our leadership team and look forward to working together to be the best manufacturing partner for our customers.”

Summit’s former COO, Greg Halvorson, will remain at the company part-time as Advisor to the CEO.

With eight North American facilities and approximately 1,300 employees, Summit offers a complete portfolio of PCB products trusted by industry-leading companies in the defense, semiconductor, and commercial markets. Patterson joins Summit at a time of continued growth and innovation both within the company and in the electronics industry.

“Summit Interconnect has proven to be a customer-centric and rapidly growing company in the electronics supply chain,” stated new COO, Sean Patterson. “I am honored to be a part of Summit’s world-class team as we support our customers and bring a resurgence of manufacturing technologies back to the North American base.”

Mr. Patterson is a successful executive who has scaled operations to hundreds of facilities and overseen thousands of employees and assets. He was most recently the Chief Revenue Officer for Nano Dimension, a provider of intelligent machines for the fabrication of additively manufactured electronics to support embedded electronics, antennas, sensors, multi-layer PCBs, and other products.  Prior to that, he held multiple leadership roles in Amazon’s transportation and healthcare groups. Patterson also led numerous aerospace and defense manufacturing plants during his tenure at TTM Technologies and was instrumental in a billion-dollar acquisition restructuring. While at TTM, he oversaw the expansion of its PCB assembly plants and vertical growth in the supply chain.

Sean served as a US Navy Submarine Officer following his graduation from the United States Naval Academy where he earned a BS in Systems Engineering. He also holds an MS in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About Summit Interconnect: Summit Interconnect is the largest, privately held PCB manufacturer in North America. The company is focused on the fast-growing defense and high-performance commercial sectors in the North American market.  Summit offers solutions ranging from advanced cutting-edge prototyping to complex high mix, low-to-mid volume production.  Summit’s facilities are located across California, Illinois, Colorado, and Toronto, Canada. For more information, please visit  summit-pcb.com.

In 2020, the total value of electronic component shipments in the United States was approximately $235 billion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Since then, multiple new technologies have only increased the amount of circuit boards produced in the U.S. and around the world.

While the demand for PCB assembly services increased, more methods of PCB fabrication and assembly were used. One of the most effective methods is turnkey PCB assembly. There are two methods of turnkey: half and full. While half turnkey PCB assembly is fast, there are several reasons why full turnkey PCB assembly is the method of choice. Here are just a few of the many reasons you need to consider full turnkey PCB assembly.

Improves Speed and Quality

With full turnkey assembly, development speed as well as overall quality are typically improved. This happens because members of a circuit board assembly team use components that are the most conducive to the assembly technology being used.

Consolidation

If you choose to use full turnkey, your whole process will be consolidated. All it takes is a single purchase order to complete full turnkey. If you’re using traditional assembly methods, it can take multiple orders and extremely precise coordination during each stage of the process.

More Consistency

In turnkey PCB assembly, every aspect of the development phase is more consistent and yields more precise results. A full turnkey assembly method utilizes automated machine assembly to help deliver the most consistent end-results for every product coming out of an assembly facility.

Shorter Development Cycle

Full turnkey assembly has a much shorter development cycle than traditional PCB fabrication, which means that a PCB’s journey from assembly line to market distribution is much shorter using this method of assembly. This is mostly due to the fact that there is much less time spent switching from phase to phase during assembly.

Assembling PCBs is a vital part of keeping up with our rapidly advancing technological society. In a world that wants more in a shorter period of time, full turnkey assembly is an incredibly important asset for the PCB fabrication industry to make use of.