Hello and welcome to my first Blog+ article about our European team. My name is Hans Adams and currently I am working for Nisshinbo Micro Devices Europe. Recently I was informed by our headquarters about a new informative Blog section on our website and are looking for some content writers for this. As a long-term employee of our European team, I would like to describe the history of this department and what we achieved versus the early days in the past.

Blog: Nisshinbo Micro Devices Inc. is Born.

Launch of the European Office

Somewhere in the year 2000 Ricoh Electronic Devices in Japan decided to establish a new European office to support the local customers as this area has a lot of potential customers and we would like to expand our business.
My previous manager was assigned and sent to Europe to launch the Semiconductor Support Centre based at Ricoh Europe in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. Soon it was clear that he needed an assistant as this department has a lot of duties and responsibilities. So, they were looking for an application engineer to visit and follow up requests from customers, communicate and support the local distributors and also start some marketing activities to promote our brand and products. I joined the department in March 2001, although I had 20 years of practical experience as a field application engineer in the Netherlands, various tasks were challenging for me, and I had to learn many things. Firstly, I was able to communicate in English but lacked a daily experience. So, writing my first email in English took me half a day and around noon I was still hesitating to push the outlook send button. Fortunately, it takes much less time nowadays to write emails as I became more experienced. But in those early days I always thought that you had to be perfectly skilled in English for an international job. Over the years I learned that almost nobody is perfect in English, we all have our own way to communicate. But the most important point is just to forward your message to others, even if it contains grammar and spelling mistakes. Today it is even easier as we have so many translating tools available to assist our daily work like Google and DeepL to translate documents, YouTube with automatic translated subtitles, text to speech tools and what about this fast-growing ChatGPT, it will certainly become a promising tool soon.

During my first week, my Japanese colleagues had absolutely no time to teach me about their electronics business, instead they were preparing for the first European seminar for distributors in Cyprus and were busy to make presentations and printing materials. They gave me two large databooks, each with at least 800 pages and asked me to read it during the week of their absence. Well, I had nothing to comment about as a newbie but reading a databook is just like reading a telephone book, it is full of technical data, parameters, and specifications. The book has certainly no exciting story with a happy end… Anyway, after their return they also had good news for me, it was time for me to go to the Shinagawa office in Japan for some training and wow, what an amazing new world unfolded for me during this trip, let me write about this in a next episode.

Shinagawa Office

Creating Product Photo's, Past versus Present

After a few months my manager asked me to start promoting our new products in electronics trade magazines, another new challenge for me. I had to write some text to highlight the product, include important features and a nice product photo. In those days in 2001, a good product photo was not available, and the publishers asked for high resolution images in at least 300 dpi. After some considerations, I ordered some product samples and an “advanced” digital Ricoh camera. Well, I totally underestimated this job as I had to take a photo of one of our first products in a WLCSP package (R1113Z) with dimensions of 1.29 x 0.79 mm, good luck!
To make a long story short, the camera was hardly capable to focus on such small objects and my photo was just a lucky shot of numerous attempts. As for the background I used a CD since I liked the colourful reflections by shining light in a particular direction. The packages were put on a piece of glass a bit above the CD to create some shadows. I have been using this technique for a while, but it was time consuming, difficult to get the result you had in mind, and I always had to order samples which could have a long delivery time. 

Photo R1113Z LDO

We have a very different approach nowadays as in general, all semiconductor packages changed from through-hole to small SMD types which are barely able to handle by hand. It would have been an idea to purchase a better camera and appropriate lenses but when enlarging such small package, all the imperfections become visible as well. The best option was to purchase 3D software to create our product images on the computer, which is very convenient. It is now possible to design package images of any kind and we are in full in control of all photographic aspects. You can find these rendered 3D images throughout our website and in any publication. Of course, there is a tough learning curve to become familiar with Rhino3D software, but it is also not necessary to learn everything from A to Z. It is now even possible to create an animated motion image or some transparent package to see what's inside.

3D Software to Make Product Photo's

Digital Marketing Requires Various Skills

Our way of working evolved over time in terms of marketing, I learned that this job is much more complicated nowadays. Marketing is not only a skill to promote products in the most efficient way, but one also has to understand the products in order to write an article, understand the typical technical slang which is common in the electronics industry and not to forget the knowledge and skills to work with various desktop publishing tools. That makes this job exciting and is never dull, every day is a new challenge to try something new.

At a Glance: Nisshinbo Micro Devices Inc.