Episodes
Wednesday Aug 17, 2022
The Promising and Challenging Future of 3D Printed Electronics
Wednesday Aug 17, 2022
Wednesday Aug 17, 2022
The business development manager of J.A.M.E.S., Alexandre Schafer talks about the organization’s vision to push the Additively Manufactured Electronic technology to become more accessible to the industry.
Show Highlights:
- What is J.A.M.E.S. and how did Alexandre become involved in the organization?
- J.A.M.E.S (Jetted Additively Manufactured Electronic Sources) is an online community of professionals, stake holder, manufacturers who share the same vision of accelerating the AME technology
- Alexadre’s AHA moment was seeing a drone’s PCB created through AME process
- The current technology readiness level is currently between experimental and demonstration pilot phase
- Introducing new technology to the industry has it’s challenges:
- Influencing engineers’ mindset
- Which design tool to use? In an ideal world a tool with both ECAD and MCAD design capabilities is necessary–a fully working 3D auto router will be amazing
- Design standards are inexistent at the moment
- On another note, the lack of design standards opens up to wider creative possibilities. Standardation is the enemy of freedom -Zach Peterson
- Moving forward to future plans: Scaling up, manufacturing of the equipments and creation of additive process design rules
- Availability of resources and current efforts to educate PCB designers through AME Academy
Links and Resources:
Follow J.A.M.E.S on LinkedIn
Connect with Alexandre Schafer on LinkedIn
Access Register to AME Academy
Visit J.A.M.E.S website
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Tuesday Jun 28, 2022
IPC CEO John Mitchell on the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act
Tuesday Jun 28, 2022
Tuesday Jun 28, 2022
Supply chain security and having access to trusted manufacturers in the US would be an ideal outcome of the Printed Circuit Board Act.
IPC President and CEO John Michell talk about how the organization helps shape the current bipartisan proposal to help bring back PCB manufacturing in the US and how this can contribute to a globally resilient supply chain.
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Show Highlights:
- John Mitchell briefly talks about his background and dives right into the topic, the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act
- John emphasizes the role of the IPC as the voice of the electronics industry
- Supply chain security and having more trusted PCB manufacturers in the US would be a great outcome of the Printed Circuit Board Act
- Adapting the existing legislation on manufacturing defense products to broader use, especially with electronics
- Raise awareness of the different aspects of the electronics supply chain shortages and other issues related to it
- Eradicate the notion that PCBs are just a piece of plastic, but an essential piece in every electronic
- The IPC's influence on shaping laws relating to the electronics
- John explains IPC's role and involvement, which includes solving industry problems related, but not limited to, the workforce, supply chain, and advanced packaging issues
- The IPC SEA Tools: Standards, Education, and Advocacy
- John stresses that having manufacturers in different regions is a key to a resilient supply chain
- Identify what electronic products to manufacture where
- The Printed Circuit Board is a 60 billion industry globally, and only 3-5% of volume comes from the US
- John explains the impact of the changing administrations in the US on the current progression of different bills and legislations relating to the electronic industry
Links and Resources:
Connect with John Mitchell on LinkedIn
Visit the IPC website here
Learn more about the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act of 2022
Watch John Mitchell’s previous episodes:
- IPC CEO John Mitchell on the Impact of COVID-19 on the Electronics Supply Chain
- John Mitchell, CEO of IPC, Visits The White House to Participate in the Pledge to America’s Workers
Watch a recent related episode: The Benefits of Diversifying PCB Industry Supply Chain
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Wednesday Jun 15, 2022
Occam Process: Assembly without Solder
Wednesday Jun 15, 2022
Wednesday Jun 15, 2022
Have you heard of assembly without solder? In this episode, Joseph (Joe) Fjelstad, founder and president of Verdant Electronics, talks about the Occam process.
Let’s hear about Joe’s 50 years of experience in the electronics industry and how he got started with solderless assembly for electronics.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Show Highlights:
- Joe talks about his background and previous roles in the industry, including his position as the educational director in the IPC and Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Research in the Soviet Union
- “Assembly without solder” Joe recollects how he arrived at the idea of a better way to build electronics – build a component board and put circuits on it.
- Joe shares how he came up with the Occam process and its benefits “It absolutely doesn't need to be for everything, but it can be for a lot of things, and it can make products that will be at once cheaper, better performing, lighter, more environmentally friendly.”
- Download Joe’s book for free: Solderless Assembly for Electronics: The SAFE Approach
- More about the Occam Process
- Did Joe coin “Design with Manufacturing”? He shares his efforts in promoting solid work relationships between PCB designers and manufacturer
- Occam Process vs. 3D printing, could 3D printing bypass solderless assembly? Read Joe’s article Putting 3D interconnection technologies into perspective from chip to system
- Joe commended the microvia technology, “they know how to build these things”
Links and Resources:
Connect with Joseph Fjelstad on LinkedIn
Visit Verdant Electronics website
Read Joe Fjelstad Interview: Breaks Down His Occam Process
Download Joe’s book for free: Solderless Assembly for Electronics: The SAFE Approach
Connect with Zach on LinkedIn
Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
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Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Wednesday Jun 08, 2022
The Benefits of Diversifying PCB Industry Supply Chain
Wednesday Jun 08, 2022
Wednesday Jun 08, 2022
To develop a resilient ecosystem, understanding the root cause of the PCB industry supply chain shortages is a must.
In this episode, Travis Kelly, president and CEO of Isola Group will help us understand what is going on with the current supply chain in the electronics industry. Travis will also give us his insight into the new legislation introduced in the US Congress: Bipartisan Bill to Bring Electronics Manufacturing to America and Strengthen Supply Chains.
Tune in, or listen on the go. Stay up to date with the latest discussion in the PCB Industry.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Watch the video, click here. t
Show Highlights:
- Travis's introduction and a brief overview of PCB manufacturing and fabrication in the United States
- About 20 years ago, the US produced roughly 26% of the world's PCBs; today, that number is down to 4%
- There used to be over 2000 fabricators in the late 1990s and early 2000 to less than 140 today
- What are the main drivers of the PCB industry supply chain shift?
- The industry recognizes the benefits of working in a global economy; Travis explained the need to diversify manufacturing capabilities in certain regions
- Identify what makes sense to have a robust supply chain domestically, e.g., 5G, 6G, medical, aerospace, obviously defense, banking infrastructures
- Travis stresses that there are ways to reduce the overall cost of PCB and electronics production and still manufacture domestically
- Looking at the entire ecosystem and pointing out vulnerabilities outside of just chips and advanced packaging, how to address each one?
- Focus on a balanced approach, not over-indexing; strategically, where does it make sense to build brick and mortar to have a resilient, robust, and trusted supply chain?
- What does it mean to bring manufacturing onshore?
- Building a strategic and competitive PCB industry ecosystem requires more than just automated facilities; it’s also essential to invest on:
- Workforce development – hiring and building up a talented workforce domestically
- Promote STEM in schools
- Create awareness of PCB industry design and manufacturing as part of the sought after career in tech
- Travis gives insight into the new legislation introduced in the US Congress: Bipartisan Bill to Bring Electronics Manufacturing to America and Strengthen Supply Chains
- He emphasizes the importance of understanding the root cost of the imbalanced supply chain vs. addressing just the symptoms
- Continue to educate the Whitehouse on understanding the issue extensively and not just focusing on the semiconductor shortages
- Considering the cost of the end products (for consumers) when navigating and drawing solutions
- The role of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America (PCBAA) in the industry: educate, advocate and legislate
Links and Resources:
Connect with Travis Kelly on LinkedIn
Follow PCBAA on LinkedIn
Visit Isola Group’s website
Eshoo & Moore Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Bring Electronics Manufacturing to America and Strengthen Supply Chains
Connect with Zach on LinkedIn
Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
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Learn More about Altium Nexus
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
Data Security, 5G and Onshore PCB Manufacturing with Dr. Rob Spalding
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
In this episode, we are very pleased to have Dr. Rob Spalding. He is a retired Brigade General at the US Air Force and now the CEO of SEMPRE (Secure EMP-Resistant Edge), a tech company based in Washinton DC that provides military-grade 5G and high-performance edge computing infrastructure for telecom operators, first responders, government and enterprise customers.
Today, Rob and I will talk about all things security! Rob will tackle the importance of being proactive when it comes to protecting your data, and his advocacy to bring a better understanding of technology and innovation in Washington, DC (White House).
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Show Highlights:
- Rob’s background and career before he became the CEO of SEMPRE
- What is SEMPRE? What are the problems it solves and the solutions it offers?
- Rob clarifies what’s written in his 5G report, which was taken out of context in 2018
- He emphasizes building enough spectrum into the network to take full advantage of the 5G technology
- Rob’s take on PCB manufacturing, and semiconductor manufacturing onshore
- Onshore manufacturing has its advantage in controlling and protecting intellectual property
- Most corporations are making decisions on the basis of, what's my margin?
- TSMC has built itself up to be the best chip company in the world because they own the manufacturing line
- Hardware-level security in base stations
- Ability to zerorize crypto–shutting infrastructure down, and shut that thing down physically destroy certain things
- SEMPRE uses FPGAs as a security advantage
- It's data that really drive value in the economy
- If we can’t protect our data, then we can't protect the integrity of who we are as individuals and who we are as a nation
- Rob demonstrates how vulnerable is the public from being spied on
- A recent survey reveals that there will be a talent shortage in the PCB design and manufacturing industry in the next 15 years
- Rob suggests allocation of budget to sponsor American kids through four-year degree programs in STEM
- During the Cold War, the US had initiated education for national security–a lot of scientists and engineers in the space race were educated through this initiative
- The advantages of bringing the manufacturing back to the US
Links and Resources:
Connect with Dr. Rob Spalding on LinkedIn
Visit SEMPRE website
Read about the shortage of talents in the PCB industry in 15 years: In an Unpredictable World, PCB DESIGN ENGINEERING Stays Steady
US Government Calls for Revitalizing American PCB Manufacturing
Connect with Zack on LinkedIn
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Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Tuesday Apr 05, 2022
The Many Benefits of Additive Process in PCB Manufacturing
Tuesday Apr 05, 2022
Tuesday Apr 05, 2022
In this episode, we will continue with the topic of Design WITH Manufacturing, and joining us is Mike Vinson, the Chief Operating Officer at Averatek. Mike will help us understand Averatek’s advanced PCB manufacturing processes, including the technology and chemistry behind A-SAP and 3D printing.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Show Highlights:
- Mike Vinson's background
- Mike explains what is an Additive Process
- A-SAP–a semi-additive process used to make very fine features for high definition, and high density interconnects on print circuit boards.
- The ability to add metalization other than copper, such as platinum, gold, palladium
- 3D printing–a fully-additive process where all of the material is just added on, and nothing is subtracted away
- Averatek’s business’s scope
- Licensing the technology and selling the chemistry
- The current clientele is North America
- Efficient and secure prototyping
- Is the 3D surface solderable?
- MIDs or molded interconnect devices, are cool, but are they affordable?
- Tara Dunn, Averatek’s VP in Marketing, is the primary point of contact for licensing
- Tara is also one of Altium’s Industry Expert contributor
- What’s in the Averatek’s IPC Paper
- What does the economy look like for A-SAP technology? Will it be accessible, and cost-effective?
- Mikes talks about the scalability of materials set in A-SAP technology
- How can PCB designers take advantage of the A-SAP capabilities so that they can create more compact, smaller features, more advanced products?
- How about a transparent substrate? Averatek has worked with transparent polyimides and has done some other transparent substrates
- What are the things to look forward to in additive processes and the additive manufacturing realm in general?
Links and Resources:
Connect with Mike Vinson on LinkedIn
Visit Averatek's website
Check out Tara Dunn’s Articles on Altium Resource Hub
Watch Previous Episode Mike Vinson:
Sub-25 Micron Traces with Averatek ASAP Technology
Semi-Additive Process Technology at Averatek
Connect with Zack on LinkedIn
Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
Download your Altium Designer Free Trial
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Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
High-Reliability PCB Design with Juan Frias
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
The aerospace industry has driven the high-reliability design in the center focus. Juan Frias, our guest for today, is a very experienced PCB designer who has designed for Aerospace, Military, Industrial, Semiconductor, Communications, Medical, and Automotive; he will be sharing the tips for a successful design for manufacturability. We will also tackle Flex and Rigid-Flex design. This conversation will be fun and insightful, so watch through the end and make sure to check the additional resources below.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Show Highlights:
- High-Reliability Design WITH Manufacturing, how did the Aerospace industry influence this focus?
- The advantages of working closely with the manufacturing team
- Focus on improving the design process and eliminating back and forth communication and miscommunications
- Understanding what will work BEST for your manufacturer
- Working with flex and rigid-flex designs
- Space savers
- Reliability and stability advantages
- Choosing between flex versus a rigid-flex board, what are the considerations?
- Can you use BGA on Flex?
- How does the manufacturer influence the material selection
- Board-spin on existing design–the systemized process of ordering materials that are running low
- The design preparation process for fabrication
- What do designers need to know about stiffener
- The importance of creating a prototype to save time and money
- PCB Validation, test and Inspections, who does what?
- Typically the customers are the only ones who can do a test with the product because they have the entire system on their end
- PCB designers perform the electrical tests and control impedance lines
- Identifying a good designer to do business with–-local vs. overseas
- See you at the AltiumLive 2022. Register here
Links and Resources:
AltiumLive 2022 Connect: Now open for registration
E-Book: Navigating PCB Manufacturing: Part 1
Three Common PCB Design Mistakes You Can Spot in Your Gerbers
How to Successfully Design a BGA
Connect with Zach Peterson on LinkedIn
Watch Zach’s latest Altium Academy courses on Youtube
Read Zach’s articles on Altium’s resource hub
Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
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Learn More about Altium Nexus
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Tuesday Aug 17, 2021
Data-Driven Smart Manufacturing
Tuesday Aug 17, 2021
Tuesday Aug 17, 2021
A Silicon Valley rising star advocates higher efficiency in electronics manufacturing.
In this episode, Andrew Scheuermann, CEO, and Co-founder of Arch, shares his company’s mission to drive digitization and sustainable innovation in electronics manufacturing. He will discuss Surface Mount Technology machine optimization and how factories can benefit from advanced analytics.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Watch the video, click here. [link to website live page]
Show Highlights:
- Introduction to Andrew and the founding of Arch Systems
- Understanding the founders, Andrew Scheuermann and Tim Burke’s experimentalist and theoretical personas, respectively
- The key to finding their niche
- Starting Startx - top 5 startup in the world
- Platform mindset - software and hardware technology that could be deployed to any kind of machine
- Become a world expert in Surface Mount Technology (SMT) machines
- Industrial Automation, how does software makes the world go round?
- Opportunity identified for SMT industrial control automation and useable, meaningful data
- Data-driven, smart manufacturing
- In-depth analytics-getting data out of legacy machines
- Digital Proof of concept, why is this valuable?
- 20 - 40 or even 60 percent improvement in manufacturing efficiency
- Predicted quality, 99% OK what do you do with the 1%?
- How do you get data out of the machine and translate them into meaningful solutions?
- Universal translation, aggregation, data security
- Andrew explains ArchFX broker being deployed on-premise
- The benefits of advanced analytics - Improved Quality, reliability, speed, better-increased margins, Informed CapX spend
Arch Systems Website
Arch Systems Overview Video
The ArchFX Platform: The Proven Fast Track to Transformation
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Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Tuesday Jul 27, 2021
Key Factors of Thoughtful Design
Tuesday Jul 27, 2021
Tuesday Jul 27, 2021
“Engage your suppliers early on the design process” - Ed Becze
Everyone wants a lower price, and often the “real cost” is not realized until it’s too late. In this episode, Ed Becze of Pegmatis, a highly experienced R&D company with end-to-end product development capabilities, joins us to help start-ups and design engineers like you avoid electronic product development failures.
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Watch the video, click here.
Show Highlights:
- Introduction and the interesting origin of Pegmatis’s company name
- Ed explains the foundation of a good product development process
- A thoughtful development plan mitigates risk early on—engage vendors and suppliers early on the design process (understand parts, availability, vendor capabilities aligned with your product)
- Holistic understanding of electronic product development: strategy, cost, and your design team’s experience level
- Start-up challenges, how to prevent failures:
- Understanding the risk of “development by demo”
- Address the lack of system-level design experience (use external expertise if needed)
- Don’t trust the data sheets—only 5% of chipset providers give adequate design rules to follow. The rest, you are on your own.
- Manufacturing test is absolutely critical—test equipment and test development are often overlooked
- Engage early on the design process. Ed stresses the benefits of nurturing your relationships with your vendors and manufacturers.
- Successful product development relies exclusively on your network—find capable vendors
- Supply chain intelligence, plan ahead when coping with supply challenges
- Cost reduction—do it, but follow the process that is within the constraints of what you intended to create.
- What are the costs of NOT thoughtfully designing? It’s huge! Money and time. Delays inTime to market are extremely expensive.
Links and Resources:
Pegmatis Website
Ed Becze on LinkedIn
Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
Download your Altium Designer Free Trial
Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics
Tuesday Apr 02, 2019
Materials 101 with EIPC Chairman Alun Morgan
Tuesday Apr 02, 2019
Tuesday Apr 02, 2019
Meet Alun Morgan, Technology Ambassador for Ventec, a world leader in the production of high quality, high performance copper clad laminates and prepregs with a world-wide distribution network. Alun interacts with customers around the world promoting Ventec materials, and brings the latest market requirements to Ventec in order to develop new products.
Watch the Video here.
Show Highlights:
- Alun is a Material Scientist, with a B.Sc. Hons in Metallurgy from the University of Surrey. Once he became involved in PCB manufacturing he found it such a fascinating field that he has spent his entire career refining his knowledge.
- Everything Ventec does can also apply to smaller scale operations who are making PCBs.
- Alun was a Keynote Speaker at AltiumLive
- The FR-4 we use today has it roots around 60 years ago; there was an FR1, 2 and 3, as well as FR-5. According to the NEMA specification from the 1960s, FR is defined as Flame Retardant.
- FR-4 also means the fourth generation of materials in the NEMA classifications system. It defines the resin kind and the reinforcement type.
- FR-4 is an epoxy resin and the reinforcement is typically woven glass fibres for strength.
- The substrate itself is a composite of these two materials; the resin, the reinforcement and the conductor which is copper.
- Why the different composites? The main reason is its strength, it’s a very good insulator, and it’s available. It also bonds chemically to glass fibres very well.
- Lead-Free soldering created a major change about 20 years ago when lead was banned from electronic assemblies causing a range of performance issues.
- Higher temps expand materials dramatically, and because there is no reinforcement in the Z-axis, the expansion is considerable.
- When materials are heated beyond the TG, or Glass Transition temperature, thermal expansion is rapid and massive.
- The solution to this is adding inorganic fillers to modified, lead-free compatible materials to reduce the Z-axis expansion of which there are several types such as silica-based materials.
- Losses impact - some inorganic fillers have lower loss than the epoxy resin they’re replacing.
- How to choose materials? Talk to your manufacturers about the correct materials, ask which material they use the most and which of them work most successfully. Do beware of SI though, as this is a very fast-moving aspect currently.
- It is strongly advised to attend materials courses, and ask questions. Ventec is always ready to assist and answer questions. Go to a boardshop and see how these things are produced.
- Alun is also the EIPC Chairman and anyone involved with PCBs is welcome to attend their events. There are two conferences every year and the next will be in Austria, on June 14th and 15th. This will include a facility tour of ATNS, the biggest grossing PCB shop in Europe.
Links and Resources:
Tuesday Mar 19, 2019
Why Protect Vias and What is IPC 4761?
Tuesday Mar 19, 2019
Tuesday Mar 19, 2019
Why do we need to protect vias? Here to answer is Gerry Partida, Director of Engineering at Summit Interconnect Technologies. Summit is an advanced technology manufacturer creating custom printed circuit boards. Summit focuses on complex rigid and rigid-flex products and offers extensive expertise in RF/Microwave applications. In today’s episode, Gerry will help us untangle IPC 4761 and get actionable info that you can apply to your designs.
Watch the Video here.
Show Highlights:
- IPC 4761 comprises design guidelines on seven existing methods of via protection
- Combinations: Capping one side vs the other side, dry film soldermask with soldermask over, or via plugged with solder mask capped over with soldermask or not, plated shut via epoxy filled and plated over, or via and pad also known as Type 7 which is popular for HDI (High Density Interconnect)
- Why protect Vias? To prevent solder paste from running down an open via to the other side of the board, preventing solder balls on the secondary side, moisture protection, sealing to prevent chemistry entering and becoming trapped, to ease the subsequent processes, and finally assembly
- For via protection with a surface finish like ENIG or ENEPIG, both sides of the via need to be open during the ENIG or ENEPIG process.
- IPC 6012 Class 3 now prescribes the same thickness for copper wrap plating
- Why do people fill? Primary reason is to get the via at the pad connection in the component
- When you’re talking about High Speed Digital, you don’t want to go from trace to via
- Place via in land to avoid delay and reduced real estate for routing
- Slight reduction in reliability when via is plated, epoxy-filled and plated over versus a via only plated in the final
- Peel strength is much lower when you epoxy-fill is in the center and plated over
- You have to buy IPC standards
- Encroach soldermask clearances - encroaching soldermask on top of the LAN but not in the hole is an excellent solution.
Links and Resources:
Click here to view all Episodes
Or click here to access the Altium Designer Free Trial Today.
Tuesday Feb 26, 2019
Semi-Additive Process Technology at Averatek
Tuesday Feb 26, 2019
Tuesday Feb 26, 2019
In today’s OnTrack Podcast Judy talks to Mike Vinson, the COO of Averatek about their breakthrough innovation in which they use a semi-additive process incorporating a liquid metal ink as the catalyst seed layer. This special catalytic precursor “ink” can be imaged to create the patterns or areas where conducting metal is to be deposited. This ink controls the horizontal dimensions of line width and spacing and creates the ability to get down to 1 mm and sub-1 mm line and traces. Keep an eye on this technology! Welcome to the future.
Watch the VIDEO HERE.
Show Highlights:
- Mike’s background is in semiconductors primarily in the area of interconnects.
- At Averatek they create HDI solutions.
- What does Averatek’s technology enable engineers and product developers to realize? Lower layer count, Improve Yield, Cost reduction and High Value
- What is Semi-Additive Process Technology? Fundamentally the ink carries plating onto the surface of the substrate, depositing them in very thin layers.
- Also called atomic layer deposition - Averatek calls it lipid metal ink.
- Process allows for very precise and very small circuits.
- Learn the jargon: SAP (Semi-Additive Process).
- Copper can be left undisturbed by the etching process.
- Can be run in a traditional board shop - new technologies are emerging.
- Lithography capital equipment is indeed a worthwhile investment.
- Liquid Metal Ink where are you in getting this to market? Strategy is to license and sell liquid metal ink.
- What type of design considerations will EDA tools need to build-in to enable design with this technology? Smaller lands and increased density.
- Evolution: Lines & Spaces first then other areas.
- Thieving areas parameters will change.
- This tech will work for both flex, rigid-flex, and rigid circuits.
Links and Resources:
Email: mike@averatek.com
Tuesday Feb 05, 2019
Printed Electronics Applications and Innovations
Tuesday Feb 05, 2019
Tuesday Feb 05, 2019
The use of printed electronics is on the rise, and Chris Hunrath from Insulectro is here to talk about how to design for it. Learn about the different applications and design possibilities that are available to PCB designers. The proliferation of more advanced printed electronics materials from polyester film, polycarbonate, to transfer film for fabric and flexible circuitry have enabled interesting new applications for printed electronics. Listen in to learn the latest from Chris Hunrath, an expert in material supplies for circuit board design.
Watch the video, click here.
Show Highlights:
- Insulectro has seen a significant growth in sales of printed electronics products, this is an area of massive growth.
- Printed Electronics have traditionally been used in RFID along with metal f
- oils such as anti-theft devices and security access cards - items with conductive inks and membrane touch switches, for example: coffee makers, dishwashers, rear window defoggers, etc.
- Interesting new applications include: glucose test strips, wearables - sensors of all kinds, automotive, and self darkening windows.
- Self darkening windows are used in skyscrapers and aeroplanes, silver conductive ink, placing current on the window, giving the user control and saving energy.
- Printed Electronics is a high-growth area: business doubled every year in the past five years, doing very well in both substrates and inks.
- Predominant applications driving this uptick in usage: Capacitive Touch switching, in general it saves costs, lighter in weight and has no moving parts (i.e. car dashboards: a lot of work being done on it today) makes it more reliable.
- The molded structure: print the matte side and ink moves with plastic when molding, circuitry is totally encapsulated in the injection molding process.
- Ink technology: silver is used and is cheaper than gold and more conductive; silver flake or conductive particles make it possible to have the ink move with the plastic.
- Insulectro offers materials for Printed Electronics, some examples: polyester film - trade name Mylar and other brands, polycarbonate, transfer film for fabric and flexible circuitry in wearables.
- What’s the difference between conventional and printed electronics? Conductivity, and Resistance - know the sheet resistance and use a comparable copper thickness and width.
- Altium Designer 19 and Tactotek, who do in-mold structural electronics are working on relative design features in Altium.
- Printed Electronics whiteboard video
- There are inks that can sense chemistry and can be ion selective i.e. blood glucose, natural gas, carbon monoxide and so forth,
- Applications in wearables: Neural bypass, can pick up nerve impulses, movement sensors, chemistry sensors and more, and can withstand several washings.
- Higher silver loading inks can be used in many different applications.
- Chris shows an example of printed antenna that uses silver inks.
- Can be used in materials that you couldn’t use in a traditional PCB process.
- Conductive ink kits for children - you can draw conductive inks with a pen.
- Chris shows an example of substrate with high temperature ink, that has a 500-degree operating temperature.
- Events where you can see examples at the Insulectro booth: IPC Apex in San Diego, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Insulectro typically at IT TechEX.
- Conductive adhesive is more ideal for components, soldering to printed electronics is very delicate.
- Screen printing is the main way to print and is very scalable.
- Printed electronics is easier and cheaper to get started and environmentally more friendly.
- Stay posted for more developments in this exciting field!
Links and Resources:
Tactotek IMSE / Printed Electronics Podcast
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
Embedded Capacitance and Embedded Passives with John Andresakis
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
Listen in to Judy Warner and guest John Andresakis from DowDupont and learn about embedded resistance materials. There are several benefits that make this a beneficial technology. Did you know that you can take up to 90% of your decoupling caps off the surface of the board, while improving reliability and reducing inductance? Learn about several design considerations for using embedded capacitors and build on the knowledge of experts like Rick Hartley and Eric Bogatin who both addressed inductance in their AltiumLive San Diego keynotes.
Watch the video, click HERE.
Show Highlights:
- Senior Technical Marketing Leader - Interconnect Solutions at DowDupont; 30 years experience mostly on the materials side and now at DowDupont, soon to be the new Dupont.
- Embedded capacitance -cross connections with: Rick Hartley's keynote at Altiumlive (inductance) and Eric Bogatin's keynote as well
- This reduces inductance
- Film based materials now allow embedded capacitor layers to be 1 mil or below with excellent yields
- People were practicing some form of this 30+ years ago, but according to patents 25 years or so. There used to be material concerns, but with the advanced materials i.e. improvements in technology more is possible.
- What manufacturers are providing this service? Most of them!
- It's like a version of a rigid flex, without the flex part sticking out.
- This isn’t a very hard thing to implement, it wouldn’t be difficult for the manufacturer to get up to speed on this. The things involved are not difficult to learn.
- Learn more at IPC APEX - stop by DowDuPont and Insulectro - booth 624
Links and Resources:
IPC Standard: 2316 Design Guide for Embedded Passive Device Printed Boards
DuPont Interra HK04J Planar Capacitor Laminate
IPC Standard: 4821 for embedded passive devices
Rick Hartley on the Importance of PC Board Stack-up at AltiumLive
Tuesday Dec 18, 2018
Altium Designer 19: Highlights from the Latest Release with David Marrakchi
Tuesday Dec 18, 2018
Tuesday Dec 18, 2018
Altium Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, David Marrakchi is here on the show to talk about Altium Designer 19. This latest release is part two of three major releases Altium has planned to level up high-speed design capabilities. As an engineer who likes to wear multiple hats - and with experience in the field as an Electrical Engineer - David has done it all from developing requirements to schematic capture and PCB layout, across industries including home automation, military, and medical. Now he is bringing his rich skillset to the intersection of innovation and implementation by helping people understand Altium Designer and how to get the most out of the PCB design tools, easily and in the least amount of time. David is an inside expert on Altium Designer sharing his expertise on the overall processes of PCB design and product realization; playing a major role in creating product demonstrations, webinars, whiteboard videos, and interactive articles that illuminate the processes of printed circuit board manufacturing.
Watch the Podcast Video here and see more Altium Designer 19 videos.
Show Highlights:
Altium Designer 19 is released. David is hosting webinars to demonstrate new features. You can join live or on-demand--sign up for live webinars here: https://www.altium.com/webinars
What’s new in Altium Designer 19?
High Speed Design Features: What they are and how do they help designers?
- Advanced Layer Stack Management: Impedance solver, material library (vast array, pre-defined) and microvia support. Very important for tracks carrying high speed signals.
- Micro via (more info in the Interactive Routing webinar)
- Impedance modeling
- Material values - (there are always new materials coming out!)
New Part Search:
- Find a part that both meets requirements and that is also available!
- Search and filter with parametric information - global parametric supplier search. i.e. size, package, height, frequency, stock, model, and compare two parts.
Routing Improvement:
- New follow mode (allows for locking i.e. curves)
- HOTKEY / SHORTCUT: ctrl+f to lock to contour
Trace Glossing Improvements
Draftsman
Multiboard
Printed Electronics
Check out this Podcast with Tactotek to learn more.
Altium has a culture that embraces a mindset of continual “Relentless Innovation”
Some users say they’d rather us fix more bugs--why do we choose to continually innovate?
What value do you think this commitment to innovation provides to our users and the design community as a whole?
If you are an existing Altium Designer User you can download the latest version now at Altium.com.
If you are new to Altium Designer, we invite you to get behind the wheel and take it for a test drive and see why Altium has become the fastest growing PCB Design company in the world.
Links and Resources:
Tuesday Aug 14, 2018
Concurrent Engineering with Bill Brooks from Nordson Asymtek
Tuesday Aug 14, 2018
Tuesday Aug 14, 2018
Learn about what is involved in true concurrent engineering and get practical tips for including stakeholders early on in the design process with Bill Brooks from Nordson Asymtek. When project collaborators come together up front, then they move forward together. Hear how Bill spends the time up front to get everyone aligned during the PCB design process to ensure fabrication and assembly processes progress with minimal issues.
Show Highlights:
- Bill had an interesting childhood. His Dad was an inventor and worked on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. He introduced Bill to the electronics industry.
- He also started a board shop in the garage and created his own hydro-squeegee, using peanut oil.
- Bill’s career started when he worked as an Electronics Technician for almost two years. When his employer started hiring designers to do PCB layout work, he grasped the opportunity.
- Back in the day, people used to sign their PCB artwork.
- There are a host of stakeholders involved, the designer is like the glue that holds everything together. Some of the stakeholders are: Fabrication, Assembly, Testing, Marketing, Managers and Engineers.
- When do you get the stakeholders involved in the PCB Design process? The IPC standard is to have a design review upfront, before design.
- The designer is the only one who can control moving the design through the process and make the board survive.
- We involve many stakeholders from the outset. Divisions like purchasing takes care of primary suppliers to ensure they can provide what’s required.
- We do system integration in-house. Partnering with other companies has become a big deal and it’s working very well.
- What does Concurrent Engineering mean? Considering all aspects, together, upfront, then moving forward together. Spend the time upfront to avoid wasted time and effort later in the process.
- Educate people who have control, they take care of everyone and everything goes smoothly, works correctly, and is right first time.
- Bill’s Dad used to say ‘the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.’ You need a disciplined management team to do the work upfront, be quick but don’t hurry.
- A ‘quick and dirty prototype’ is a myth.
- Use software to load projects into a common depository - keep it current and work in cohesion with regular refreshing.
- Bill and their team use Playbook, which enables managers to have a full overview of every division’s progress and enable proper scheduling.
- Designers after hours: in 2008 Bill was introduced to sculpting. Started attending classes, commencing a 6-year love affair with sculpting. He now teaches on Saturdays.
- Rick Hartley encouraged Bill to do mentoring. Bill is now part of the International IPC Executive Board and has received an award for his contributions.
Links and Resources:
AltiumLive 2018: Annual PCB Design Summit
Hey everyone this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Thanks again for joining. Today we have another great guest - do you ever get tired of me saying that? Another great guest because we just have them every time, and we'll be talking with Bill Brooks today from Nordson ASYMTEK, and before we get started, I just wanted to remind you to please follow me on LinkedIn. On Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter - and also if you'd rather watch this on video we also have this on Altium's YouTube channel under videos, and you'll see all of our podcasts recorded there as well.
So today we have Bill Brooks, has been a great contributor to the industry, as well as being a very talented designer in his own right. So I thought you would enjoy learning about his long history in the craft of PCB design, so Bill welcome; thank you so much for joining us here. Bill comes from just up the freeway here from our office in La Jolla, so it's handy to get him over. So Bill won't you talk about your professional history? I think you, like many printed circuit board designers; you were kind of set up to be in this industry, but you found your own path. So, tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah I guess when I was a kid I didn't know where I was gonna go...
Yeah me neither.
-my dad kind of introduced me to the electronics world, and right out of high school actually, I was still in high school - my dad was working in the aerospace industry and he decided to start his own printed circuit board shop. He looked around San Diego at the time, and there weren't a lot of shops to go get boards made and he said: well, I can do this. And so he looked up the information and we started making printed circuit boards in the garage.
Good times, that was a long time ago where you could set up a board shop in your garage.
Yeah it was - today it'd be completely illegal.
Yeah right.
[laughter]
I think the neighbors complained, he created his own hydro-squeegee and he was using a fusing oil, which was I guess peanut oil, and he bought this big 50 gallon drum of peanut oil and he used a check valve, and he put this - - he used air pressure to push it through a check valve and to spray it so he could put the boards down to get them hot after they had been coated with solder and then squeegee ''em out as he pushed on the pedal on the floor. And it would just make this nice beautiful-
It's a handheld hot air leveling machine!
-Yeah it was very dangerous, in fact, I think he got burned a couple times.
Oh I'm sure!
-but the neighbors just loved it because they’d look down at the corner of the cul-de-sac and they’d see this giant plume of black smoke coming out the back of the house, going: what's he doing over there? But dad was kind of an inventor and he liked to invent things. So he didn't go out and he was kind of a 'shade tree mechanic' - he'd figure out how to get something done on a dime and do it himself. And I guess that same ingenuity was something I picked up, I figure out how to get things done.
So how did you end up going down the design path, from building boards in the garage?
Hmmm it was kind of convoluted. I thought I wanted to be an Electronics Tech and eventually Electronics Engineer, and I started down that path. I got a job with a company that was making television headend equipment; the transmitter part of it, there was channel 52 UHF subscription television, Oak Systems and I started working as Electronics Tech for them and I did a lot of work for them for, oh at least two years as a Tech, and they were hiring in printed circuit board designers to do the layout work. And I had already learned how to do layout work with my dad's shop when I was younger and I looked at that, and I said: welI can do that. How much do you make? And I think I was making like seven bucks an hour at the time, and they were making like 10 or 11. And I said: I could do that, and I told my bosses I want to do that - I can do that! And they were: okay we'll get you in the other department and I started working in the drafting department. So I got a $3 an hour raise and I started doing layout work instead. And it kind of set me down that path. So that's how I got started anyway.
So Bill, a lot of people that have been around a while, both you and I have been around a while. There's no college to learn what you've learned. So how did you pick up, we were discussing this earlier; you've done so many aspects - RF, some electronics and mechanical, how did you pick up all those skill sets, sort of along the way?
Yeah that's kind of a long story really. My dad started me when he had his shop, and gave me a printed circuit board to do as a way to teach me how to do layout-
Okay.
-and we went to the TI Handbook and found a circuit for an audio amplifier - 10 watt audio amplifier and he said, why don't you try to build that? And so I made a schematic, I took the schematic from it, and I laid out the board and we manufactured the board and I bought the parts and I put them on the board, and I soldered them and turned it on and talked through a microphone - it worked and I went: yes that's hot!
It's so funny.
I remember in seventh or eighth grade, we had a science fair in junior high and everybody made their science project; we had a bunch of tables all set up and my dad said, well why don't you make something - - an electronic metronome? It has to do with music, and so I drew a schematic and I put the whole thing up there, and I built the metronome and I turned it on so it'd go 'tick-tock' 'tick-tock' you know, and I thought that was amazing. It was a really great and one of my friends said: Bill that was so cool, how you did that because I didn't have to do any of the work and I still got credit for it and I said well it was it was a challenge. So I took it on I put it up there but I didn't win a darn thing!
The guys who made the volcano that spews out all the stuff - they got that prize. So people didn't appreciate what I was doing. I felt a little bit geeky and kind of out of the norm as I was growing up. But I was fascinated with electronics. I was almost intimidated by it. My dad was a very good R&D guy, and he worked in the aerospace industry and he actually worked on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, it traveled all the way past Jupiter and it's outside our solar system headed on for Aldebaran now I think.
That's crazy.
So that's kind of a neat thing and I think on one of his print circuit boards, if you find down in the little corner you'll find his initials there-
Out in the outer regions of space.
-yeah and I talked with Dr. Walker Fillius, he was the principal on the project at UCSD and after my dad passed away and he sent me back an email and he said: you know someday these little green men out there they're gonna find that and wonder: what does that mean? Why did they put that there? And a lot of people did that back in those days, you used to be so proud of your artwork you'd want to sign it and they did.
Right, that's funny.
Yeah.
So from I have to say, I think that was probably really invaluable experience for you, very young, to put together that design affected manufacturing, affected assembly, affected performance. Like at a very young age, you saw that whole overarching process - sort of on a small scale - but still; and not everybody gets that experience even today, few designers.
Few designers have ever been in a shop and actually made a print circuit board. A lot of them are dealing with the drafting side of it; they don't see the whole process.
Right and it makes such a difference to decisions you make as a designer.
Absolutely.
Right and so I can see how that sort of set you on a path to be a little bit more globally minded about the whole soup-to-nuts kind of - - from design to reliability or how something is actually functioning.
It has a lot to do with curiosity, it's funny; I've been listening to a book about Leonardo da Vinci and one thing that was amazing about him is, he had this insatiable curiosity, to almost distraction, I mean he would look at things and go: why does it work that way? And he'd start, he'd set himself a task to figure it out - and he didn't have a college or someplace to go learn those things - he had to do it himself. I've done a lot of the same kind of things in my life. I get fascinated with something and I go: well, I can figure that out, I'll go figure it out - all it takes is being brave enough to try and not being afraid to fail. Failure is just an opportunity to learn more.
So I think it was Edison once said , he did like hundreds of different ways to try to do a light bulb and he said, well now I know a hundred different ways not to make a light bulb, it's okay-
I still finally need way to know how to do it right?
-but those those skills and the curiosity drove me into expanding my knowledge base. Getting into printed circuit boards, I wanted to learn how to take the thing I knew how to make, and turn it into something that was a product. I wanted to find out how to make that product appealing to somebody so that it made them happy with the product and not unhappy with it. And that kind of dovetails with what we were talking about before.
We have, as designers we're kind of the glue to the whole design process. We may not come up with the initial idea that needs to be created, but we take that idea and we turn it into reality and we not only have to turn it into reality, so that it's electrically functional, but it can be manufactured in a reasonable way that's not super expensive, that's reliable, that survives harsh environments or abuse. It has to be testable so you can provide for test points and things of that nature. There are a whole bunch of stakeholders involved.
People who are - their job is keyed on being able to take what I create and turn it into a product that they can actually sell. The marketing people have to make sure that the product meets the customer’s needs. I have to be aware of that when I'm designing it so, I don't design in some function that makes it fail there. I have to be aware of those things. So the designer - they're kind of the key glue to the whole group.
But I find that very refreshing and I think most professional designers, from our early days of making a simple 2 layer board say, it's so much more complex now. So we tend to like head down, into our specialty right and I think, as you have said some engineers/designers have never been inside of a board shop.
Right it gives you myopia, you can only see just your part of the whole process.
And I can understand that because, I don't say that from a critical perspective, it's a very complex process. We're time constrained, resource-constrained, so it's hard to put your head up for a moment so-
You just named some of the stakeholders.
-I would say fabrication for sure, assembly, testing...
You mentioned a marketing department, probably managers too.
Managers all have cost and time constraints, they have time to market that they have to be worried about. The engineers of course, typically are going to be concerned about, can they get the parts or are the parts available; are they gonna be end of life parts?
Yeah that's a whole fun bag of fun there.
The hardest part for some designers is, they'll get the board 90% done and then the engineer comes back and goes: I can't get that part anymore, I need to put a different part in and that's bigger than the one I gave you before. And so you got to go back and fix the circuit, so you can fit that bigger part in there and make it work. And it gets quite challenging.
So when do you recommend to get those stakeholders on board and collaborating?
That's a great question and funny - if you go through the IPC; I think it's 2221-standard - it's like the very first - almost first paragraph and the thing it says: make sure you have a design review up front first, before the designing begins. Why do they say that? Those people all are going to bring their expertise, and their wants and desires, and their concerns to that meeting. Well they're gonna be a part of that and give that information to the designer who really is the only person who has control over what it ends up being. The creator - they are the creator; they take all the information and they create something that can be built, tested, cost-effective, survive, functional, not have EMI problems, EMC problems... it has to pass safety agency requirements like TV and UL you know?
Yeah.
Or stand somebody handling it and giving it an ESD shock - thousands of volts - how's it going to survive that? You know, we do Hipot testing, there's a lot of work that goes into making a board that just is not - just connect the dots.
So you're now working with Nordson ASYMTEK, which makes assembly equipment correct, or is there more than that?
Their key thing, the company I work for they're making robotic equipment. The equipment allows manufacturers to do high-speed manufacturing very reliably and typically they're dispensing fluids. They have a few divisions that do board inspection. They have one that does plasma cleaning-
Mm-hmm.
-it's very common, I think it's MARCH - - I think is the name of it, something like that, but primarily we focus on fluid dispensing; got lots of patents on fluid dynamics, how to dispense a dot of material that's the exact amount of the material, in the right viscosity, of the right mix of materials, and at the right place , at the right time.
Right.
Very, very challenging stuff - we've come up with some really high tech equipment that are making our customers real happy.
That's great, so when you do, on a practical, where the rubber meets the road stuff - when you embark on a new design - do you get the stakeholders together? I mean how do you do that?
We get a large number of them involved. We have a purchasing department that cares about who our primary suppliers are. They review them; we go qualify them, make sure that they're going to be able to supply what we want, when we want it, at the price we want it. We use third-party vendors to make the boards, assemble the boards, test them. We put everything together in-house. They call us a system integrator kind of thing - and I guess that's one way to refer it. So the final assembly stuff all happens in the factory; and then we ship overseas and here in the United States and Europe.
So you used a term which I've heard before and just tell me what it means to you, is the term 'concurrent engineering'?
I was introduced to that a while back, and to me it was confusing at first. Of course I've been in the industry a long time and there used to be a model where engineering would be a little black box and inside, all the engineers do all their stuff in there, and it was black magic, and they got it all done and then they went; pop - and they threw it over the fence and said: okay, you guys figure out how to make it. And that's as far as they went. Engineers were done; okay, I'm working on my next thing have fun. And the manufacturing engineers get it and go: oh my god, how are we gonna build this thing? And they almost had to re-engineer it to make it producible. So that model was going along for quite a long time here in the United States, before they started analyzing what the Japanese were doing and looking at their manufacturing process. It was very organized, and they introduced just-in-time, which has affected the whole supplier chain.
But partnering with other companies to be able to be successful has become a big deal and they can reduce the number of staff that they need to do what they need to do. They can have highly qualified people doing what they need to do - they don't need masses of people - and then they can subcontract things out get them delivered on time, put them together and get them out the door and they're very very good at it.
Concurrent engineering means thinking about everything up front. Not just your part of putting it in a black box and playing around with it until you're happy and then flipping it out and saying: you guys figure out how to build it. You want to bring the people that are stakeholders in up front. And then together, you move as a group. And the people involved in the engineering part of it have to understand those people's jobs, because they're their customers.
Right.
They're the ones - they're gonna use what they create. So we spend more time up front to make sure that they don't have to work harder, that they don't have to redo it, that we don't waste money and time out there with failures and have to come back and make changes and send it back out, saying: how about this one? No that's not good enough you've got to do it again. Oh how about that one? No that's not good either. So you educate the people that have control of it - they put the intelligence into it to take care of them and everything goes smoothly, and we make a lot more product, a lot less expensive, and that's right the first time.
You and I were swapping some little statements right? So one I remember you saying - - I don't remember who you cited: the hurrier I go...
That was my dad...
-that was your dad.
Yeah 'the hurrier I go, the behinder I get'.
[laughter]
Yeah and that's so true I mean it's funny if you have this: I'm the only important person in the world, and what I'm doing is the most important thing and I don't care what anybody else thinks or wants to do. You can create something, in fact, I've seen some amazing sculpture, of components that were soldered together and in the most amazing ways and it was an electrical circuit, it worked, functioned.
Yeah - but if you touched it, it would fail, if you moved it, it would fail. It wasn't built - it was just to see what would happen to the electrons when they get moved around that way. So people - and there's a desire - typically management, has traditionally figured, well - if you whip the horses harder and make them go faster you'll get there sooner.
I have seen that by the way being a board manufacturer and selling to and working with designers. The constraints are brutal sometimes...
They can be.
-and it's like, well if you want me to put out good work, you need to give me a little bit more margin right and so I think, to your point is, you had also said that it's really a myth, the idea of a quick and dirty prototype.
Yeah it really is
- it's kind of a myth - I've worked in environments where there was a philosophy that said: we can be faster if we just slap something together and we go build it and we bring it back and see what it does. I think the people that had that idea probably didn't have any simulation tools. They didn't have any way to predict how it was going to behave - so they would make one and go try it, and then they'd find out how it didn't work and make another adjustment. So I remember working on a board that had 17 or 18 different iterations of them trying different things...
That's so expensive and such a time suck!
-Very expensive and it takes a lot of patience - you just kind of have to work with them and keep going and keep going. But we win when you get a management group who - I happen to work for one - it's very, very smart people, they'd like to do it right the first time. So they spend the extra time upfront. They do the research, they analyze what's going on, and then they go build it. When they build it and bring it in we're like 98 percent there, most of the time. Very few times maybe we get one or two little blue wires and we're good to go and take a few changes boom - you're out the door. And that's a good thing and CAD tools help us do that too, by the way.
Yeah well, and that's a really insightful management team I think, to know that if you take the disciplined time to do it up front, it really saves you so much on the back end in regards to time, money, and resources. I always like John Wooden's quote; he used to say: be quick but don't hurry, it's the same thing - like be nimble and quick - we don't want you dragging your feet but don't be hasty.
I think part of it is just having a good work ethic, the self-discipline to say: you know what, I'm here, I'm gonna focus on this, I'm gonna get it done, and I'm not gonna let Joe come over and talk to me over a half hour about the thing he was doing up on the mountains last weekend, or stop and shoot with people at the water cooler or whatever. I'm gonna stay focused on it and when I'm not here then I'm doing other things, but when I'm here I'm focused. And I think that the managers; they should analyze the people and look and see what kind of people they have, and try to work with them to get them to have that work ethic. We've got lots of distractions in our world, plenty of them, things that can take us all over the place, so it's just a personal discipline I think.
So we talked about, in those cases - I'm thinking about the people that are designers that are listening to us that may not have such an insightful management team as the one you work with and I'm sure you've worked for other less insightful management teams. How do you recommend that you tactfully, and professionally, push back to say, I need five more minutes to get this right - how do you do that?
Well to frame it as pushback, is probably not politically nice but it's a communication. I think one of the things that you don't do, is you don't go off into a dark room somewhere and then pop out with a design later on and they're going: what's happening what's, happening, what's happening. So you have to have a lot of open lines of communication with your team.
We use SVN as a way to load our projects into a common repository and then the other engineers that are working, can download that and refresh it, make it current so the master is in the SVN file. So I'm working on basically a copy that I refresh every time I do some work. And I do that regularly, I don't wait very long and I'm refreshing it - I'd do it many times an hour sometimes. And sometimes maybe I go for a couple hours and then we'll refresh it, but it's mostly based on how much change I have made to it.
The idea is to keep it current and keep the lines of communication with the other people concurrent so that they're aware of what's going on if they're busy working on the schematic while I'm working on the board we can do that in parallel, and I can do my parts get them done and then they can say, oh I found out I have to change this part, or I need this other circuit in there and I've just uploaded it - you can pull it in and and make the changes. And we do that very often.
Which is really great and I know here at Altium, R&D is working very hard to make sure that people can work concurrently and building those subversion networks and, even going beyond that, as we delve into Nexus and other products is to enable that, so you guys are seeing each other work in real time.
Often times this is kind of a neat thing about that tool. We typically, the group I'm in is the new product development group, so we take the 'pie in the sky guys' stuff and we turn it into a product. Then we have Reliability Engineers who have to design a testbed to test the product. So oftentimes when the schematic gets to 90% they've got a copy of it and they're looking at it while we're designing it...
And there's the concurrent engineering isn't there!
-Exactly.
It really is a tool that enables that concurrent chain.
It enables it - so we're able to do that and then the guys in production want to know what's going on with it, so they can pull down a copy and look at it, and then the next time we have a review meeting they'll bring their thoughts to the meeting and they can say: we like what you did over here, but we'd like to change this because it helps us be more efficient, and we can run that back there because we need to do that; we listen to them...
Which is so great.
-having that dynamic - real-time communication - it's really huge in being successful the first time.
Yeah that's great, it's great to hear. So but...
tact is used to push back.
-tact yes.
I used to joke with my boss; did you ever see the movie The Money Pit?
Yes.
And the: we're gonna fix the house and the farmer shows up and says, how long is it gonna take? Two weeks, two weeks. We used to do that. Looks like, wow this will take two weeks. Most people can accept two weeks, but we've got a new tool now at work; Playbook - and it allows them to get all the stakeholders involved in helping us schedule the project. So people who say I'm gonna have my test part of it ready at this time, and I'm gonna have the board ready at this time, and I'm gonna have my schematic ready at this time.
The managers can see the whole thing without having a good run around and bug everybody - it's all right there.
If there's a problem with a schedule - update it so we know what's going on. Tell us, and they get it; they see the impacts, they see when things are going to happen and they can strategize and make plans on how they're gonna pull something in or adjust something to be successful.
That's great to create the level of transparency right?
Yeah so pushback is really more...
Well you know, that makes it sound like the manager's a bad guy. They've got a job to do and they've got to get a product to market in a timely way, at the right cost, so I'm just saying is sometimes to your earlier comment like the whips to the backs - at times it feels like that and sometimes you have to stop and go: okay...
How can I communicate better?
Yes, how can I communicate this in a way that makes me me your ally here?
Exactly.
I want to help you win, we're on the same team by the way, and me getting this done right the first time...
You can help me be successful in doing it the first time, and you, and you, because I want to get all the things that you need into the design. That way you're happy with it and you can make it and you're not gonna go; damn that Bill Brooks - why did he do this?
Oh gosh we love the finger pointing don't we?
Yeah I've lived through a lot of that.
Well Bill, this has been really good and really practical, I think where the rubber meets the road. And this part of the podcast, I sometimes like to call Designers After Hours. I want to particularly focus on what you do after hours because you are a very creative kind of - use both sides of your brain - but you have a very strong right brain. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do after hours when you're not designing boards?
Gosh - let's see; was it 2008? I went through a divorce and I was trying to find something to do with my spare time and I got introduced by another engineer at Datron World Communications where I used to work; and he was taking classes in sculpting and he showed me a picture of a sculpture that he was creating; this head of his wife, and I had met his wife - she was wheelchair bound and it was so neat to see the love, you know. He is caring for her and she needs him to push her around and whatever. But he was making a sculpture of her and I thought that was really cool and the likeness was amazing! I thought, you really did a good job, I was really impressed with it. How in the world did you learn how to do that? Because I'm taking classes in Carlsbad.
Bullshit - what? Nobody teaches that right, I don't see classes for sculpture anywhere. Where do you find that? And he says, no it's real, you should come check it out. So I made a point to go down and meet the teacher and the teacher introduced me to it and I thought, this looks like too much fun I’ve got try it. And that started about a six-year love affair with sculpting. And now I'm currently teaching it so - there's a place called The Green Art House in Fallbrook and every Saturday I've got a class there and I teach sculpting and it's fun.
And we will share this link by the way, because your mind will be blown. He doesn't just do a little hobby sculpting - these are amazing sculptures he makes! And oh my goodness, and then I start prodding him about painting... Oh yeah I would love to take a painting class. Bill says, oh yeah I do that too.
About two years ago - maybe almost three - I was at a gallery where I had my bronze sculptures that I had made from the sculpting studio and I was trying to see how they would be accepted in the public and so forth. So I had them in a gallery and I met a guy there, Richard Struggles who's a teacher, and he teaches how to paint and so I got brave one day and I thought: I could do this. So I went down to Michael's and I went through the paint department found the primary colors and some paintbrushes and a canvas and I said I could do this and I just bought it and took it home and I thought I'll find a picture I like and I'm gonna try it.
Well about three hours later I said, you know it's not bad - it doesn't look too bad, I bet if somebody taught me I could do better. So I asked him, I says I see you teaching people, can I come? He said sure come on down. So that started me learning how to paint and I've done about eight or nine paintings. One of them's a triptych; it's some cheetahs it's hanging in my mother's home, behind her couch and it's real pretty and a lot of horses.
I know I love horses I owned a horse and so I love your sculptures and your paintings of horses.
I used to have horses too - so I know that bond and the connection with the animal - it's amazing.
So anyways, just for giggles we will share Bill's amazing artwork there because he does have a good after-hours gift there. Will you please share with me any - I know you've shared with me some links and things we'll make sure we put those up for our listeners that could glean more information from Bill. Bill's also taught PCB at our local college here, and he has mentored many people as well as being mentored throughout his career.
I can blame that on Rick Hartley.
Rick Hartley who we just had on the podcast today.
Yes he was, in fact, he cornered me. We were doing an interview right after the Top Gun at PCB West, and he said: Bill, you've got a lot of experience. Have you ever thought of mentoring? And I said, no I never thought about it, to me making boards was just a way to get a paycheck. Get paid, go home, buy food take care of family do all that stuff. And that seed it planted, made me seek out the IPC Designers Council and I joined the local group in San Diego, eventually became part of the board, and then I joined the International Group and actually became part of the Executive Committee and also the Education Committee. And I think I've got an Emeritus Status now with them. I mean I've been with them a long time and I've contributed as much as I could. In fact they gave me an award once for contributing to the industry so it's good fun.
Yeah we'll provide all the links we can. We thank you again for joining us Bill.
Thanks for joining us today in office and again this has been Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast and Bill Brooks with Nordson ASYMTEK. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time. Until then, always stay on track.
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
Ted Pawela, Altium COO, Shares Vision for the Future
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
Ted Pawela, Altium COO, joins Judy Warner to discuss how Altium intends to fundamentally transform the electronics design industry, what Altium’s vision for the future looks like, and what to expect in Altium Designer 19. They also touch on Altium’s upcoming international design conference, AltiumLive: Annual PCB Design Summit, and why everyone in the community is encouraged to attend. Learn about Altium’s vision to bring PCB design and manufacturing closer together — a world where design turnbacks and respins can be avoided by bringing DFM constraints into the design tool itself. Listen to this special episode of the OnTrack podcast to learn more and remember to share your comments and ideas below.
Show Highlights:
- Ted started out in ocean engineering - multidisciplinary in nature, not just physics or mechanical.
- Altium’s commitment and advocacy of engineers/industry - Altium stands for the Engineer
- The Altium origin story - anyone who needs a tool should have it, so let’s give them tools no matter what age or budget i.e. free product including Octopart and Upverter
- Upverter is for the makers and inventors of tomorrow.
- It’s our mission to transform the electronics industry.
- The whole product realization process is discontinuous. We want to change that.
- AltiumLive announcement and AD19 announcement
- Goal is to deliver incremental pcb design capabilities that would take us to places we haven’t been before - like High Speed Design - it’s not something we can deliver in one release. AD18 was the foundation.
- Design and manufacturing worlds can come closer together.
- The power of CAD can be problematic - it can be overwhelming, needs to be feedback from the tool to help find problems.
- New company acquired - PCB:ng (NG=next generation) is board assembly manufacturing, low volume, high mix. Good for prototypes. Their mission is to create a manufacturing line where designers can know everything about it so design constraints can be removed from the start.
- Ciiva - another company trying to solve the same problem. They created a bill of material that allows you to know the lifecycle state of what you are selecting.
- We all want manufacturing insights at design time, Altium is bringing the pieces together to transform the industry.
- AltiumLive - Designers, manufacturers, fab, assembly, all came together to discuss industry problems. It’s about inspiring the community to think about current industry challenges and discuss possible solutions.
- How many Industry Conferences are out there? PCB West, DesignCon (chip and board level), PCB Carolinas, Electronica, Embedded World - but are there any that put the PCB designer front and center?
- Altium wants to provide this for the PCB designer; see AltiumLive 2017 Retrospective to see the presentations from last year. You don’t have to be an Altium Designer user to come to AltiumLive.
- Altiumlive 2018 this year will have one day, before AltiumLive officially begins, of extra learning sessions you can add on, the two options (which will run concurrently) include: University Day, focused on learning Altium Designer or High Speed Design with Lee Ritchey.
Links and Resources:
Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast, thanks for joining us again.
Today I have a rare treat for you, but before we get started I'd like to invite you to please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast app or favorite us on an RSS feed, and remember we also record this on video simultaneously, so if you want to see our sunshiny faces you can go over to YouTube on Altium's channel and go under videos, and you'll see all the podcasts recorded in video.
I'd also like to invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn, I share lots of information to engineers and PCB designers and I'd love to connect with you there as well and on Twitter, I'm @AltiumJudy. So today, I have the rare treat of inviting in one of our esteemed executives; I esteem you Ted. So Ted Pawela is with us today, he is the COO here at Altium and we're going to talk a lot about the direction of Altium and really kind of get a peek behind the curtain. So I'm excited to share him with you, so Ted, welcome.
Thanks Judy, I appreciate you having me on here and I'm actually really excited about the the podcast series that you're doing, and see a lot of the feedback from people and it's a little bit humbling to be here given the actual magnitude of the guests that you've had here from industry and so forth, so I'm not sure I can live up to that but I'll do my very best.
Well, I think you rank but we're glad to have you. So before we get started, I thought it'd be fun for the audience to know a little bit about your engineering background. So you haven't always dwelled in the halls of the executive world; you kind of came up through engineering, so tell us a little bit about your background there?
That's true it's probably not a very prototypical upbringing into the industry and so forth, but I actually started my... I guess you could say my engineering career, back in the education space. My undergraduate degree was actually in Ocean Engineering, and the interesting thing, I think about Ocean Engineering and Altium, is that Ocean Engineering is one of those disciplines, or one of those engineering fields that is multidisciplinary in nature, so it doesn't focus only on mechanical or only on physics, or any given thing, but it's actually very multidisciplinary. In fact, like when I think back on it, I did a thesis project that was to create an underwater acoustic transponder system - which sounds pretty fancy, but it was basically a device where you could send acoustic signals underwater to tell this device to do something. In this case, it was to release a buoy from the bottom, that had a rope tied to it. It might be attached to an anchor or something else you might want to recover, and that system, we had to actually design the electronics as well as the mechanical system. It all had to work underwater so I think back on that a lot because, following that, I spent a lot of time more in kind of mechanical domains, and so this in some ways as a homecoming for me.
Right.
To come back to being at Altium and be involved in electronics, so that was kind of the beginning. I worked in the underwater defense industry for 10 or 11 years as a real engineer doing actual design work and at that time I wasn't really focused on electronics, but more in the worlds of underwater acoustics and mechanical systems and how those converged. So they're kind of different kinds of physics, different equations that you have to solve, and so I spent a lot of time trying to make those two things mathematically work together. And then from there I actually ended up, because I was working with software, and in this case it was Ansys software and, actually Abacus software at the time you know, that has now become Somalia over at TISOL, but I was working with those two softwares which are simulation softwares in the mechanical world and I was presenting at conferences and things like that. And I had the opportunity actually, to join Ansys and I did, and that kinda took me from that world of, real hardcore engineering into the software side of the business and and I loved that and I've now been at a number of software companies, all engineering software companies, and it's become something that I have a passion for, and that I really enjoy and love and feel really fortunate to have found my way to Altium.
Well we're glad to have you, you've definitely been a change agent here for good and what I really love about Altium and I think that you appreciate it like I do, is if you walk through these halls very long here at the La Jolla office there really are a lot of people that have kind of that cross-disciplinary feel or... but we really do advocate and care about the engineer and that sounds kind of corny.
Yeah...
But I think because there are lots of people, even like myself that were in fabrication or where I was selling and sort of in the weeds, It makes me feel excited to come to work in the morning and to be able to advocate and to help enable, sort of the next generation of technology, and be part of that so...
Yeah, I'm excited about that as well and I think, fundamentally it comes down to this sort of basic notion that's independent of any industry, is that if you do the right thing for your customers and you really think about them, that they do good things by you as well and so I think we get that here.
Yeah.
From the top of the organization through to, and across all places in the organization and definitely that is kind of a cultural element here that I both appreciate and I'm kind of committed to perpetuating and extending as much as we can.
Well a fun note here, is that Ted actually hired me into the organization.
That's true...
-and I actually reported direct to him when I first joined and I - I think we really resonated on that note, and that really, Ted's really been the empowering force behind everything that I do here personally at Altium. So I really appreciate this Podcast, the Newsletter, AltiumLive, so we've had a blast doing some of that stuff and doing things really with with the designer and engineer mind. So that's been fun - well to your point, I think that's a good jumping-off point what we wanted to talk about today is Altium's identity, you know.
What from your perspective, what is it that Altium stands for?
So, I think, you said it, maybe in different words at the beginning of this and I think Altium stands for the engineer, for the designer, for the people who actually have to do the work. And I think that it's one of the things that makes us different from other software companies so we're not really thinking about things like, typical things that I've seen in other companies, like how do we sell higher into organizations? How do we get executives to buy in so that we can do kind of top-down? How we can get top-down decisions to standardize on our software and things like that. The thing about - that I really noted about Altium - and the culture of doing business and working with people here, is that it's really focused on that. The guy who's got to do the work.
And and I think largely, I believe that's the thing that we, that we really stand for and you'll probably remember that... you know, I tell the story to a lot of people and pretty frequently, about when I came here you know, trying to uncover what I felt was, or what was the fundamental kind of characteristics of Altium's brand and it's identity and, and it kind of rooted in a discussion I had with one of our board members David Warren, who has since retired, but but David was one of the first couple of guys into the company and when they started the company it wasn't, it wasn't a company yet, it was actually a couple of guys who are trying to build electronics at the time, and this goes back 30 years or so.
You know CAD software, E-CAD software in particular, it existed but it was really expensive. It only ran on expensive high-end computers and I think, nobody in the room, yourself included may remember those days but I remember those days when we had to buy Apollo workstations and big expensive machines.
Yes.
You know that $50,000 in back - this was back in the 80s...
Yeah.
-that was your barrier to entry so it was a lot of money and a lot of people who were involved in design didn't have access to that, they didn't have those budgets.
Right.
And so, and these two guys were among those. And they actually set out to say, how could we - how could we have software like that for ourselves? Well they decided to create it, and they wanted to create it in a way that it would be accessible not just for themselves but for anybody who needed it so they built it to run on on PCs and that was the genesis of Altium.
Right
There were people out there who were doing and trying to do amazing things in the world of technology and engineering who didn't have access to all the tools and they wanted to provide that access for themselves, and for others, and you know for me, and for the company, I mean that's really a core part of what we stand for. Be for the engineer but make that technology accessible and make it accessible to people who need it, even when they don't have big budgets to work with, sometimes they don't have any budgets to work with. So that, to me, that's really what Altium stands for.
Yeah I think we have the best sort of origin story ever, especially because Dave Warren, at the time was - I believe he was teaching at University - he said to me once that there was all these young passionate people that have these great ideas and no access and so there was he was kind of incensed by that and that sort of, filtered and still sort of lives in this company, this feeling of anyone - anyone who needs a tool should have it. Because you can have a great idea at any age, at any phase so let's give them tools. And I really love that, that it's lasted long past the time that Dave Warren and these two guys sort of kicked this company off, it's really persisted and I really I really like that.
Yeah, I think it's not just persisted because it's in the spirit of the employees who work here and everything, but I can tell you that we make our decisions on that basis. I mean the basis of, kind of being true to what we represent, and so we think about that. We think about who are the underdogs, and how do we empower them? And not, kind of like leave them behind, in pursuit of purely making money in business - and we are a business - we're a commercial business, and of course we want to make money; our shareholders expect us to make money and, on the other hand we think that there's many ways to do that. And you know, everyone may know, we have multiple products and kind of like multiple price points - that's one way. But we also try to think out of the box a little bit and so as an example; we have, I guess one of our brands called Octopart, where people can go and search for parts and so forth, and you can do that as an engineer and you don't pay to use that - it's actually kind of a seller pays model right?
Right.
So when somebody buys parts after they've searched throughout the parts and we may get a small fraction of that revenue, or people advertise on that site and we get a little bit of revenue from that, but we don't have to charge it to the user and we think about - that's an example - but we are always thinking about how do we take a product like Upverter for example, that actually was, before we acquired it, they charged a subscription fee. We made it free, with the intent that we would find ways to kind of indirectly monetize that in a in a seller pays kind of model.
Right.
Because we want to make that technology accessible to the maker community, to the kind of inventors and creators of tomorrow who who don't have money today. So you know, it's like I said, it's a core part of the decision-making process here; is how do we stay true to that vision of making technology accessible to everyone?
Yeah, it's just so refreshing to hear from an executive a software company I think - you know - it's not something I think you hear a lot, like money does lead in many cases, but it's clear to me that there's a guiding principle behind that. That,of course you have to be disciplined and answer to stockholders and do all those things, but you can do that in fresh and new ways and...
That's the key, because I think again, we want it, we need to be a sustainable business or else the technology that we provide won't be here.
Right.
In ten years or something and of course we don't want that to happen…
Right but there are, interesting and different ways you can do it requires that you maybe, are willing to think outside of the conventional wisdom or the best practices and so forth and… that's one of the things that I like about Altium, is that we really do try to break those... mmm... norms and...
Yeah.
-and you know, think about how we can do it differently and just don't accept status quo. Don't accept best practice just because that's the way it's always been done.
Well to me, it's innovation and...
Yeah.
-and we try to build innovation into our software all the time, so we're building innovation into our model too which I really love. So what would you say, do we... would you say we have a defined mission? I mean, beyond what you kind of spelled out, so like an actual defined mission?
Oh absolutely, so I think everyone at Altium, we've refined this thinking in the way that we articulate it internally, but if you were to look at the things that we present externally, like when we do go to shareholder meetings, and in particular, we do a technology day to our Investor Community and we've done it the last several years in Australia. And that you can see the presentations on the web and so forth, but that's a real clue for anybody who really wants to know where Altium is going. If you'd look at those things directionally that gives you a lot of guidance and the thing that we say over and over and over again is that it's our mission to transform the electronics industry.
And specifically, what I mean by that, is that creating electronics is more than just about the design process and the design tools and and so there's what I would - kind of call it a value chain - that's involved right, you have people who think about the product and what's the intent of the product and that kind of breaks down into requirements for mechanical systems, for electronic systems, and all of that.
But even then, the job's not over, because there have to be components that are supplied to that or that are selected from that and then found and acquired. There has to be a board that gets manufactured; the bare board. There has to be the assembly and fabrication of the full, system level board and everything and sometimes it's multiple boards, and then it's all got to be put together and so the job’s not really done until everybody does that and the thing that is sort of striking about the electronics industry, is that that's a really discontinuous process, we kind of like, all think within our sort of domains with our blinders on and we believe that it's our... it's gonna sound a little silly - but it's our self-directed destiny to kind of change that. That's what we want to do, so the mission of the company is to really change, to transform the way that electronics are conceived, designed, manufactured and delivered to the world, and we think there's lots of opportunities to do that a lot better.
Well I know personally, a lot of people have asked me about, why are you buying these... you know, how does... why? I remember Happy Holden last year saying; Upverter? And so it's because they think of us primarily as just a CAD provider right?
Right.
And so I think not a lot of people understand that we have our sights set much higher than that - along those lines - I'd like to dig into that a little bit more. But before we do that, we are sort of - AltiumLive will be here in San Diego in October, and we will be, at least doing a marketing release then, of showing what will be in Altium Designer 19.
We will.
And you mentioned to me that I had kind of thought - even just working here - you're down the hall from me but my impression was that Altium Designer 19 was going to be sort of an iterative release and that Altium Designer 18 was massive. We changed the platform, we really revolutionized the tool in so many ways so I thought: well we're going to catch our breath, add a few little bells and whistles and be on our way down the road, but you're telling me no, it's going to be big. So, can you without giving away the secret sauce, tell us a little bit about sort of the intent?
Yeah well, so I mean there's things that are still forming, it's kind of like the cake is still in the oven baking right now, so not necessarily ready to share a lot of detail but here's what I will tell you about that.
First of all you're right, Altium Designer 19, it's not just another release, just like 18 wasn't just another release and, in fact, if I shorten it just for the sake of simplicity, AD, AD18, AD19 and, AD20 are really a set of releases that are linked together in a fundamental way, and so what we wanted to do with that series of releases was in part - it kind of gets to this thing that I was talking about, this idea of transforming the electronics industry and specifically what we wanted to do with AD18, 19 and 20 - was to deliver incremental PCB design capabilities that would take us to places we hadn't been before so, and specifically into high speed design. Historically... you know...
Yay! my favorite subject
I know you have lots of time invested into that segments of the industry and know lots of people there and and we think that's important that we can do better to support that and AD18, 19, and 20, that was one of the core kind of objectives there, was to help Altium to kind of grow up in terms of high speed design capabilities. But it wasn't something that... I mean it's kind of massive, and it's, in terms of being able to do it, so it wasn't something we were able to deliver in a single release...
Right.
-in fact when I think about high speed design, specifically AD18, was kind of like delivering foundational capabilities that are required to do the kind of complex and large designs that typically we see in high speed.
Right.
So you didn't see particular high speed capabilities there, not big ones yet, anyways in AD18, but what you did see was that we moved from our old 32-bit platform to 64-bit.
Right.
We went from single threaded activity to multi-threaded within the application, and things like that; that are kind of the plumbing...
Yeah, it's like the foundation...
That's right, they need to be there for us to be able to exercise those high-speed capabilities that we wanted to build in. With AD19 you'll start to see more of the capabilities now coming out. It won't be complete but there will certainly be designs in the realm of high speed that people will start to be able to do and it'll become visible that we're really going somewhere with that and then AD20, will be the one where we move a lot towards a more completed set of capabilities for high speed.
So that's one sort of key thing that I would say is that - certainly at AltiumLive, and as we come out with AD19 - you will see real capabilities that start to bring us into that world. The other thing though, is making real this idea of beginning to bring about industry transformation, and specifically, even at AltiumLive last year, one of the things we heard over and over again in the talks was people who were in board fabrication and assembly and manufacturing and who think about DFM and things like that, who were saying over and over and over again: you guys out there in the design community don't think about us. I know the manufacturing world, not nearly enough and often enough, and conversely we heard from people on the design side saying kind of similar things back to manufacturing so those two worlds have been historically siloed, as you said.
It comes up, I cannot tell you how often this comes up in this podcast series it's just a persistent problem, everybody knows it's there.
Yeah it is a huge problem and I think in one of the things that I'm really excited about with AD19 is that you're going to see some you're gonna see some things that are fairly dramatic in terms of helping to bring those two worlds together to where people who are doing design will be in contact with people who are involved in manufacturing while they're designing. And you know, the ultimate endgame for that, is that you would imagine a world where when you are doing design, you don't only have design constraints to think about but the manufacturing constraints are things that guide what you can and can't do and how you create that so that you avoid those kind of like downstream... not exactly mistakes,but those downstream things that you didn't think about that cause design turn backs and spends that are really not needed.
Right, they're not needed and cost so much money and time.
Yes so, AD19 is going to be, I think it's gonna be really impactful and kind of transformative in the way that design and designers, and people in the manufacturing side of the business will be able to work together. So I don't want to spill too much of that, but it's gonna be, I honestly think this is in many ways, a bigger, more transformative thing than AD18 was which was pretty huge, for us at least, in seeing our tool transform.
When you said that to me I'm like: wait what? I was shocked when you said that to me about a week ago I was like, wait I work here and I don't know, and I talked to developers regularly and I think because I get just little glimpses of pieces I'm not seeing the overarching where I think you, from where you sit, you're getting the overarching perspective.
Maybe so, but like I said, I think the key thing here is it will really be something that changes the way we think about CAD and what we should expect from our CAD tools.
Which is great; I've said for many years, that the power of CAD has actually been problematic, because, if you are not 30-40 years into this industry you can get so much power in that tool. It's like, I was saying to someone, I go: there needs to be a feedback from the tool that says, no stop dummy, you know. Like there is no place that says, no stop, this is a bad idea...
Right.
-those cores don't match. Those holes are too small those vias are... you know. There's, of course we can put in parameters and things that help them design well, but there's... so to hear that coming together would just be life-changing, so that's very exciting.
Yeah, and like I said, it's not something that I think we won't realize - that full vision of AD19.
Right.
It'll be that again, this combination of 18, 19, and 20 - you'll be able to see now with AD19, how those things kind of link together and we'll be telling people, we'll disclose our road map for AD20, so people can see how that whole thing plays out but there's gonna be a lot there and it will be enough to change the way that designers and manufacturers are working together. It will change more; well it'll be changing them in even more dramatic ways as we are able to deliver everything through those three releases.
Right.
But there's gonna be enough there that I think, it's really exciting to think about, and talk about and you know...I guess, the other thing for me, or maybe not the other thing - but on a related note - I remember last year at AltiumLive how all those conversations seemed to be centered around standards. And so, couldn't we come out with a single standard for how data is represented and so forth and...
(that's a hot topic)
Standardization, I just have to say, I mean standardization is such a hard thing to do to get everybody within an industry to do that and I think the reality is that standardization isn't the answer. The standardization is a solution that people kind of assume is the right way to solve the problem, so they... and so we tend to kind of like think about how. First you know, how could we solve this problem? If the problem is that people just don't work together and when I design I don't end up with something that's manufacturable until I go through many spins, as an example that's the problem right and then, the solution is just to make it work right. I mean as a designer, or as for somebody in manufacturing, do I really care about standardization? No, I don't, but what I wanted to have happen is that it just works.
Right.
-and I don't have to think about it, I don't have to do anything extra, nor does the person on the other side of the wall that we're throwing things back and forth over. We just want it to work.
Right.
-and that's the approach that we're taking and and again you'll see the it gets to what you were saying why do we acquire these companies for example?
Right.
So we did, just recently, a small acquisition of a company called PCB:NG; NG is for Next Generation and that's a company that does board assembly manufacturing and they do it on small scale, so it's the idea that they do low-volume, high-variety kind of, high-mix kind of designs. So when people want to build prototypes and so forth and their whole mission has been to really change, to be able to create a manufacturing line where the designers can know everything about it so they kind of design in those constraints from the start. Which is very aligned with the idea that I was talking about, and where Altium has been thinking, and now if you rewind back a couple of years ago we acquired a company called Ciiva and Ciiva was really focused on a couple of things. One was to have a Bill of Material that was smarter, and smarter in the sense that you understood straight away what was the life cycle state of the components that you select.
Right.
And the parts that you select - are those things even available anymore? So you don't select and design in things that you couldn't even buy if you wanted to.
Right.
And then there's the notion… that it happens frequently by the way - it does happen frequently.
And it's such a headache.
And in Ciiva you know, the other thing that they were really focused on was to understand those manufacturing constraints as well and so there's kind of this nice convergence of thinking where the Ciiva guys were trying to solve that problem, PCB:NG guys were trying to solve that problem, and Altium is trying to solve that problem, and so bringing them all together now gives us a way that we can say, how do we make it just work and so having that small manufacturing company gives us a way that we can prove this out. We can make it happen having sort of, like full access to everything in that facility and on their line and as well having the people on the side of thinking about the supply chain in the Bill of Material and the design side. We can do all of those things and so we don't intend to kind of like make PCB:NG into some big volume manufacturer. It's never gonna be Foxcon, what we want it to be but we want to make it just work and once we prove it there, then we can take it to all manufacturers.
Right.
And that's the idea and and so we'll again, start to give you a glimpse of that, and more than a glimpse, we'll give actual real capabilities in AD19 that will allow people to begin to solve that problem or, not even salvage, just make it work.
Right just make it work.
So AD19 in my mind is, is a huge step forward.
Well I'm very excited so I'm gonna put a pin in our conversation real quick and just let our listeners know that, all of... you know, sometimes people just think of us being the creators of Altium Designer and don't realise we sort of have been acquiring these companies so we will have an area at AltiumLive in San Diego and in Munich if you're able to join us, where all of those brands will be joining us. I'm hoping to put them in an area that I'm calling Altium Alley, so we'll have Upverter, Ciiva, the PCB:NG, and so, we can start to see how this all fits together.
Yeah.
So I'm excited about that. So let's talk a little bit about AltiumLive, since we are rolling out AD19 at that time, at least to give a sneak peak of it. You and I worked very closely together and sort of had a shared passion for the idea - it was AltiumLive, our first ever users' conference was really Ted's brainchild and then, I was brought on board and then we worked closely together and then it took a village - it took an Altium village - to put on that users conference so can we talk a little bit about why AltiumLive, why do we decide, as a company to begin doing a users' conference, and sort of what, is our intention behind that? Because we want to sell more software?
[Laughter]
Well of course we want we always want to sell more software.
Of course we do, there's no doubt about that... I'm obviously being very facetious.
-yeah but if I come back to the beginning of our conversation, you know I mentioned this notion that if you do the right thing for your customers that they support you and and good things happen as a result of that and and I think, AltiumLive is really built on that idea. So we wanted to create a forum in which our users, but more than that, people in the industry could come together to kind of talk about and collaborate on how do we solve the challenges that we face as an industry. So the fact that we had manufacturers there and manufacturer's reps and everything else as well as... you know, so these are people that don't know Altium Designer. If they saw it they wouldn't know whether it was Altium Designer or another tool per se...
Right.
-possibly but they're involved in the industry and they're relevant right, to the way that we do design and so forth. As well as all the design people. So we wanted a place where our users could come and they could learn and they could get better at their craft and they could connect with one another so - I think Judy you came up with the idea - that it was about, connect, learn and inspire...
Right.
-and that's really the idea right, I mean in terms of connect; it's always good to be able to meet your peers, to talk with your peers, who you face common challenges with, and talk about how do you overcome those, how do you approach them, how does your company support you in those things. Those are always really valuable conversations and so that's - I think - what the connect part is all about. Learning is pretty obvious, people always want to learn how do I get better and that's both in terms of using tools but more than that, it's about becoming better as an engineer. So a lot of the curriculum, if you will, that was associated with that, and in the sessions that we had they weren't about how do I use Altium Designer, they were how do I solve these challenges from an engineering perspective...
Right what are better routing practices...
-Right, speakers about specific tools, because it's like, how do I do these things? So the learning part of it was really important. And inspire, obviously if we're going to transform the industry, we want to bring together the people, the stakeholders in the industry, who are likewise, facing these bigger challenges, not just how do I design better, but how do I design in a way that I know it can be manufactured and that manufacturers don't have to go back and completely recast the Bill of Materials and force me to change the design. And how do I ensure that these parts are actually available and all of that - but it's really again about inspiring the community to think about how we solve these problems of the industry. The fact that it's sort of discontinuous in terms of that flow and so forth and we've got a lot of ideas at Altium about how we solve that, but we definitely don't have all the answers and and nor would we want to try to solve those in absence of all the thought leaders and practitioners in the industry right.
So I think that's the third part of it, is really to bring together those leading practitioners and thought leaders from the industry to say, how do we take this, how do we take our whole industry forward in a way that I... don't want this to sound a little too trivial but, we talk about IoT how do we deliver 50 billion devices by 2025 or whatever.
Right,
-whatever those numbers are, but I think that there's lots of places where electronics are important even in absence of IoT, but the smarter we make our world, the better that's going to be, the more ability we have to solve some of the big picture problems in the world using electronics and engineering and so forth and that's only going to happen when we all come together to figure out how do we do all this better and more effectively.
I loved the convergence at our event it was like magical to see - and such spirited conversations - between fabricators and even our keynotes right. I remember one of the keynotes in Munich saying something about fabrication and then our friend Julie Ellis is like, wait a minute, and then having this really honest challenging almost debate right, but it was so beneficial. I think everybody was really, I think empowered, by having really those frank conversations and really learning from each other. You know a thing that I really like Ted, is that if you look across North America at least, well I would even say Europe, how many events are there for designers? I mean for printed circuit board designers or engineers already, what events are out there? We have PCB West which has some good tracks, Design Con is chip and board level, PCB Carolinas I can think, Electronica, Embedded World... so there's just a handful, but is there any that just focuses and kind of exclusively puts the designer front and center?
No, they're kind of lost - they don't really have a place and what I love about AltiumLive, is that gets to be sort of the center of the conversation but shoulder to shoulder with all the other stakeholders right, so it's like they get their own party where they can just dig in and get such deep learning not only from really incredible thought leaders like our keynotes but also from each other.
Right, we saw that happening a lot right then, and now you can see it just if you go even on the website for AltiumLive and you look at last year's recorded sessions and so forth you see that pretty clearly. It was pretty striking, and my hope is that over time people will actually start to see this event as something that's not an Altium event it's their event.
Right.
And that's the spirit behind it frankly, is that the same as with products, and solving these problems that everything we can't there's no way that Altium can do it on its own or any one company could on its own. We have to do it as a community so I really see AltiumLive as a community and I hope it grows and I hope that the control of the agenda and the content and all of that kind of stuff stays with the users, the designers and the people in the industry who are actually doing the work. That's my vision for it, that it's not us and it's not about our software...
Right
-it's really just about us using the fact that we have lots of customers and users and so forth as a way of using our position to help bring them together.
Right, absolutely, and I've shared with people that you don't need to be an Altium user to come to this event.
No that's true...
-and it's like no one really believes that but it really is true. You could come using another mainstream tool and you would have to endure us rolling out the new release of Altium Designer for 45 minutes...
Right.
-other than that, you will just be getting good learning, meeting with other designers so...
Yeah if I go by memory right, we had something in the order of, I don't know, a dozen main stage presentations or so, and of those, two of them were by Altium people.
Right.
And the rest were not. We had probably, I think two dozen, actual learning sessions that were, kind of focused on training and developing skills and so forth and of those, I think maybe four or so were really focused on Altium Designer. And sure, we could show what we typically did was show, how after you spent the bulk of the time learning, how you attack a problem, you'd show how that could be done in Altium Designer, but it wasn't about solving it with Altium Designer, it was about solving it so, and I'm frankly, I'm kind of like proud of that and proud we didn't make it a place where you just come and hear about Altium and we market to you, and sell to you and so forth it's not about that.
Well you really are the champion of that and I am your proud sidekick in that regards because honestly I didn't know any company would let somebody like me, do this, but it's being driven from the top so I love that, that you're kind of holding on to that. This is about community...
Right.
-dang it - so for those of you who are listening, please know that you are welcome to join us at AltiumLive 2018 in San Diego, October 3rd through 5th, and the website is up, registration's open, and because the attendees asked us to last year, we've added a full university's day, where there's more tool training because people actually complained a little bit that we didn't train them enough on our tool. So kudos to us, but we again, didn't want to mingle that into our main program, so we set aside 100 - 160 spots on the front end where we will teach you in the tool, and keep the rest of it rather tool agnostic and then also in parallel our friendly Ritchie has agreed to teach a full day on high speed design which will be a real treat. And all of this, the price is silly-low, and it's in beautiful San Diego so there's just no downside to it as far as I can see so we're all looking forward to seeing you there.
Absolutely.
I wrote a note here Ted, and I'm just gonna ask you about it and we may have already covered it but you had mentioned something to me about AltiumX was that about the transformation part, our x-factor?
Well that's a little bit of a, little bit of an internal code name, right now for the the projects surrounding this connection between Altium Designer 19 and manufacturing...
Okay.
So we've kind of covered it and you won't see a product called AltiumX, but yeah, you know as often happens when products and projects kind of come to life, they don't have a brand associated with them and we look for clever little ways to talk about them internally before we know that people can kind of rally around and know what we're talking about and AltiumX was that, well for this project at least for a while. And we've talked about different ways to brand it and talk about it and so forth but it's really the key thing; is it's a part of Altium Designer, this isn't gonna be a separate product and actually I will say that that's one of the things that's interesting and and I think valuable about Altium Designer, is that it's always been this idea of that it's not kind of like module, by module, by module, but it's one thing that gives you the capabilities that you need and where there are exceptions, it's because we have partners involved and they need to know how much of their product is going on, and so forth but largely if it's Altium, if it's things that we develop internally, we make it a part of that product.
So it's really simple to know what it is you want, you want that one thing Altium Designer, it's really simple to buy it there's one price and it's hopefully really simple to to work with us, and do business with us and in that notion, we call it easy-to but that's when you get to the spirit of Altium, and and our identity and everything, I think that's another piece of it that I didn't talk about before, but it's another part of what we think is really important, is that we just make it easy for people to know what they're dealing with, who they're dealing with and how they work with us and so forth. Even how they use the product, try to work hard to make everything easy to do.
Right, and I think we're living up to that - we're not perfect, we've got lots of growing to do...
That's true.
Always but when I, because I have the privilege of sponsoring teams and different things as part of my job. Often people will come to me and go, oh my gosh! This was so easy to install it only took me... I was up and running in an hour instead of half a day or whatever, so I I sort of hear that feedback so it makes me proud to be part of this team.
So Ted, thanks so much, I know you're such a busy guy and you're spinning a few dozen plates at all times so, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and share with the people who are listening to podcast.
Well, thanks for giving me the chance to do that and I hope that I was able to give enough insight and something interesting and exciting for people to think about. Love to have people come to AltiumLive and hear more about what we're doing and also hear from their peers in the community but, like I said we're really excited about kind of the journey that we're on. This whole transformation of electronics and we are now starting to feel like we can, we're starting to see light at the end of that tunnel and we've got a long ways to go but there's enough light there that I think with AD19 and AltiumLive that's gonna really start to be exposed in ways that will stop people in their tracks, and so I'm excited about that.
I'm so excited about that and I don’t even know about some of the stuff you guys do, so we'll all learn at AltiumLive so, I hope you will join us. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. I do encourage you to register for AltiumLive, coming up in October in San Diego we should be in Munich, I believe the mid-January. We're just locking that down now, so bear with us while we get that locked down. And remember, whether you use our tools or not, you're more than welcome and we would love to have you just join us and rub shoulders and be part of the community. So thank you, again Ted, for joining us today. And thank you for listening, or watching, and we look forward to being with you next time, until then always stay on track.
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
Paste Interconnects and Paste Sintering with Chris Hunrath from Insulectro
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
Paste Don’t Plate! People are doing 90 layer multilayers with paste interconnects. Want to learn more? Find out about paste sintering from Chris Hunrath to learn more about its applications and benefits to PCB designers. What must designers consider and what are the advantages of Ormet’s products? Listen in for insights from the expert in this week’s episode.
Show Highlights:
- New material developments make paste interconnect technology more feasible
- Ormet’s paste sinters at one temperature forming a new alloy with higher melting point
- Paste interconnects allow for changing build sequence in which vias are formed i.e. drill, add paste, and then laminate - giving you interconnects inside a double-sided core with no visible vias
- Multilayer PCBs: Can split up a 32-layer board to two 16-layers (even as many as 4 x 18 layer multilayers - which is much easier to build
- Also reduces risk depending on design - electrically test each half and only use the good ones
- Ormet process/paste interconnect process eliminates traditional drawbacks i.e. excess copper on surface features
- Eliminate backdrilling with paste interconnect process without extra copper in the via
- Ormet paste eliminates electrolysis and plating process
- Signal integrity benefits
- Applications: RF, high-layer multi cap, avoid secondary remelt, downhole assembly etc
- Design considerations: Where to split up layers for best design benefit; Via at 1:1 or less aspect ratio - only in 1 B stage layer and correct size via for applying paste; Size of receptor pad for laser drill via must be correct to prevent paste from running - spread glass is good for B-stage; annular ring around the via to register laser drilling; with many paste interconnects - don't paste to the edge.
- Paste melts and forms alloy with inter layer copper creating a permanent metallurgical joint
- People are doing 90 layer multilayers with paste interconnects.
- HDPUG (HDP User Group) is creating HDI test vehicles with paste interconnects and HDPUG members will have access to reliability data for breaking up big PCBs
- Paste don’t plate!
- Future topics: Many ways to use conductive inks in electronics, copper foil, integrity issues and printed electronics. Material science behind electronics, new design tools, various versions of conductive inks
Links and Resources:
Chris Hunrath on Linkedin
Click to listen to Chris Hunrath’s other episodes about Spread Glass or Material Sets.
Hi everyone. This is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Welcome back, here we are again with your friend and mine, Chris Hunrath from Insulectro who's going to teach us about paste sintering today, which I don't know much about, but we're going to learn about it together. But before we get started, remember to hit all the typical Altium social media platforms Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter please follow me on LinkedIn and also remember we are recording on YouTube as well as Podbean and we can be found on all your favorite podcast apps.
Alright, so today we're going to talk about - I don't even know how to set this up entirely cause I'm just as much as a student. So Chris, welcome back! Thank you again, and I know this isn't a new technology - it's just not one that has crossed my path. So tell us about what paste sintering is and what the applications are, and benefits to our designers that are listening today?
Okay, interconnect technology, as you mentioned is not new, what's happened recently though is there's been some new material developments that make it more feasible for the circuit boards. Certainly in ceramic fire technology, metal - powdered metals have been used to make interconnects and traces and circuits on ceramic circuit boards, but those fire at 850-plus degrees Celsius, which would obviously destroy most PCB materials so there's some new technologies out now. There are different kinds of pastes that are used for interconnects. The one that we work with, and the one that we promote, is something from a company called Ormet, and their material is interesting because it sinters at one temperature and then it forms a new alloy with a higher melting point.
Okay I feel like we need to back up and explain what paste interconnect technology actually is. Like how it's performed and then we can go into the material science part just so I can keep up, Chris I want to be able to keep up.
So multi-layer PCBs - also not new - typically what you do is, you print and edge any number of layers, you drill and then you plate. Typically electroless copper, to make the non-conductive surfaces conductive, and then you build up the thickness with electrolytic copper.
Mmm-hm.
And some people call it a semi-edited process, because you are using the electroless first as a seed layer. There are some other technologies used to make that dielectric surface conductive, and then you build up with electrolytic copper and so that's how you link the layers of the z-axis.
So if you think of a classically - as a circuit board - as a web of foils printed and etched, all your XY connections, and then the drilled holes - whether they're laser drilled, blind vias, or drilled through holes, the plating links everything in the z-axis. Now one of the challenges when you do that, is you're consuming real estate at all the layers. So let's say you have a 12 layer multi-layer - relatively simple multi-layer by today's standards - but you need to connect layer 1 to layer 10 you've taken up the real estate in all the other layers - you can't route circuits in those places, because there's a via in the way, unless you wanted them to connect to that via and they're part of that net. So there's a term called any layer HDI - I don't know if you're familiar with that term? Basically it means you could put a via anywhere you want in any layer. Nowadays that's done typically by what we call build up technology. So you start with a core of some sort - again it could be double sided, it could be a multi-layer core, and then you sequentially build layers and you only go one layer deep with a laser drill sometimes two - depending on the design - but that's not true for any layer.
Anyway, you go one layer deep you plate, you print and etch, and you do it again and again and that allows you to put vias almost anywhere you want in any layer, the downside is, it's almost like building multiple circuit boards. So the cost really starts to increase. And of course you're putting the board through multiple lamination cycles and that has some undesirable material side effects depending on the material. Some materials can withstand three lamination cycles, some six, some ten, but it is hard on the materials to go through that lamination process, over and over again.
Right.
Especially electric phenolics, which are very common for lead-free assembly, because they're relatively economic and they're also - they also will survive lead pre-assembly, but they tend to get more brittle every time they see a thermal cycle though, so that causes some issues too. So what paste interconnects allow you to do, is change the sequence in which the vias are formed. So instead of laminating drilling and plating you can actually drill, add the paste, and then laminate, so it changes the build sequence and this is important both for the fabricator and the designer to understand what that means. So typically what you would do is, you would take a B stage layer of some sort; you can either drill it and paste, fill it with what we call a postage stamp process or you could pre-tack it, vacuum tack it at low temperature to a core of some sort, or substrate, laser drill through the B stage, apply the paste and then when you laminate the paste interconnects, the layers in the z-axis - you could literally take a piece of prepreg, laser drill it with a stencil or with a Mylar Stencil, I'll talk about how that works in a little bit - apply the paste, remove the Mylar laminate between two copper foils, and now you've got interconnects inside a double-sided cork.
That's cool.
So then if you print and etch that, now you've got a core with connections between the layers with no visible vias; they're all internal. Yeah there's some technology around the paste and again we can talk about that, in a little bit.
So how is it applied - is it squeegeed in?
Yeah.
Okay, just like with a silkscreen?
Well no screen - so what typically what you do is, you apply a 1 mm Mylar mask to the B stage and you tack it simultaneously. Then when you drill through the Mylar and the prepreg B stage to get down to your copper features, then you apply the paste, and the Mylar's your mask, and then you remove that just prior to lamination.
And that stays inside the hole? It doesn't just I don't know the consistency of it. My mind was - pictured it just wanting to drop out of that hole - but it must have some kind of stability?
Yeah it's a liquid and there is a tack right. There are a number of ways to do this, but the most common method is to laser drill, apply the paste, dry the paste... you would do it a second time to top it off and then when you remove the Mylar, the liquid paste stays on top of the paste that's already been applied. Then you dry it again, then you go to laminate.
Does it air dry or do you have to cure it what do you do?
You don't really cure it because it's metal powder - metal powder based - so there isn't really a polymer matrix. Unlike print electronic sinks - which is a again another story - you would just dry off any of the carrier solvent used for the application process. It is a liquid - well it's a paste, not a liquid - but but when you dry off the the solvent that's in it; which is less than 10 percent by weight, then it's just powdered metal and that's how it makes a connection. So think about this right, you've seen a lot of PCB designs - imagine a 32 layer board, which most shops can do, but it's not at the low end of technology. Imagine splitting it up to two 16 layer multi layers right?
A lot easier.
A lot easier to build and then you just paste them together at the end, and depending on the design, you can electrically test each half and only use the good ones. So your risk is light.
Oh, right.
There's a lot of advantages to this. Or what if you want to put together three 16 layer multi layers, or four, or 18 or four 18 layer multi layers - it's been done you know. Now a shop; instead of trying to build a 72 layer multilayer - if they're building 18 layer components - it's a lot more manageable.
Hmm, that totally makes sense. So you explained some of the benefits - it's a nightmare, and you've seen, we've all seen these cross-sections of these crazy stackups with all the sequential LAM and drilling cycles and all of that. And then - and also kind of an unintended consequence you can get, is you can - from a performance standpoint - if you do enough of that right can't you get excess copper on the surface features?
Yes - that's a very good point. So in other words, if you're going through many plating cycles depending on how you break that up and you're trying to meet a wrap requirement, that could definitely add up and make it - make fine line etching more difficult there's a lot of - there are some some drawbacks to traditional processing and then with with an Ormet style process, or a paste interconnect style process, you can eliminate some of those things even with an RF design.
Let's say you have very sensitive surface features and you don't want to play with that layer. You might want to put on the surface finish, the nickel gold, but you don't want to put any additional copper - you want just the original foil copper. You could do that with this paste because you could create that as, almost like a double sided board, and then bond it to the rest of the stack up at the very end, and you're done.
Interesting. So I think you mentioned too, there's some good signal integrity benefits, did we cover that I don't recall?
No, so one of the things that a lot of designs call for is something called back drill. So you're familiar with that, so you do the back drilling to get rid of the unwanted copper. So again, in my earlier example let's say you're connecting layer 1 and 10, and let's just say it's a 22 layer - 26 layer multi-layer. You're going to have a lot of extra copper metal in that via that you really don't need or want. So common technology is to back drill down to layer 10. Now of course drilling to that precise location or depth, to remove the copper up to layer 10, but not beyond. It can cause a reliability concern that's a bit of a challenge. So there's those issues.
What you can do with the paste technology is let's just separate that board at layer 10, and not put a via on that half that goes from layer 11 to whatever the other layer is and you're done. So you can eliminate back drilling and the parasitic effects of having that extra copper and the via so that's another application. So there's some signal integrity benefits, there are some RF applications, there are some high layer cap, multi-layer applications, but also many layer HDI applications; it really depends on how you design it and use the paste.
So if you're a designer what kind of design considerations do you need to make up front?
Okay, my recommendation would be is: think about the design, think where it would make sense to split up the layers and provide the most design benefit. Generally speaking, we like the via to have a one-to-one or less, aspect ratio. Now that might sound restrictive, but it's only in that one B stage layer.
So then that's an important consideration. So in other words, if I have 5 mm of B stage, I won't want my via to be 5 mm or larger where I'm going to apply the paste. It has to do more with the paste physics and how it fills the via and then of course the pad, the receptor pad that you're putting the laser drill via on, needs to be a sufficient size for where the paste doesn't have the opportunity to run on one side or the other of the pad.
So we do like an annular ring around the via, that's going to have a lot to do with how well you can register your laser drilling, usually that's pretty good. The other consideration is, the B stage you use, spread glasses - bringing up spread glass again. Spread glass is good, because it tends to keep the paste corralled, whereas if you have an open weave and that prepreg resin's melting and flowing and during the lamination cycle the paste could run to that area. So spread glass is better. Higher viscosity resins tend to be better. We like low flow prepregs. So those are some of the design considerations.
Another design consideration is - and I've seen this happen before - where if you have a ground area and you're making a lot of paste interconnects along a wide track. You don't want to put the paste interconnect to the edge of the track because what ends up happening is, during lamination, the resin wants to flow off the surface of the track down the sides to fill - hydraulic effect, and it's going to move the paste with it. I've seen vias actually move during lamination. So just some common-sense things. Keeping in mind that it's the B stage where your interconnect is. You want to make sure you put that in some good locations, and in that particular case all they had to do is, go back and shift the vias a little bit to one side and then everything was fine. So it's just those kinds of things. Certainly they could contact us, we can give them some design hints and I can give you some literature to go along with this video or podcast.
Yeah, yeah, very good. Ormet and the paste interconnect - paste sintering - has been around for a little while. What's been the sort of acceptance of it industry-wide? Is it being widely accepted, is it just on certain applications?
It's been around a long time. It was primarily used for quick-turn mic review work, and also large format boards where you're literally stitching very large boards together so you can - again the idea is you can make boards that are nearly finished and then electrically interconnect them. The nice thing about the Ormet paste is it doesn't melt at reflow assembly.
Hmm, so it changes chemically right, so once the sintering is done then it doesn't change, then it doesn't morph and heat?
What attracted us to this technology over some other paste interconnects - because there's other processes where you would apply a paste of some sort and then make a connection with pressure in the z-axis - but what interested us in the Ormet material is: the paste melts at one temperature and alloys - so the paste is basically copper particles with a tin alloy powder. When the tin alloy powder melts - and the melting starts at about 130° Celsius, it starts reacting with the copper and forms an alloy with the copper instead. What's interesting about the Ormet material is, it's alloying with the inner layer coppers as well, on the PCB layers. So we have a metallurgical joint, not just a pressure or contact connection.
So it's - and unlike, the tin lead or lead-free alloys and solder, the melt - the new melting point, when it forms an alloy with copper is one phase is 415°, the other is 630° Celsius. So it's not going to remelt that assembly. So it's a permanent connection, so really the paste applications from other technologies like flip chip and whatnot packages where you didn't want to have a secondary or - if you have a secondary reflow operation - you didn't want to have any more remelt. It has some applications there. Or a down hole assembly is another application where the board might be subjected to the temperatures near the solder melting point is another good application for this material.
So that's what interests us because you know when a board's in use, it heats up the z-axis expansion with other types of pastes interconnects, you have a resistance change every time the board is heated even from, let's say 40, 50, 60° Celsius in normal use, not even in any kind of environment - parts of the board would heat up from the components and you'd have a change in resistance, and that's what this is designed to circumvent because it forms that metallurgical bond with the copper inner layers.
Interesting.
So yeah it's a different technology than the paste you would use in printed electronics.
Okay well that's been fascinating. Again I feel like a newcomer to old technology but - and I've known about Ormet that I think got acquired by Merck now, but I've just never had someone sit down and explain it to me. So thank you for doing that.
90 layer multi layers people are getting - 90...
What!
Yes, 90 layer multi layers with paste interconnects yeah.
That's crazy, I didn't even know a 90 layer board existed I guess.
Yeah I've only really seen them into the 60s I guess personally, so.
Yeah you know, one common design was a 72 layer multi-layer, again made out of eighteen layer components, and one of the things with the chip tests the ATE companies, they built some high layer count multi layers and you need a lot of IOs, there's a trend to go to wafer level testing were you’re testing the entire wafer. You need lots of interconnects and that's one way to get there, is to use the Ormet paste to put in lots of layers. So we're seeing more interest in it lately, and I think that's one of the reasons why the technology hasn't taken off until now, is because there just wasn't the demand.
Right ahead of its time maybe a little bit...
Yeah.
Well, I know you've shared with me some cross-sections or I think you did, and so please be sure to share those with us and we'll put those up on our website and we can share your website and Ormet or Mark's website, so the designers can get more information. Is there any place else besides your two websites that you would recommend for more information?
You know I've mentioned HDPUG (High Density Packaging Users Group) in the past - they're actually contracting some PCB manufacturers to make some HDI test vehicles with paste interconnects. So there's going to be some data - anybody who's an HDPUG member will have some access to some really good reliability data and they're pretty complex boards so it'll really push the technology but for breaking up big thick and ugly PCBs, that's pretty well-established.
Yeah very cool. Okay well thank you. So tell us about that fish on the wall behind you?
[laughter]
So it was a gift from my sister, actually it's made from recycled materials so there's an old PCB cut up on there, and the old spark plug wire, and a few other odds and ends. Some artists put together actually I didn't buy it; my sister bought it on Catalina Island and somehow we went out there as a family trip and somehow she smuggled it off the island and gave it to me just before she headed back to Virginia. So it was kind of cool.
Oh that's fun a good throwback to your diver self.
Yeah so - just the last thing on Ormet, is 'paste don't plate'.
[laughter].
Is that their tagline or is that yours?
Actually that's their tagline. We were sharing it with the IPC shows, but another nice benefit to the Ormet - which I didn't mention earlier is - there's no electrolysis, no plating processes in these interconnect layers so it circumvents all that.
Which is like bizarre for me to think about but...
Yeah but if you're capacity constrained, no plating, that's another benefit.
Well thanks again this has been really good. If you have anything else juicy to share with the listeners just email it over before we get this one up.
Okay.
And thanks again for this one. Now I know we've talked about exploring down the road a little bit on copper foil, integrity issues, and also printed electronics. So I'm sure I'll hit you up again soon Chris.
Yeah definitely. I would like to talk about some of the material science behind printed electronics and I know you guys are working on some new design tools and print electronics; there are a lot of different ways to use that in electronics... I should back up, but there's a lot of different ways to use conductive inks in electronics there are so many different versions of the inks.
Which is another subject I know nothing about so it'll be good. I'll be a student with our listeners and, I know they're out there, I know what conductive inks are, but as far as all the applications, all the different materials available, that just seems like something that's in writing a lot, that people are really turning towards a solution.
Lots of new technologies are coming out in that space and it's going to be fun to watch it all.
Yeah yeah it will be.
Okay Chris, thanks for another good podcast and we'll see you soon.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. Again this has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast and Chris Hunrath from Insulectro, we'll see you next time - until then - always stay OnTrack.
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Learn about Embedded Passives Technology with Bruce Mahler from Ohmega Technologies. OhmegaPly® embedded resistor-conductor material is popular, but it’s not new. Ohmega has been making this product since 1972. So why is it getting so much attention lately? It’s reliable and has stood the test of time for five decades--but emerging technologies are making it more relevant than ever. Tune in to learn more about embedded passive and embedded components and find out if it may be the key to solving your current PCB Design challenges.
Show Highlights:
- OhmegaPly® is a true thin-film, Nickel-Phosphorous (NiP) alloy. In the manufacturing process, about 0.05 to 1.00 microns of the alloy is electro-deposited onto the rough, or “tooth side”, of electrodeposited copper foil.
- Embedded passive and embedded components: ER - Embedded resistors, EC - embedded capacitors
- People tend to think of this technology as something new. Ohmega has been making this product since 1972. It’s the oldest, new technology out there.
- Functionality - it can be used in so many different ways.
- Mica - old copper clad laminator, conceived the technology as a way to add functionality to a copper material. Developed in early 70s as a new product.
- First users of the technology - Cannon electronics in Japan saw the potential in the product for cameras.
- Other early user was - Control Data Corporation. From there alot of mainframes utilizing the technology.
- Ohmega ply - thin film resistive foil, plated process, nickel phosphorus, varied thickness and sheet resistivity, fractions of a micron-thick film. Very linear, as film deposit is thinner, resistivity goes up. Thin film technology.
- We make it in Culver City, CA for 40+ years.
- Work with Rogers/Arlon, Taconic, Isola, Nelco and other laminators
- If you use a tiny discreet resistive element, they can be hard to handle. Etching a 5 or 10 mil trace is no problem.
- Space restrictions, solution - print and etch a resistor
- Why would I want to use Ohmega ply? What are the cost, reliability, performance indicators? “There’s no other way I can design this unless I get rid of my resistors!”
- Most designers use Ohmega ply for densification. Helps when: hard time routing, too many passives, board is a little too thick
- Example: MEMs or Micro-Electro Mechanical System microphones for cell phones.
- Applications: military, space based applications - satellites,
- Uses include: Sensors, IOT, Wearables, Automotive, Memory, Heater, Biomedical
- Ohmega wants to talk technology with PCB designers. Leverage their expertise, they operate as a part of your design team and happy to be a resource for you. Technical people are available to help.
- Ohmega and Oak Mitsui - technology partners - Ohmega/FaradFlex is a combined resistor/capacitor core consisting of OhmegaPly RCM laminated to Oak-Mitsui’s FaradFlex capacitive laminate materials.
- Printed circuit board copper lead times are getting longer
- Self-reliant company
- Very close relationships with raw material suppliers
Links and Resources:
Ohmega Technical Library and Tools
Hey everybody it's Judy Warner again with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Thanks for joining us again. We have yet another amazing guest on a fascinating topic that I hope you will enjoy and learn about today. But before we get started I wanted to invite you to please connect with me on LinkedIn. I like to share a lot of content relative to designers and engineers and I'd be happy to connect with you personally, and on Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We also record this podcast simultaneously on video, so on the Altium YouTube channel you can find us under videos, and then you will see the whole series of podcasts that we record. So that is all the housekeeping we have for the moment.
So let's jump right into our topic today which is, embedded passives and I have a wonderful expert for you today, and an old friend, Bruce Mahler of Ohmega Technologies. Bruce, welcome, thanks so much for joining us and giving us a lesson today on embedded technology.
Thank You Judy, it's great being on board here and I look forward to talking to you and the audience about embedded resistors in particular, as well as other embedded passives.
Okay, so before we get going I want to make sure that I'm calling this technology the right thing because I always think of them being embedded passives but I don't think I'm right. How would you characterize the technology exactly?
Well the OhmegaPly® product, our embedded resistive product, is ER embedded resistors, PCT planar component technologies it goes by many names: embedded resistors, embedded capacitors; I think the most common now is ER embedded resistors EC embedded capacitors in particular. When we're talking about passive elements - and those are the two main ones that are really driving the embedded passive world - and a better component world right now so yeah, OhmegaPly® is just fine with me.
Okay so let's jump in now, you told me something recently that I was kind of shocked to learn about and I'd like you to give us a brief history of Ohmega Technologies and sort of the evolution of this technology. What I was really shocked to learn is the age of the company. So can you tell us more about that?
Sure many people who are looking at using embedded passives, think of it as a new technology, something just on the market. It's been out a year or two - no new applications yet but people are looking at it. So when we're asked, this OhmegaPIy® product , how long have you been making it for? And I said oh since about 1972, and they said wait a second, 1972? I said yeah that's actually , we're going on 46 years now and it's amazing that it's probably the oldest new technology out there.
[laughter]
That's a good way to put it.
I think that has a lot to do with the functionality of the material, how it could be used in so many different ways. And so just briefly a history of the technology: originally the OhmegaPly® embedded resistive thin film material was developed, conceived, and developed by Mica Corporation. Many of your old listeners on board know Mica used to be a copper clad laminator, supplied epoxy glass laminates and polyamide glass, did a number of other things, and it was conceived in the early 70s as a way of adding functionality to a laminate material. So rather than just getting copper foil bonded to a dielectric it was a copper coil that had a functional purpose beyond copper traces bonded to a dielectric and so, after many years of development at Mica, a product OhmegaPly® was developed; the Mica laminate product was MicaPly that's how the name originally came about and it was originally developed in the early 70s as a new product.
Now with any new product, somebody had to be the first to go ahead and try it you know, who was going to be on the bleeding edge of any new technology, who was going to be the route maker? And the interesting thing is that back in the early seventies - about again, '72, '73 - the first users of the technology were two absolutely opposite companies in absolutely opposite areas of the electronic industry. One of those happened to be Canon electronics in Japan. Canon, making AE-1 SLR cameras at the time, looked at the technology as being a great way of making a step potentiometer who could eliminate the ceramic potentiometers circuits that they were currently using, at the time and it fit very neatly into their camera system. So they were very simple, these were surface resistors, put in FR4, make resistive elements in the potentiometers, and they started using it in their AE-1 camera. Very quickly Nikon and Pentax started doing the same thing. The other first user happened to be somebody completely opposite - now we're talking about the early 70s - and that user was Controlled Data Corporation; used to be in business a long time ago. CDC's aerospace group who had some very dense multi-layer boards of mixed dielectric layers of PTFE Teflon, layers of FR4, ECL ecologic, lots and lots of termination needs and absolutely no real estate on some of their high-speed digital boards for termination.
So the idea of being able to print and etch a resistive element, and embed it within a circuit layer, particularly underneath an IC package, speeded up board area for them, allowed them to terminate. They got some other benefits of better electricals. They started using us and then very quickly thereafter, other divisions of CDC started using us in things like their cyber mainframe computer systems, and it kind of dovetailed into people like Cray Research and their supercomputers, and we went from there to super mini computers , places like Digital Equipment and Prime and Wayne, and Data General and Harris. All the guys in the 80s who had ecologic termination needs. So it was the heyday back in the 80s, and a lot of mainframes, supercomputers, super mini computers, kind of like with those very, very powerful systems that people now carry in their cellular phones-
In their pocket right?
-at the time it was very, very powerful though. And so, although two different areas of growth we - in the 70s and 80s - found new applications and digital application, particularly termination, but we also started working very closely with the military aerospace industry where they saw the elimination of solder joints being a very positive thing. You know, high g-force doesn't affect it -vibration - there's no joint there in the resistor circuits. So we started working with a lot of them in the military aerospace, space-based applications, radars, antenna power dividers, high-speed digital systems - just a variety of different things. And it's evolved from there, it seems that every five years new technology comes on that says I need to use that. We can talk more about that - we'll get back to maybe the basics of what do we actually do, how do we make it.
Yeah so let's talk about OhmegaPly®, what is it? What is it like to process, and let's just go in and tell us the whole story.
Oh man, you want to go right back to the beginning again. Okay the OhmegaPly® technology is a thin film resistive foil. Now we became Ohmega Technologies - a spinoff of Mica - started as a separate independent company in 1983, and we basically took over that whole technology from Mica, and what that technology involves, is taking copper foil as a standard EDE electrodeposited copper foil that the printed circuit industry uses, and we threw in a reel-to-reel deposition process as a plated process. We plate a very thin coating of a nickel phosphorous NiP resistive alloy onto the mat or two side of that copper and by varying the thickness of that resistive coating we can vary the sheet resistivity. And so this product - a true thin film nickel phosphorus alloy - we're talking about fractions of a micron thick film, so it's truly thin film. So we have a variety of different sheet resistivities, a 10 ohm per square is about a 1 micron thick film, a 25 ohm per square's a 0.4 micron, 50 ohm is 0.2 micron. So it's very linear, as the film that we deposit gets thinner the sheet resistivity goes up. Now we start getting into the dangerous territory of talking about things like ohms per square and I don't want to start having your listener's eyes cross over some strange area, but suffice it to say, it follows thin film technology.
So what we do is, we make a resistive foil that's a copper foil resistive coating. Now what that foil does, that's what we make at our facilities, in our factory in Culver City California very close to LAX or a few miles away. We've been doing it now , for literally 40 years plus at that facility. That resistive foil then gets laminated or bonded to a variety of dielectrics. We work with people like Rogers Arlon, Taconic, we work with Isola we work with Noko, we do some work with DuPont we're working with others out there, but essentially the resistive foil can be bonded to almost any kind of dielectric just like any other copper foil. Standard pressing, heat pressure, it bonds to a variety of dielectrics. Now that laminate product - a copper clad laminate with the resistive film between the copper and the substrate - goes to the printed circuit board community, the PCB community, then prints and etch copper circuitry. They normally will do a print develop, extra process to create copper circuits.
Now they go through a separate (an additional) print develop bed strip so it's a two-print operation and the first print is defining where they have copper traces, then they etch away all excess copper and they etch away all excess resistive film underneath their copper. Now they have copper circuitry. Underneath all that copper circuitry is a resistive material, but electrically it's shorted out by the copper above it. Well you have a spot for tracers.
Makes sense.
That's a point think of it as a treatment of copper only like a zinc or a brass.
Okay.
Now the board shops come back and they apply more photoresist over that copper circuitry and they print a second piece of artwork and that artwork protects all the areas that they wish to keep as copper, and exposes for etching the copper that will be the resistive element. Now in almost all cases, the first etch will define the width of that copper that will be the width of that resistive element. So the second image artwork defines a length of copper that will be the length of the resistor. So it's a very simple piece of artwork to use; very easy to register, but after protecting the copper with photoresist, now they etch away the exposed copper using the 'aplan' based etchings, and they leave behind the resistive film that was underneath it, and they have a resistive element.
Interesting.
-stripping photoresist off the board; leaves them with copper circuitry with resistive elements that are integral to that copper plane. Those resistors can be tested for value, they can go through standard multi-layer processing, laid up with other cores, pressed and then forget you have the resistive elements embedded, if it goes through traditional drilling, print, develop, etch, strip process, or plate process I should say.
So you do a drilling and you desmear, you plate, you etch and your embedded resistor inside; and as a bare board now, prior to shipping for assembly, the board shop can do traditional testing, and they can measure resistor values to ensure they're within spec. They could also be used on the surface of a board, in which case you solder mask over the resistive elements along with your copper traces, and that protects them from abrasion and scratching. The key here is this though: if you use a discrete resistive element, an 0402, an O201. An O201 is a 10 mil by 20 mil resistor. They're pretty small;
Yeah.
-hard to handle, hard to assemble. So if I go to a board shop now and say: hey guys I want you to etch a copper trace that's 10 mil wide, they're gonna look and they'll laugh and say: come on you're insulting us!-
Yeah.
-we do 5 & 5, 4 & 4, 3 & 3, 2 & 2 technology. So etching a 10 mil trace isn't a big deal, five mil trace is not a biggo. When they etch that copper trace, they're essentially defining the width of the resistor, so it's like a controlled impedance trace. They're creating a resistive element of a certain width. Now you say: can you cover it with photoresist and have a little box window that's 20 ml long? Sure that's not a big deal if you etch the copper away. Now they've left themselves with a 10 mil by 20 mil resistive element, which does not push the art at all, it's already built in, no assembly, and all that. So if you say: hey can they do a 5 mil by 10 mil resistor? Sure, we have applications that are using 50 micron by 100 micron resistor. If a board shop connected that copper trace, that's the limit of the resistor width you can print. So you can get a significantly small, very, very, precise resistors that could be located right where you want them, under a package, and that's where we're doing a lot of newer applications like microfluidic heaters, you're talking about a couple mils, by four or five mils you can get very small heat rises in a very localized area, very low power, but I'm ahead of myself.
Okay yeah well so I'm thinking about our audience right now, who are EEs doing design, or just purist board designers for the most part. Why would I want to use OhmegaPly® over traditional? I mean you just mentioned one, if I had space restrictions and I didn't want to use these tiny, tiny parts that seems like a no-brainer but is it real estate, is it cost? Like what drives people - I think I'm opening a can of worms, sorry but what is the cost, performance, reliability implications? And if I was a designer, why would I want to use OhmegaPly®?
Okay, it's a good question and people use it for a variety of reasons. The best reason we like to hear is: I have a design and there's no other way I can design this thing unless I get rid of my resistor and so, kind of I get a tear, I well up a bit, I get very emotional-
[laughter]
-with those. Because then it's all driven by performance and densification.
Right.
But look at everybody - realistically - cost is a big driver, as is performance, and obviously densification all goes hand in hand with reliability. I would say most designers design with us for a number of reasons. The key reason that we focus on densification and that is this: if I have a certain number of resistors on a board and I said: I'm having a hard time routing. I have a lot of passes on my board, either I have to route in more layers, so I'm adding to a multi layer design for its traditional through hole, and I'm gonna have to go to HDI which adds a lot of cost to my board. Or my form factor, my X&Y; dimension is a little too big I need to shrink it down, or my board’s a little too thick, I'm gonna make it a little thinner. So here's a tool, a technology that allows you to do that.
So let's say I have one resistor in a unit area of a board, and somebody says, well gee I want to etch in a pretty natural resistor. Okay who’s cost’s it going to be? It's gonna cost whatever our materials, divided by one. There's gonna be one resistor. Now instead I have ten resistors - what's the cost? It's our unit cost divided by ten because it's the same material that goes through the same print and etch process. So the greater the number of the resistors lower the cost per unit resistor. One application that uses our technology - and this is where it reinvents itself. A number of years ago - five/six years ago - it started being used in MEMS microphone.
If any of your listeners out there, any of your designers have a cell phone, you very likely have us in your cell phone in the MEMS microphone that you're talking out of, or you're listening out of right now. Now why use us in a MEMS microphone? We're part of an RC filter network which improves the sound fidelity significantly. So it's been found to be a very significant offering by the MEMS microphone makers and their end customers who are the cell phone manufacturers - but in very massive, mass quantity production - for many, many years over in the Far East, particularly in China, where our product is used extensively. So in those applications it was a combination of densification, they can make these MEMS microphone boards. The PCB's thinner because they eliminate the chip resistor, you don't have to assemble it, they can make them a little bit smaller and because you're talking about such small little element - even a few resistors only a couple resistors - in that design, you're talking about a fraction of a cent to put these resistive elements in a board. Fraction of a cent, no assembly-
Yeah when they're in the millions that matters.
-all that's very important. There's another example. If I'm a designer and say: hey I have a high-density IO/IC. My fast rise times I have some termination issues but I'm on a 300 micron pad batch and there's no way I can put a discrete component on my surface. To go ahead and terminate, I have too far to go. I have too many of these line. So I have IO of hundreds of traces, maybe a thousand traces, and I do it but guess what? If you're able to take every trace, every logic trace coming off that that IO and I build a resistor as part of that trace - to have a trace it has just a little of the copper removed - leaving a resistive element behind.
So it's a resistor built-in trace which is one of our products: ORBIT Ohmega resistors built-in trace - you can terminate every one of those drivelines - they're underneath the IC package, so they take up no board area. They terminate off that driveline, you improve impedance now, naturally reduce line delay, you also save money because now you literally have hundreds of resistors in a square inch of area or a couple square inches of area, and it saves a lot of cost by not having to assemble and put those discretes on your board now. So cost is a big driver. I just mentioned a couple of them. Densification is as well, but our material also is essentially inductive free. So you know, it means that you have less inductive reactance with fast rise times. So what happens; you get less EMI coming off your board, it's a cleaner signal. Our materials, also because of that, used in certain applications for absorbers or, R cards where they used us, that resistive film, to suppress some of the EMI coming off for-
-interesting
-as a shielding agent. So there's another application. So we're used extensively, not just in power dividers and R cards and absorbers, but obviously as terminators, as in filters, pull-up/pulldown resistors and now we're seeing a lot of activity in heater elements. We're in the military aerospace uses a 'cell' so my active laser activation where they have tiny resistive elements on PCBs that can go ahead and activate a laser for laser guidance for smart munitia, missile systems, or heater elements that can go ahead and maintain heat on critical components in avionics or even in space based applications. Or our product is used in satellites and even in deep space probes. We were on the Mars Express Beagle 2 Lander, on the surface of Mars where we have an Ohmega heater, key critical components up to above minus 15° C. It would work great if the parachute did not land on top of the lander
[laughter]
and prevent the deployment of the solar array but hey it was a great application for our product.
Well it's again - I think just such a surprise - or at least it was to me, when I learned about one: how old the technology is and two: that it's really because of complexity and just all the different things that are going on in the industry right now that it's growing - it's growing at a quick pace.
Significantly so, we've had a wonderful record year; every year is a record year. But that's the nice thing, that the resistive film is like a blank slate. What you do with it is a new assignor and so yeah in the 80s it was all ecologic termination and then it goes into power dividers, and they're still doing all that stuff. But you know what's happening now is, we're saying, it’s utilized in so many different ways so we talked about the MEMS microphone. Well there's new sensor technology, there's accelerometers or other there's other MEMS-type sensors who use us. Now we see automotive sensor technology that says: hey, we could use this, not only is it obviously super-high reliability, been out for decades you know, can be done in high volumes, very cost-effective, density impact identification. But there's some critical components you could use in automotive, 5G technology-
What about IoT Bruce, it seems like ideal for IoT, provided the cost-
-in IoT you're saying?
Yes.
The Internet of Things well that's why I'm talking about sensor technologies. IoT is a combination of a lot of things.
Yes.
Technologies are getting into it, we see our stuff on flexible materials, and wearables.
Your wearables, yeah that was the other thing I was wondering about.
Wearable devices, we can get smaller home devices, home audio devices, and as things get thinner, smaller, everybody wants things densified. So getting rid of the passives especially, really allows you to do that. So yeah IoT is a big thing, automotive, even memory devices going to DDR4, going out to DDR5 , those fast data rates are causing needs for termination again, and 'Genic' has approved the embedded resistor within some of the DDR4 structures. So memory is another area. So between sensor technologies and automotive, and home devices in things like memory devices, and things like heater microfluidic heater bio biomedical type things you know. We have micro heaters on an embedded board, you can have fluid come in and have basically a breakdown to the protein to do analysis, they use us for things like that. It's pretty exciting - so yeah it's been around for 45 years but guess what, we think that the new technologies, the new applications, it's almost like just starting over again.
Yeah I can see that.
Especially, we have the reliability long-term use, high volume low volume, high density/low density, so many different ways of doing it so, that's nice to have that background, make people feel good about using the technology, but knowing that all these new things are developing. I mean I can't wait for the next 45 years.
That's fun.
Well a couple of things I wanted to ask you about what made me think of calling you and wanting to do this - sort of a side note - is, you hear about passives being on allocation and all of that and I'm like: I wonder if Bruce is seeing an uptick just because people are freaking out over automotive buying up whole lines - I don't know if you're seeing that, it was just a curiosity I had?
Well yeah I know what you're saying, we definitely see an uptick, and now part of that uptick within the context of the of the industry. First off, I do want to tell your audience, especially your designers, we've been doing this for 40 - 45 years plus, as I mentioned - 46 years. I'd like to say that I was only 2 years old when I first got introduced to technology-
-We're going with that; I was three, you were two - let's go with that!
But we also have designers at our company whose job it is to work with the design community, particularly a PCB designer who could help them optimize their design, who can develop real footprints of resistors. What we don't want your your listeners to do, is reinvent the wheel; we want you to use our knowledge, talk to our people - say: hey here's what I think I'd like to do, I have an application I want to use, does it make sense for your technology? If it doesn't, we don't want you wasting your time. So ultimately you're gonna say, we're not gonna use it anyway we want you to have an optimized design because we want you to be successful. So think of us as an extension of yourself, of your team.
We're part of your design team we're there to help and assist. If you go to our website ohmega.com, there's a lot of white papers, there's a lot of good information there that people could read and reference. But more importantly is the communication with our staff, technical people who can really help you. Now talking about in general, the industry, there is an uptick in that. We talked about passive, so I mentioned it; we're in filters and MEMS microphones, resistors and capacitors and in one case, one of the capacitive materials, the embedded capacitor material FaradFlex, which is a embedded capacitor material, it's produced by Oak Mitsui. So Ohmega Technologies, my company and Oak Mitsui, got together and combined the material and had our resistive material on their capacitor material so we'd have one layer resistive capacitor.
What? My head just exploded!
What we did was we found that it's pretty simple, from a technology standpoint, to stick two technologies, each separately have its own complexity but working together really worked very well. Importantly enough it had such synergistic effects in terms of improved power, lower RTC characteristics, or change of resistance to function the temperature down to almost nothing, the stability is astounding over a wide temperature range that we applied and we got a jointly held patent for the combined technology which we have in the US, and also all over the world now. So it's a joint technology pact between Ohmega Technologies and between Oak Mitsui and Mitsui Mine in Japan for this technology, and we see applications where if somebody wants to get a resistor and embed it, they also want to embed the capacitor. They get rid of capacitors that are passive. A lot of times they want to get rid of resistors too. So it goes hat in hand with a lot of those.
In general, there is a lot of movement in the industry to embed it, but it's a growing thing because of densification, growing needs for real estate, smaller, thinner, lighter. You touched upon something and that is material sources, right now the industry is going through some uptick. I think part of that's military aerospace that has increased the amount of funding and a lot of military programs, but also other areas. So we've seen that as well and our products are used in a lot of stuff. Radar systems F-35, F-22, a lot of missile systems, Eurofighter, just all over the place. A lot of satellites, a lot of SATCOM, a lot of other things like that.
A lot of radars on the ground as well, but we're seeing that uptick because the IoT, as you mentioned, in the Internet of Things, there's more and more sensitive technologies being demanded into a lot of different product. People are amazed at how many sensors go into so many things these days and the key with a lot of that, is densification, smaller, faster, cheaper - so that gets hand-in-hand with the 5G, the automotive, self-driving cars that are coming up; a lot of the sensors the Lidar, other sensor technologies are going to self-driving automobiles and what everybody says is: hey, this all sounds great, but you know what? If I have a printed circuit board not using a computer and I have a failure in that it's okay. So it's annoying my computer goes, I swap a board, I put up a board, but I cannot afford to have any failure. I cannot afford to have anything go wrong, if I'm in an automobile that's driving itself, do you have room for any kind of failure? And so it's taken very seriously in the industry and going to a lot of these conferences and hearing the talks, the people involved with testing a lot of these are very concerned. They have to have absolute... as tough as it was, they have to make it even tougher for testing. Nothing can fail, so a lot of that comes into what can we do to improve reliability? Hey let's get rid of solder joints.
We want a kind of thing doesn't cause something go 'ding' and fly off a board anymore - or you know X&Y; expansion or z-axis expansion, all those things. Get rid of those solder joints, mechanical joints, improve the reliability while you enhance, densify, improved electrical performance. So we're saying that that's going on right now. And the other thing is that companies are concerned about, the industry is facing some interesting things right now in the printed circuit industry copper lead times are really out.
Yeah, that's crazy too.
-yeah the industry is getting smaller and smaller, yet at the same time the end-users and designers have to rely more and more on fewer and fewer resources. So we've been around since like I said 1972, so for 46 years we've been supplying this technology and we have never ever not been able to supply this in those 46 years. It's important for us that, A) we manufacture everything ourselves we make that resistive film we test it, we have test facilities which make sure that the product is what it should be before it ships out the door. We have hands-on manufacturing that's critical we don't want to subcontract making our product because we feel it's too important to our customers. They're relying on us. If we subcontracted, what would happen if whoever we had make it, went out of business? Or they sold the business; I don't want to do it anymore, and then we can't get product, our customers can't. We don't want to rely on someone else; that's number one.
Number two, we have very good close working relationships with our raw material suppliers. Most of our raw materials are USA-based, we get them in from the US you know. We want to have a critical supply chain. When you're talking about scarce resources like copper and other things, it's important that we have that kind of relationship with our suppliers so that we always have product. We're always there to support our customer needs when they need it, how they need it, and that to me is very, very important because a lot of companies are coming to us saying: oh yeah we're giving two months lead time on getting product, and how are we supposed to deal with that? And say what about you guys? I said: you want some of our stuff we'll ship it tomorrow. To us that's very important. Customer; you've got to go ahead and satisfy customer needs and especially their concerns that's absolutely critical in the industry today.
Yeah and it's refreshing because we get in this weird cultural thing as a business and it's like: Oh faster, cheaper or we're gonna be the lean supply chain and buy out. We get into this whole frenetic thing, but we forget if we're not meeting any of the customers we'll be out of business. So I really love that philosophy. Now as far as our listeners go Bruce, we're gonna share all of this in the show notes right. Everything that's on your website I encourage it, so we're going to supply all those links and the website you guys, if you're interested you can call Ohmega Technologies directly, get the help that Bruce alluded to. But they have a really great website with some really neat things that will go into even more depth than Bruce has gone into so far.
So thank you so much. So Bruce, as we wrap up here. First of all, thank you Bruce is joining us from IMS in Philadelphia today even though he's - at Ohmega in Culver, so thank you for hopping out of the show for a few minutes to give our listeners a treat, so thank you for that. When I wrap up the podcast I always like to have a little feature in here called 'designers after hours' because most of us techie weirdos have a little bit of a right brain and have interesting hobbies I've found. Is there anything that you do after hours that is creative, compelling, interesting or otherwise, or do you have any after hours? do you just work all the time Bruce?
Do I have any after hours? That's a good question.
Yeah we encourage people to call us and that keeps me rather active and the staff at Ohmega and we welcome that; please, please, please call us, email us, we'd love to talk to you and listen to you. As to me yeah I enjoy travel, I enjoy writing you know, I always have . Now it's mostly technical things or papers that I publish. But you know, I love doing fiction as well, I do do that and I get very involved. Between that and having a lot of crazy grandchildren running underfoot, that keeps me going.
That fills up your plate. So also, would you say you are a geek or a nerd?
I'm sorry?
Would you say you are a geek or a nerd?
That's a good question, I'm probably more geek than nerd yeah they've cleaned me up over the years, so I think I'm more geeky.
Yeah I would say you're more geeky, but you are walking on the razor's edge my friend. You can you can dip into that nerd space pretty easily.
[laughter]
Oh man, and I've been so good I haven't cracked any jokes, you can be mad about.
[laughter]
Here I am, now you're telling me I'm close-
-no, no only in the best kind of way that you like go into this nerdy space of technology but that's really -
-you want to know something; it's been a long time, I've been doing this a long time and I'm so excited - it's like it's a renewal if people get that I'm excited about technology about where Ohmega fits into technology it's because I really AM. It's genuine, our president Allan Leve, over at Ohmega Technologies, here's a guy who's had the same kind of passion. So every time we see something, we're always sending articles: look at this it’s neat isn't it? So if you call that nerdy, you call that geeky, that's fine. You know what we call it being enthused with technology and how we fit into that technology.
Absolutely.
-because I've been called a nerd and a geek I'm gonna drown myself in a Phillies steak salad.
-extra cheese and onions.
[laughter]
No - when I say you teeter is only because I remember when I was working at Transline Technology, you came in and you were showing us how it's done, how it's processed as a board shop - and I remember listening to you going: this guy totally knows his stuff and it was so articulate and I'm like, boy when I grow up I want to be able to talk like this. Like Bruce Mahler does, man he's got it going on! So that's why I say-
-just wait until I grow up really.
-well it is an exciting time in technology there's no grass growing under our feet so I share your enthusiasm for everything that's in the market and you're seeing everything so that is really exciting. Well thank you again for -
-thank you I appreciate it Judy, the opportunity to spend time with you and spend time with your audience, and hi to everyone out there - look forward to talking with you, look forward to working with you and like I said; a lot of exciting things out there right now in our industry so we're working in the best industry out there.
We are, now we're gonna send poor Bruce back to booth duty where he can stand in a booth. Sorry to send you back to booth but thank you so much. Again this has been Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast and Bruce Mahler of Ohmega Technologies. Thanks for tuning in again until we hear or talk to you next time always remember to stay on track.
Tuesday Jul 03, 2018
Tuesday Jul 03, 2018
What finish should I use for my PCB Design? There’s no one single answer, it depends. Meet chemist and surface finish expert Mike Carano, the Vice President of Technology and Business Development at RBP Chemical, industry leaders in high performance chemical technology. Mike emphasizes a key question when it comes to surface finishes, “What are the reliability requirements of the environment?” Learn about the chemistry behind different finishes, fabrication and get tips for avoiding corrosion in unexpected environments in this episode of the OnTrack Podcast.
Show Highlights:
- Mike was Inducted into IPC hall of fame.
- RBP Chemical - veteran owned small business, based in Milwaukee, founded in 1954 as a supplier for the printing industry and over the years evolved into surface finishes and also carry product lines for Embedded Medical Devices and Semiconductor and Mining industries.
- On using solder mask over bare copper method - prior to going out to assembly the copper needs to be made pristine.
- What are the surface finishes and which to use when? 50% of industry using hot air solder leveling (HASL), a surface finish with a long successful history.
- Other surface finishes: Electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG), Electroless Nickel Electroless Palladium Immersion Gold (ENEPIG) - which is common in IC substrate, packaging industry.
- Future of surface finishes: Tin-silver, Direct palladium copper
- What finish should I use? There’s no one answer, it depends.
- Are there common examples of things that can go wrong? ie. High frequency design applications - ENIG is a well known issue that most engineers learn about the hard way.
- Where is the final product going to be used? Is it a domestic product or for the military?
- Reliability first, cost last. Cost should not be driving force.
- The environment is what really matters i.e. Shock-drop or Brunel fracture - consider for mobile phones, ENIG - tin-nickel bond, not tin-copper, corrosion environments, temperature extremes
- What are the reliability requirements of the environment?
- The most high quality board fabricators have strong process control and automation in place to ensure chemical stability.
- Board designers are looking for electrical performance. Need to ask about the environment.
- I would put every designer in a circuit board fabricator for a week and let them build a board they design.
- To learn, you need to practice and get practical information on building the bareboards.
- Creep corrosions on the mill automation machines because the OEM is specifying the finish.
- Japanese techniques i.e. Shokuku chemical
- Most substrate work is done in Asia; IC substrate packaging at its best is in Japan.
- Advice for learning: IPC courses, CID and CID+ training is one way to learn more.
Links and Resources:
IPC Hall of Fame Interview Video
HDP Users Group (HDPUG)
Hey everyone it's Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack podcast. Welcome back we are glad to have you join us again today we have a very unique topic and speaker which was actually brought about by Mark Okumura who is the Senior Principal Hardware Engineer from ETS Lindgren who reached out to me and asked me about the topic of surface finishes and lucky for you I happen to know the guy who is a chemist and expert on surface finishes. A longtime friend Mike Carano from RBP Chemical. Before Mike and I get started, I wanted to please invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, I'm @AltiumJudy. Altium is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and also please know that we're recording on YouTube in case you want to see our sunshiny faces. So Mike, welcome thanks so much we’re delighted to have you.
Thanks for inviting me.
It's good to know friends in high places right?
Well, I have friends in low places.
[Laughter]
I don't believe it, well maybe, so Mike, I’ve got a question. First of all let's talk about your background a little bit so as a way of introduction Mike Carano was inducted into the IPC Hall of Fame a few years ago and I had the privilege of doing the video interview that was highlighting his induction into the IPC Hall of Fame because he has served on so many committees and boards for IPC, but he really is the go-to guy on chemistry. So Mike, tell us a little bit about your background how you got into chemistry specifically related to the printed circuit board electronics industry?
Well sometimes Judy, things happen by accident really, chemistry and sciences were always a love of mine so I always liked to experiment - my parents got me the chemistry set, and everything from blowing up golf balls to me making things at home, everything from even experimenting with making wine that's chemistry - that seemed like a good thing to do right? I also realized that probably owning a vineyard would not be in the immediate future so onward and upward with chemistry, particularly the area of physical and advanced chemistry electrochemistry working on a Master's Degree, I happened to be walking up on campus one day back in 1980, 24 years old, and there's a gentleman standing outside this building and he noticed my chemistry books he says, hey come here I want to talk to you, and I thought, oh what's this about? And I noticed the sign on the door there, Youngstown Ohio City Electrochemicals, and he asked me if I wanted to interview for a position there. Well it was perfect because graduate school was more part-time. I was doing some teaching assistance and what do you know, I interviewed for this thing on surface finishing chemistry having no idea really what I was getting into, but I did. The idea was finishing my Master's degree, and go on and do something else - maybe do this for two years - well 39 years later here I am still in the industry. In some way, shape, or form, so that's how I got into this and as the company, Electrochemicals in those days, founded primarily on the metal finishing industry - you know, surface finishing for doorknobs and bumpers and decorative plating. Well the company was just then getting into printed circuit board chemistry and a lot of people didn't even know what that was in those days because it was a fledgling industry there was mostly - remember Judy way back then was the 80% of the industry was really run by the OEM...
Yeah
-So digital equipments the the Adelphi’s, the Delco’s the IBM's, but pretty soon there was that switch, and then I got involved in IPC and pretty soon was formulating chemistries and technical service, traveling globally around the world was fascinating for me, and here I am today, and still in the industry in some way, shape, or form. You know, you evolve, you continue to evolve matter of fact, just like surfaces they've evolved.
Yeah right.
Where we are today, I'm sure they'll continue to evolve in the very near future.
Yeah for sure, so can you give us a quick overview, I know you were Chief for many many years and now you're with RBP can you give us a quick thumb nutch of RBP?
Absolutely, great opportunity, company privately owned (veteran owned) small business, our company is based in Milwaukee Wisconsin and was founded in 1954 and has been privately held since. The current CEO and majority owner is Mr Mark Kannenberg, he's my immediate boss, Mark served in Vietnam, he's a West Point graduate and also a Harvard MBA, but he always wanted to kind of get in the business of owning his own company even though he had many, many opportunities. So he's now been running RBP for these last 30 years. Under his control the company has grown beautifully - initially, the company was founded as a supplier of materials and chemistries for the printing industry, newspapers, newsprint magazines, but over the years also evolved into surface finishing, surface treatment and printed circuit board chemistry, which is the company today, because as I said it continues to evolve. Today and we have four major product lines the printed circuit board and photochemical milling chemistries. We have a great product line in the area of embedded medical devices, and we also serve the semiconductor and the mining industries with some specialty additives. A lot of people don't understand the connection but there's a connection all the way through the platforms because the chemistries are basically adapted to work in all those industries which makes working with RBP fascinating for me - the diversification but yet the the continuity and the familiarity - so great opportunity and I've enjoyed it immensely.
Good, thank you for sharing that Mike, so let's jump right into surface finishes. I'm sure most of our listeners who are engineers and designers will be familiar with surface finishes but let's just go back to our ABCs for a second and just define surface finishes for us for PCBs.
Sure that is the part of the board that is really going to be used to prevent oxidation of the base metal, as you know, typically we have copper as the base metal if you're using the solder mask over bare copper method where you basically put solder mask down that nice green stuff and the copper is showing, you have to make that copper solderable, you have to preserve the solderability so typically, prior to that board going out to the assembly operation, the copper has to be basically made pristine with a finish that does not oxidize so that you can join the component leads, whatever they may be, whether they be surface mounts, through-hole, BGA, QFNS, QFPs, they have to be able to to wet that surface and form a reliable joint. So the surface finish is critical for that application and for that end product.
So tell us - give us just a rundown - of what the surface finishes are and then we're gonna jump in to which one to use when.
Sure well, here in North America and primarily for the military, we're still using - at least 50 or so percent of the industry - uses hot-air solder leveling. Basically you're taking that solder mask over bare copper board, flexing it, cleaning the copper and then dipping it into a molten solder pot to coat the surface. But over the years, due to a lot of other constraints, one of them was to get rid of lead. And even when we have lead-free, hot air leveling, the other surface finishes have evolved, as a matter of fact, have taken center stage primarily outside of North America. With these surface finishes are we hear the term ENIG, which is Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold we also hear about Electroless Nickel Electrons Palladium Immersion Gold also known as ENAPEG, and while that may be an expensive finish, you see that used quite a bit in the packaging industry, the semiconductor packaging IC substrate industry. Then there is OSP Organic Solderability Preservatives, which is actually the only one of these to be non-metal-containing and then we have immersion silver, and immersion in tin, and again we expect that there’ll be other additions of these finishes coming up in the near future. Potentially a tin silver or direct palladium over copper to get rid of the gold altogether. There's a lot of movement in this area to enhance the surface finish reliability at the same time managing costs because you see how precious metals like gold and palladium can contribute significantly to the cost of that board. Which then makes you wonder, okay what finish should I use and when should I use it? So that's a rundown of our finishes and each one of them - I can tell you this Judy - when people ask me, and I travel all over the world, what finish should I use...
Yeah
-no one finish fits all.
That's a loaded question isn't it Mike? It depends, that's the answer.
It depends right.
Well as I mentioned in the beginning, this gentleman Mark Okumura reached out to me and said, are you ever going to talk on your podcast, or do you have any information about surface finishes? Because in his particular case - and this is just one of many many high frequency application engineers and designers - have found out the hard way that if they use ENIG the Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold, that if it's high frequency then we have the skin effect and then the signal begins moving through the nickel and the nickel is lossy, and unfortunately that's a well-known issue it's been going on forever but it seems like people have learned that the hard way, unfortunately one at a time, that's just one example. So can we talk about when we talked a few weeks ago, about environment playing a huge role on how to make a selection on your surface finishes. So can you jump into that a little bit?
What I mean by environment is, where is that final product going to be used, and let me just preface it this way, if you're in this industry, whether you're in the printed circuit board industry directly or you're an assembler or you're an OEM. Choosing the final finish for that product may be the most important decision you make, because it is going to impact that long-term reliability of least of that solder joint now as I’m saying solder joint, I'm using it interchangeably with lead-free as well. And compounding that, is again, where are the boards going to be used? Is it to finish in harsh use environments such as automotive under the hood, military aerospace - and that's one application. But then, what about consumer items like mobile phones, smartphones, desktop computers, smart tablets, household devices. You don't need a product or a finish that adds $9 a surface square foot of the board if you're using it in a washing machine in your house, or in a microwave, or even a desktop or laptop computer. Now military aero things like class 3, or class 3A that have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can't fail - you can't fail. You may look at that and you say, well do I need ENAPEG, do I need ENIG? Do I need to make the OSP also work? And some people really are surprised when they find out that OSP’s a very reliable finish. It's not wire bondable but in terms of reliability in forming the copper tin in a metallic, and having a reliable solder joint, it's fantastic.
So think about that, it also happens to be the lowest cost finish but I am of the opinion, and I asked somebody this, and I listed ten things I have cost of the finish at the bottom, because that should not be the driving force of what you put on the board. It's the environment where the board is used and then you ask yourself other questions. Is cosmetics important? Do I have to have a shiny silvery finish or don't I need one? I'm worried about shock drop, we know for example, if something I have in my hand drops a lot like a smartphone. you worry about brittle fracture of the components - actually fraction when that phone hits the ground - we've all dropped our phones and the mobile phone companies, the Apples of the world and the Samsung's, conduct shock drop tests all the time because that's important criteria. You don't want to spend money on a new phone, drop it and find out the components fell off. So that's why you don't see ENIG used a lot on the smartphone, you use things like something that makes it much stronger - copper tin and a metallic bond - whereas with ENIG, your tin is formed with the nickel so it's a tin-nickel bond not a tin copper one.
I see.
So, we all know, and there's been hundreds of papers published by many, many companies and fantastic researchers around the world, showing that the tin to copper in a metallic is much stronger than the tin to nickel in a metallic. So that's something to consider as well, not just the cost. But you might use ENIG in medical devices, we know the military is starting to look at ENIG as a final finish, but they also do some things to ensure the reliability of that component as it is attached to the surface. So there's a myriad of things to look at - oh and corrosion environment - in terms of creep corrosion, and that's an issue and silver tends to be somewhat prone to creep corrosion, but in an industrial environment kind of outside, or in a clay modeling studio or in a paper mill where sulphur is emitted.
Yeah that's interesting.
So, if you told me, well I'm making this part because I work for General Motors and I'm modeling, I'm gonna use clay to model my next car and I'm gonna have all these computers hooked up inside that studio, I think I'll use boards with silver on them. Well you probably don't want to, your work is gonna be lost, so that's one consideration. As I said shock drop is another, but again where are you using the final product? Industrial automation, using it outside, base stations, all of those things. Industrial controllers where we're subjected to not just environmental contaminants,but maybe significant vibration, temperature extremes etc. So always look at the environment where you're using it and what the reliability requirements are. Can you afford the warranty, what is the warranty when you take something back? If it's inexpensive, you can use an inexpensive finish but if the cost of failure is great, you should rethink that finish which you're going to use and how you're going to use it.
That totally makes sense to me. You had mentioned that a lot of people think that OSP is generally a sort of low-tech product, but you were pushing back against that when we discussed that, why is that?
Well 25 years ago OSP was what you would call the single attachment finish - one reflow, maybe one through-hole, and that was it. It lasted four to five months whereas the other finishes, like hot air leveling - one year, two year shelf life - that's changed. Companies have made significant improvements in the reliability. Also the the ability of the OSP to reduce oxygen penetration on the copper, and that again is what you're trying to do, you're trying to prevent the underlying copper from oxidizing so that when the solder melts and spreads on the surface, it spreads and encapsulates the leads on the side on the components and solidifies and it's a highly reliable. If the surface is oxidized even slightly and doesn't wet properly you've lost your reliability, but OSP has come on strong now and you see it in automotive under the hoods, major telecommunication companies using it for the reasons of getting away from brittle fracture, you see them in smartphones - a significant number of smartphones - and I have experience in those areas so, I'm talking from personal experience - the reliability is there with the right finish. Now the low-tech you find, if you buy a low-tech OSP from somebody you've never heard of, you’re taking a risk, but the companies out there - two or three that are making significant contributions to the performance of OSP - they've upped the game significantly. Many of them are fifth-generation molecules, these are synthesize organic azone molecules, that just do a fantastic job, and I would not hesitate to recommend it for numerous applications.
It's interesting how that's evolved over time, I wasn't aware of that until you mentioned it to me recently, and that's some of the magic of chemistry that just runs in the background of our industry until sometimes - it seems like - until there's a problem.
That's right.
We don't talk about it, so I'm glad to sort of have this discussion.
That’s a good point, to that point Judy, when Black Pad showed up what people will call brittle fracture...
Yeah.
-it set the industry back 15 years for ENIG because they didn't understand it, they wanted to blame the phosphorus content of the nickel deposit, but that turned out to be incorrect, it turned out that the cause of that was the galvanic effect. When you put immersion gold on top of nickel you're not electrolytically plating it, you're doing an immersion deposit, also known as galvanic cells, so to deposit on nickel, some nickel actually has to corrode and leave the surface, so that the gold can take its place. And that's the main difference of an immersion deposit. Well, what was happening because of the way things were being run, pH, nickel morphology, roughness, etc that galvanic effect was significantly large, causing this corrosion - significant corrosion - to take place on the nickel surface, and that would impact negatively the formation of the solder joint. And there you would get brittle fracture, you drop something, It breaks. So, things are better now, but I still would be very careful, if you told me, I'm gonna put ENIG on my board today, I would say do a first article, make sure that the board design you have, will not end up with this issue.
That's a good advice and, for people who are listening. Again - you're going to hear me say this over and over again - and I'm not going to apologize for it, is that you need to get into a board house, find the time because most really good, world-class board houses - you're going to go in and you're going to be surprised to see... and Mike can talk about this, the complexity of the labs they have in place to make sure that their chemicals are stable and doing what they're supposed to do. Mike, I imagine you've spent just more than a little bit of time inside of board houses discussing chemical balance and, if you would, jump in on what the choice of surface finish has on the fabricator and why the designer should know about that?
Right yeah, well first let's go back to your first question about these board fabricators the ones that are high-quality board fabricators and I'm looking at not just on the surface finishing side, but also other aspects of the circuit board fabrication including electroless copper, direct metallization, the amount of control that they have in place, process control automation, to keep plating and other the key ingredients within a very tight operating window. And that's not difficult if you invest the time, and you have the commitment to ensure that. I can’t tell you how many times Judy, have been in situations where I've had to troubleshoot a problem because someone said I've got this issue, I've got that issue, you go there and you find out that they were running the chemistry basically way outside the window. Well, why'd you do this? Well, we only check it once every two shifts. Well, you can't have a high volume operation like what you're doing and then check the chemistry once every two shifts and I'm telling you, 90% of these problems that I see related to process, are related to incorrect use of the chemistry and mishandling of the controls that are available to you.
Now does that mean that the fabricator needs to work much closer with the supplier, but if the supplier is already doing this for them, the fabricator needs to take some responsibility. But again, I've been with a number of companies who have complete failure analysis labs also in their facility. So, they take it to a very high level, they're basically their own qualification facility to ensure that they understand where the issues are. They categorize every defect and those are the kinds of ones you want to work with.
Absolutely, and I've worked for shops like that where they literally had PhDs in chemistry renting the lab. They were doing their own cross section and when suddenly, there's a spike in volume - if you're not on top of it and you don't have those people and all of a sudden - whoops production went up, but we're still checking our bass at the same rate we were before. And then like, oh what happened? Well there's all these things that need to be taken into consideration and adjust it accordingly. So, what other fabrication considerations are there that that maybe designers or engineers that are designing boards would want to consider as they decide what they're going to choose?
Well good that's a good point, and you and I know design is important, because there's this conundrum in our supply chain. The fabricator is looking for design for manufacturing and the designer is designing something to work in a certain fashion. Electrical performance, dielectric spacing, and and they don't take into consideration potentially what that does, how that impacts the bare board fabrication process. That's a very significant right? What - and I'm gonna go back to this - because I find this to be an issue as well on the assembly side boards come into the assembler, they come from somewhere, and they call me and say I have the the plating is lifting from the surface when we assemble, or the solder mask is lifting well I said do you did you specify the grade of solder mask, do you even know what solder mask is being put on the board that you're bringing in to assemble? Well no. Now I find out - it's very easy for me to find out - that they’re using, the fabricator... wherever, typically not here, are using a low $10 a kilo solder mask because no one specified it. And of course, that $10 a kilo or less solder mask is probably gonna work beautifully in a handheld child's toy, it's not going to work very well for your medical device. And you're gonna have all these other problems. So I think, I hope the designers would get more involved in understanding the difficulties in making a bare board and also understand: just don't specify ENAPEG because it sounds great, or sounds sexy. Because number one, you're probably not paying for it, somebody else has to pay for that ENAPEG and at $12 and $10 a square foot. Understand - and this is where the board designers are looking for the electrical performance - do they ask where the board is going to be used? Is it going to be in a harsh-use environment, is it going to be in a benign environment clay modeling studio? These are the key questions for them. Typically what I see designers do is, say this is how the board should be built, these are the layers, these are the holes, and you should use this material with this dielectric constant. That's all great, but it's not enough.
Right
And I've been teaching this advanced troubleshooting course with printed circuit board fabrication for years, and you'd be surprised at the number of designers that actually take that course, and they ask the craziest questions. Which tells me they haven't been outside of the board fabrication, outside of their design studio. Understand that you need to live with that a little bit I would put every designer at least in a circuit board fabricator for two weeks and have them build a board that they designed.
Yep I agree it's hard - we encouraged that here a lot - and almost every guest on here says the same thing. Because you and I've been around the block a little while, and understand that there's time constraints for them to get out. However the long-term cost of not getting out there and not onboarding. And this is another plug - you and I've been around IPC awhile - this is another plug for CID and CID+ training, as well because there you onboard some of these things that may be outside of the obvious things that are around manufacturing and assembly. So Kelly Dack wants to start field trips on every CID course. I'm like, yes let's do it!
You know, to me that would be fantastic, and to be honest with you and being heavily involved myself in an IPC, one of the things that I've suggested that when CIDs and the CID+ students earned their certifications, they should also have to get some understanding in coursework and practical on the bare board fabrication. You should make it like you did in college, the practicals, you just didn't do the book work, you had to go into the lab...
Exactly!
-apply what you just learned from the book, because if you couldn't resort to practice, at the end of the day you can't practice it. You've not learned.
And as we both know, the cost of ignorance in these areas is so high, like avoidable mistakes.
Costly... I've seen an entire clay modeling studio shut down, a paper mill shut down, because, again the paper mill folks were buying the controls from the OEM who was specifying the boards to be made but the finish... So the poor industrial automation company using these expensive controls were wondering why these inexpensive instruments are no longer doing what they're supposed to do. And they find out that there's creep corrosion in there because the OEM specified immersion silver or bought the board somewhere cheap where the individual companies decided to cut corners, like they do, to meet the cost. Like not putting enough gold on, not putting enough nickel on. You know, there are specs for a reason.
There is, absolutely.
And that's obviously a discussion for another time.
Yeah that's a whole other podcast, and then there's everything you're doing - HDPUG - which is another podcast I'd like to get you on for as well. I want to put a pin in our conversation right now because I realized, in the beginning I failed to mention to our listeners that you may hear some background noise here. There's some... well, what I was telling our producers is, we're building a better podcast but it’s noisy in here, but really what's happening is we have some construction and of course it's overhead in the green room here in our La Jolla office, so it's directly overhead, on this day of course, so please, please excuse any background noise.
So Mike, you sit on boards for international companies as well as companies here and you are a respected and trusted advisor. You mentioned to me about things that the Japanese are doing that are very innovative and that is that they're mixing finishes and doing selective finishes can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, and this is if you can see the IC substrate side in the Japanese, or the ones who really made miniaturization go. I mean they understood how to make things small, not just lawn mowers and engines like Toyota Camrys and things like in the Prius, but they figured out early on how to do it with circuit boards and and putting more functionality on the chip. Matter of fact, that's where OSP was actually invented was in Japan, in those days it was called pre-flux because it was in the rudimentary 1970s day, but they pioneered the OSP and matter of fact, today the leading OSP company in the world is Shikoku Chemicals out in Japan, they continue to evolve that chemistry and I trust them immensely.
So, going back to that question what you do is, in the IC substrate market, where you've got a complex chip that has to have gold leads or gold wire bonding, you have on one side of the substrate, nickel gold, and then you bond the chip with the wires to that feature. But then on the flip side, which is going to be a BGA feature, you have bare copper which is OSP. So they have the BGA balls on the bottom side and the IC substrate - the chip actually, the the die as they call it - on the top side. So you have ENIG - selectively on one side and bare copper meaning OSP - on the other and of course it's a flip chip. So with the IC substrate or the IC chip in there, you marry that BGA to the Barriss surface of the copper board meaning an OSP, and you've got this fantastic package, if you will, instead of doing it all in the nickel gold or all in ENIG and handle it selectively. And they've developed these processes, and they've also developed a selective imaging, if you will, to make that happen. but it's relatively easy to do, once you understand the ramifications and how to make it work, and make sure you don't get an OSP that doesn't say, ‘attack’ the exposed nickel gold. All these things, it's pretty pretty intricate, but it's been around for some time and with a lot of success so I've selected ENIG as they call it.
Interesting, so I was just gonna ask you, what does that do to cost and process ? You're saying it's not difficult, how about cost implications?
Well there is an additional cost of putting the second imaging step down to protect the board from plating where you don't want it to go, but instead of doing the entire IC substrate in nickel gold, you're doing just one portion of it where the wires from the chip are placed, from the die so, that does help you significantly in the long run. It also makes the BGA perform better because you're marrying basically tin to bare copper making another opportunity there.
Do you think that will find its way here into North America?
Well, the thing is there's only a few fabricators here who do work in the substrate industry, most of the substrate work is done in Asia for the Amcor’s and the Intel's and the Samsung’s so you see a lot of the supply chain there. Some big American owned companies in Asia are doing it in volume, but again, if you want to see IC substrate packaging at its best it's the Japanese.
Yeah that makes sense.
Yep they’re the leaders,and they've been doing that for 30 years, so they tend to be ahead of their time, but now the time has come.
Yeah well it's interesting to get your perspective on sort of a global scale, as well this has been great. Our time is coming to a close here, but will you please share with us links to any white papers or slide decks or anything you have? Because I think how I want to wrap up is Mike, if you are a designer what would you do with all this information? And we've kind of shared it sort of anecdotally and quickly here, but if you wanted to learn more about this where would you go, and what kind of things maybe can you share with our listeners that we can throw on the show notes so they can maybe get better at this.
Well very good. I would encourage you designers who haven't taken an IDC course outside of design - I encourage you to take them - you look on the IPC website. We just had Apex where, in addition to technical papers, there were workshops on a number of different subjects including my Advanced Troubleshooting course, but there were also courses on the Basics of Bare Board Fabrication, and some of the instructors do a great job of giving you the tour, if you will, of the very basics. So you can get a feel for how the board starts with bare laminate, actually starts from the design, and actually ends with the finished product, going out to assembly from a manufacturing standpoint, and you can follow that up by taking the Advanced Troubleshooting, so you can understand where some of the problems and technical issues come from when the board is fabricated, with the various chemical steps and the mechanical steps like drilling and plating and immersion gold and silver. Whatever you need to do, that would be something you should do, and also watch for IPC Tech Ed, where they're going to be putting more and more of these courses. Standalones in different parts of the company whether it be San Jose, San Diego. We just did a course in Boston back in April which was well attended, and we just had the High Reliability Conference in Baltimore a few weeks ago, which had a high military aero content to it. But there's a webcast as well. And also, I encourage you to look at the IPC website - http://ipc.org/. Go through the technical papers, look for the events that are going on there but obviously at every Apex there will be this myriad of courses to take, and I encourage you to go to your boss and say, look this is something I think will benefit me, and you're gonna send me there anyways for the other events, so why not get there on a Sunday and take this course?
Yeah good advice.
SMTA is another good place that has a lot of technical papers and seminars and webinars related to things like surface finishes and design for reliability etc. Matter of fact, IPC actually has a Design for Manufacturing workshop that is taught by some really highly-skilled people too, so that might be something that a designer would benefit from. Again, because the designer or an actual designer is actually teaching the course from experience because he lives it...
Yeah
-let me build bare boards... I'm talking like Gary Ferrari and Susie Webb and those folks, they've actually built boards but they also design. Happy Holden and he's built boards, he designs boards, he understands - they get it.
Right.
That would be an interesting perspective for all those out there.
Okay good, that's great stuff. Well we'll make sure to attach the links to IPC and I know they're doing a lot with education right now, and so I'll make sure - and if you have anything to share with me please do - and we'll make sure we also include links to RBP Chemical.
Yeah, https://www.rbpchemical.com/
And then we will share anything else that you want, and I'm hoping I might be able to twist Mike's arm to come teach a surface finish course at Altiumlive in October. But we'll see, he's so in demand, hie’s a popular guy - but if I had my wish, that's what we would do because I think it'd be a great place again hope to have about five six hundred designers there so I think they would benefit.
So Mike thank you again, you're a dear friend, and thank you so much for always freely sharing your information. Mike also writes a column for PCB007 Magazine, called Trouble in Your Tank, and that's where I learned a lot and actually how I became friends with Mike as I was asking him if I could please take some of his content and repurpose it for blogs I was writing. So we'll also include that link to his column. So Mikey, thank you again you're a dear contributor and friend to the industry and thanks so much for taking time out of your busy day to do this with us it's been fun.
Well, thank you Judy, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it, you have a great day.
Thanks you too again. This has been Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack podcast and Mike Carano of RBP Chemical. please join us again next time - until then - always stay OnTrack.