OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

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:

Altiumlive 2018

Podcast

Newsletter

Octopart

Upverter

CIIVA

AltiumLive 2017 Retrospective

 

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.

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:

Ormet Pastes

HD PUG

Chris Hunrath on Linkedin

Insulectro

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.

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 Technologies Website

Ohmega Technical Library and Tools

Ohmega Products

Bruce Mahler on Linkedin

 

 

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.

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:

RBP Chemical

Trouble in Your Tank

IPC Hall of Fame Interview Video

IPC Hall of Fame induction

IPC courses

HDP Users Group (HDPUG)

SMTA.org

 

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.

 

The rise in flex applications across all industries from medical to automotive, aerospace and military uses means more opportunity for material suppliers to innovate and meet demand. Here what industry expert Chris Hunrath has to share, from general guidelines for designing circuits unique for flex and materials that can be autoclaved over and over. Listen in to this week’s OnTrack expert to learn about flex and material sets.

 

Show Highlights:

• Medical applications (i.e. instruments for surgery), automotive, aerospace, military
• Foils - as you go thicker, its harder to make electrodeposited. More bend cycles out of rolled and yield
• General Guidelines for designing circuits unique for flex:
  • In general, avoid circuits making turns or bends in bend/flex area - don’t make the circuits go in different directions there and also avoid plated holes in those areas.
  • From a stackup standpoint, balance the construction. Thinner is usually better.
  • Look for opportunities for cracking at the bend point.
• Cross hatch ground planes have multiple advantages.
• Pyralux HT, DuPont - new product with unbelievable thermal performance. A continuous operating temperature. Imagine a flex circuit that can be autoclaved over and over.
• We are a material sciences company. There are really unique ways to put these building blocks together.

Links and Resources:

Pyralux HT

See all the show notes

 

Hi everyone this is Judy Warner with the Altium OnTrack Podcast. Thanks again for joining us. Today we have another incredible subject matter expert that you'll be familiar with because we've had him here before, which is Chris Hunrath from Insulectro and we're going to talk about flex and material sets and all kinds of really great things. So hang tight for that. Before we get going please, I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn, I share a lot of things there for designers and engineers and on Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Today Chris has some Show and Tell and so I encourage you if you - Chris will take time to describe what he's showing, but if you want to see it, feel free to go to our YouTube channel at Altium, click under videos and you'll see all our podcasts there. And you can click on this podcast and then you'll be able to visually see the materials and things that Chris is referring to today - and that's always available by the way - on YouTube so we record simultaneously in video and in audio so just know that's always an opportunity there for you.

So Chris, welcome back, thank you.

Thanks, Hi.

Thanks for joining again.

So at the end of last time's podcast, we were talking about the rise in flex applications and sort of the increasing amount of business actually Insulectro's doing around flex materials, new materials are going out so I really wanted to take this opportunity to learn about what is driving this uptick in flex, what applications are driving it  , what the cost, performance implications of that is, and so let's just start with what is driving this uptick in flex?

So a lot of it's medical, you know, and the way electronics are finding their way into medical applications. Actually it's everything, it's automotive, it's aerospace military - military has always been a big user of flex, but of course you know, all the new inventions that are used in medical applications - certainly some devices are implantable and that's something that's not new, but then we're seeing a lot of applications where instruments are being created that are used, for surgeries and things and they use flex circuits and that's because you can make things very small which is always an advantage when  it comes those applications and we're even seeing some applications where the products are reused. They're being sterilized, autoclaved, what have you and then they're being reused. But lots of new techniques, lots of new devices being developed using flex. Most people are familiar with traditional flex applications like your laptop screen, very often the interconnect between the main system and the screen is a flex circuit. You know the old flip phones all had flex circuits, your inkjet printers had a dynamic flex circuit between the printhead and the actual motherboard and the printer, and actually that's something I do want to point out is, you know we describe flex applications in two main buckets. One is dynamic flex and the other is the flex to install and it's just exactly what it sounds like is flex to install. Typically you're only bending the circuit once or twice to fit it in whatever it needs to go into and then that's it. Whereas dynamic flex, the part’s flexed in use many, many, many times.

I think that something that most people can relate to because you can see it, is the flex inside copy machines right, you can see that dynamic flex moving again and again and so are the materials - the entire circuitry is rated to have X amount of dynamic motions for the life of, it or how does that work?

Yeah actually that's a pretty good point and that can become very complex. A lot of it has to do with layer count, the base material. You know the most popular base material for flex circuits in reflow assembled PCB - a little different than printed electronics applications - where you're using conductive adhesive, but if you're doing reflow assembly, the most common material's polyimide film, and one of the most common materials is Kapton, but the thickness of the materials, the type of copper circuitry, the thickness of the copper foil - all those - play into a number of bend cycles even the type of copper, whether you use rolled annealed, which is very common in Flex, versus electron deposited-

Okay

-well that can get very complex. There are some good design guidelines out there by IPC and others you know. Again I always shout out to the board shops, some of them have good teams that help people   choose the right construction, right stack up to get the most bend cycles out of the device.

Are those the two most common types of copper used in flex by the way Chris? Is a rolled anneal an electroless?

Oh it's electro- deposited.

I'm sorry electro-deposited okay.

Yeah - and yes but unless you're dealing with very thin foils rolled annealed is the most common. That's what we call 'RA foils' the most common. Actually I have a sample here. This is some Pyralux clad. You can't see the dielectric inside, but it's got rolled annealed copper on both sides and it can vary from - you used to be limited to half ounce or 18 micron and thicker so a little side note on foils: as you go thicker it's harder to make electro positive foils because it's more plating time on the drum. With rolled annealed it's the opposite, thinner foils are harder to manufacture because you need more rolling processes to make the foil thinner and thinner and thinner.

I see.

You used to be limited to 18 micron or half ounce, now we can get rolled annealed coppers thinner, down to 9 micron or quarter ounce. You can get a rolled annealed, but the structure is much better for flexing because the grain boundaries are in this direction platelet-type, overlapping grain boundaries which is better for bending. Any foil boundaries are like this and if you bend it you can cleave the grain boundaries in. You get more but it's not that easy - foil doesn't work and flex but you typically get more bend cycles out of rolled annealed.

Okay very good. That's something actually I didn't know and it's something I've talked to my friend Tara Dunn, who's in flex - and it's just something that's never come up so I think that's kind of an interesting point. So, you mentioned with military applications - because my background - military was always SWaP right, Size, Weight and Power - so are those the same type of things that drive the other applications - obviously in smaller spaces - we can fold things up on themselves and get them into smaller packaging. When you talk about the dynamic, what other kind of things sort of drive the desire and the fit for flex?

So something that's applicable to both military and medical, is you want to reduce the size, so I have here - this is a 50-ohm SMA coax right. It's basically one circuit, you've got the shield layer, the shielding around the center conductor - but this is one channel or one circuit and I have here flex, and you can see how many circuits you have on this piece. So, imagine if you had to have one of these - for each one of these-

For each channel right.

Now if you - depending on the design, whether it's strip line, micro strip, and whether or not you have   in-plane shielding, it might be every other one's a signal. But still the weight and size is the difference between having cables right, which I'm holding up right now, versus having a flex circuit is huge right.

And in the case of medical, some of those traces can be as narrow as 20 micron. So you can fit a lot of circuitry into a very small space. And you know depending on the on the medical device. We see some of our customers will build circuits that are very, very long and very, very narrow, and you can imagine how they're used in surgery and other medical applications. And you might have twenty circuits on that part but it's in a very, very, very small space.

Oh that totally makes sense.

Now - just to be clear 20 micron circuitry - it’s not easy to do, it's doable, not easy to do, but certainly 50 microns is, most board shops can do that these days and  again you can fit a lot of circuits in a small space and of course they can flex, they can bend. But in the case of rigid flex where you have a rigid part and bridged with a flex part - and here's another example where you have this -  is not necessarily rigid flex but you'd have components here and then a connector here. You're replacing all these cables right, of this section, so that's how it drives weight and space and even reliability. Fewer interconnections tend to be more reliable so that really helps. So flex has been growing quite a bit for us, for our business and so, a lot of its based on DuPont Kapton and DuPont Pyralux products and then they - there's a B-stage system for laminating the different layers and of course the core, or the clad material as the foil on both sides and then our customers will print and etch to whatever pattern they need and put those layers together as building blocks.

Right so let's talk a little bit about design for flex since most folks listening here will be engineers or layout folks. What are some things that people need to keep in mind about designing these kind of circuits that's sort of unique to flex?

So there's a couple of good - again some good guides out there - both by IPC, DuPont has flex manuals, for different types of categories. Whether it's multi-layer, single sided, double-sided flex, they have some good guidelines on that, but in general what you want to avoid is you don't want circuits to make turns or bends in the bend area. So, for example, I'm going to use this one is an example again.

Okay.

If this is the flex area in this middle section here, you wouldn't have the circuits go in different directions in that area, so you might want to keep them. You want to keep them basically parallel in that area and you also don't want plated through holes in those areas. Again these are just real general rule - basic guidelines. The other thing you want to avoid is what we call an I-beam effect, where you have circuits directly above each other with a dielectric in between. You want to stagger them. That helps, again - more important for dynamic flex than bended, to install, but it's important not to have the I-beam effect because that could lead to cracks...

That makes sense.

-concentrates on bending. And in general from a stack up standpoint, you want to try and balance the construction. Thinner is typically better. There's again - there's all kinds of iterations there's - if it's a multi-layer flex - there's loose leaf constructions where you wouldn't necessarily bond the different layers together in the flex or bend region. You'd have them not connected. A bookbinder system is another way to do it where depending on the direction of the bend, the layers that are on the outside of the bend are actually longer. The layers on the inside - and again the fabricators that are skilled in that know how to space that - and to change the length of the circuit. But you know from a simpler standpoint, or from a more general standpoint thinner is typically better balanced. Balanced constructions are typically better   for flex.

Well balanced construction is always a good idea, I'm just saying but I could see that right. Because I think you - what you're saying if I'm hearing you right, is you have to look for those opportunities for cracking right, or stressing at the bend radius, because that makes sense right. Just from a physics standpoint it makes sense that things would want to give or pull right?

Right, when you bend a flex circuit the other side compresses against it right, and every circuit will fail at some point. It's a matter of how many cycles you get out of it before it fails.

Right how do you measure those cycles by the way?

Well there are some standardized tests and there's an MIT bend test - there's some other testing that's done to see how a particular material, or even a design or stack up performs where it's bent repeatedly until you get failure. And then you can - you can rate the stack up or the and/or the material.

Where can you get that data? You mentioned IPC as a source. Is there any other thing - resources you could share - that I could share with the listeners where they could maybe look at some of these readings?

Yeah actually so DuPont's website, the Pyralux website, has some data on that and certainly some of the folks there could put your listeners in touch with some of the design guidelines.

Okay alright I know some folks there if you and I can't find him through the website then Jonathan just came in to talk at IPC designers Council Orange County I'll reach out to him see if...

Oh Jonathan Weldon, yeah he's a great resource for that. So speaking of Jonathan Weldon, he's been working with HDPUG; they've been looking at shield layers or for reference planes and they've been looking at the difference in solid planes and cross hatch systems, and so this is just a simple - this is actually a simple test circuit microstrip construction where you have a reference plane on one side and your tracer on the other. Imagine if there were a strip line construction and you had copper on both sides with your transmission line in the middle, one of the challenges with all PCBs, and especially with flex, is absorption of moisture and then that moisture released during assembly causing delamination and one of the things that you can do to mitigate that is to bake the parts. Well if you have soft solid copper areas - baking does not work as well - because the moisture has got to go around the copper it can't go through it.

Right.

So cross hatch ground planes are great for two purposes. One is, it's a moisture egress for baking, the other advantage is it's actually better for flexibility it makes the part more flexible.

Hmm, that makes sense.

The downside is the high frequency applications - you can run into some issues.

Yeah.

So and one of the interesting things that Jonathan and company, they were looking at, was the difference between a round opening and a - what's typically used as it's..

Kind of a diamond shape?

Exactly, exactly and really it's more of  a square turned on its side, but yeah the diamond shape versus the you know... It's funny how a circuit design is always in orthogonal patterns but that's not necessarily the best way to go and anyway the round shape was better for signal performance.

Oh, for the high speed applications?

Yeah it makes sense because if you took a circle that fit inside a square you actually have less open area so...

This is true okay, alright.

Yeah, so there's some interesting data on that but I would recommend to a customer, depending on their   their frequency bandwidth bit rate, depending on what kind of design it is, that they would look at using an open plane. It works basically with a screen, for lack of better words, versus a solid plane because the reliability goes way up.

Okay now you just made me think of something. Last time we talked, we were talking about prepregs and glass, being reinforced right. When you're using adhesive systems for flex, I'm assuming they're non-reinforced?

Right.

It's a more stable material though so tell us a little bit about that, about the stability, the dimensional stability?

Yeah so - so really in flex circuits the Kapton film, a polyImide film, because it's a thermoset, it is acting like the fiberglass in your flex circuit.

Okay.

You don't have skew issues because there's no glass, so you don't have micro-DK effects. Now if you do have a crosshatch plane, you will have a different - you'll have a micro impedance effect if you would. But that usually doesn't change with differential pairs unless - again depending on where you put the traces - but you don't have the fiberglass micro-DK effect at all. Now, Kapton's interesting - it's very thermally stable but it's not as mechanically strong as glass reinforced laminate. So it tends to change more from mechanical distortion than it does for thermal. It's not shrinking like epoxies do when they cure. Certainly when you - when you remove all the copper (and I actually have a piece here) this is a piece of Pyralux AP, with all the copper etched off. This is 100 percent polyimide, used to have copper cladding on it and the copper's been mostly etched off. You can see a little bit of copper left  from the tape I use to run this through an etcher, but the material is pretty strong but it can distort mechanically, more so than thermally. So again this is kind of like the fiberglass in a regular PCB, and then you'd have B-stages of some sort, to put all the layers together.

So the actual substrate is creating the stability in the case of flex? Okay that makes sense.

It's a polyimide film, in the case of Pyralux, which is a DuPont branded flex material it's based on Kapton film.

Okay so we talked about ground planes, we talked about where to not put - - is there any other sort of design for flex things that you'd want to mention that are just rather commonplace?

Yeah so there's a lot of things, for example, you could use a pad that's a little bit larger than you would normally use that would go underneath the cover. Now let me backup a little bit and talk about cover lay. So what cover lay is, it's basically Kapton adhesive laminate, that is the flexible equivalent of solder mask. Now unlike solder mask which is used in PCB, which is photoimageable, cover lay has to be mechanically formed and then laminated over the circuitry. So you have openings and this - again this is a another good example - you have openings in the cover lay I don't know if you can see that on this? But there's openings on the cover lay for each individual pad and then that's laminated over. One of the ways to get more reliability out of the pads is to make the pad a little bit bigger than the opening in the cover lay. So you have cover lay over the perimeter of the pad - it's kind of like what we call solder mask defined pad and rigid - except you're doing it in flex, and that's that's one way to get reliability. But there - again there are a lot of different things in flex that you should be aware of, and that's where some of these design guides and things...

Okay well we'll try to track some of those down and put those in the show notes because I think that would be really helpful to have something kind of, tangible. Something I remember learning from someone else, is also talking about tear dropping pads?

Yes. Is that something that you would recommend as well?

Yeah that's good for a couple of different reasons. One is that the more material that goes under the cover lay, again helps mechanically support the pad. It's also important - typically you don't put holes or pads into your bend area, but it could be an area where you could concentrate bending. So in other words, you go from a trace to a pad, that's going to become a concentration of - right at the edge of the pad - concentration of stress and so if you do the teardrop, that distributes that stress over a larger area and helps prevent circuit cracking. But again, you would try and avoid that in your design. We would make that a bend area. And actually, speaking of rigid flex, one of the things that you would typically do is the cover lay would go into the rigid portion only 50 mils.

Okay.

-Okay and then you would keep the cover lay and its adhesive out of the plate through hole areas in the rigid portion and rigid flex - and that's also a 'keep out' region for plated through hole so you wouldn't want plate through holes going through that region. So again a lot of this stuff is spelled out in some of the manuals that you get from DuPont and others.

Alright, I'll reach out to Jonathan and - and you and I can scrounge up some things and we'll make sure to include those here. Last thing I wanted to talk to you about - which I was just stunned by - is that you told me that DuPont has come out with a new material that has unbelievable thermal performance. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah so - classically in flex, you have your your B-stage, or adhesives that are part of the package, and then you have your core materials, which are your building blocks and you print and etch your core, just like rigid, and you would have - you would put them together with either your rigid or your flex adhesives to make a multi-layer system. What's different about this new product, it's called Pyralux HT, and in fact, I got my Pyralux HT mug here...

Nice, nice.

-but instead of using acrylic or epoxy adhesives to bond the Kapton layers together, you would use this thermoplastic polyimide layer. It's got a very high melting point and thermoplastic's already used in PCB, people familiar with EPI-P and LC, those systems. The only way thermoplastics work in PCB, or reflow assembled PCB, is to have a high melting point otherwise it would melt at assembly. So this is a piece of the thermoplastic polyimide that DuPont manufacturers. It's the HT bonding film. This could either be a cover lay or it could be an adhesive layer to put - to make a multi-layer PCB.

Okay.

-But the nice thing about this, is it has a - 225 Celsius operating temperature, which is very, very high.

What does that convert to in Fahrenheit?

Oh gosh - 225 C it's over 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

I see, 225 - - Fahrenheit okay I wasn't hearing you correctly, so it was Fahrenheit okay.

Oh no - hang on, 225 C, I should know all this without me - - 437 Fahrenheit.

Wow.

So you know, some applications...

-and that's an operating - continuous operating temperature? Which is crazy, cuz some materials can take that heat for a little while but not continuing operating temperature right?

Right, so most PCB materials that go through a reflow assembly, which is either done at 260 Celsius, depending on the type of solder work, or 288 C, they can withstand that for a short period of time most PCB materials survive that. It's the operating temperature most epoxy systems will come in around 130 to 150 C operating temperature - maximum operating temperature.

That's wild, so I'm guessing - so what are the applications where this will be exciting news?

So applications where you had, fiberglass, coax or some other applications like that where you had   wired - high temperature wired connections - or cable connections, you could replace now with a printed circuit board. So engine compartments, aircraft engine compartments, aerospace, down hole, I mean there are a lot of different applications. Even from a medical standpoint. Imagine making a flex circuit that could be auto plated over and over and over again. You don't have to worry what's gonna...

I was gonna ask you about that earlier. I don't really know what temps they autoclave at but you mentioned that before that medical applications could - to cut autoclave to kill the bacteria, but like what's the normal temp of an autoclave, how many times can you do that?

So we have one customer that builds some parts that are autoclaved at 135 C but it's with steam, and it's hard on circuits, it's hard on electronics.

Yeah seems like that would be.

But for HT it wouldn't be any issue because you're nowhere near on the melting point. Now it will absorb some moisture, which could be removed from - could be removed with a bake but a lot of applications it won't matter if the assembly is already done. It doesn't really matter.

Okay.

You know there is some change in the transmission properties of the material when it absorbs some moisture. Again that could be removed with a bake but that is one of the challenges with reusable medical devices, is sterilization and how well the materials hold up, and an HT would be good for that. The downside of HT, is it does require a 600 degree lamination - Fahrenheit.

Okay well there you go, so how many board shops have lam presses that go up to that temp?

So we took a look at our customer base, and it's not a lot of them, or some of our customers had laminate, or have lamination presses that are capable, they're rated that high, but they haven't been turned up that high for a long, long time. So it's funny, some of our customers have started making some HT, all the weaker heaters, that the press might be 10 years old, they turn it up for the first time to a higher temperature; they start popping heaters and they have to go and replace them. But actually we're seeing a trend though. A lot of our customers are buying laminating equipment and right now that's a whole 'nother story because lean times are way out on equipment in general, but what we're seeing is people are making sure they have that high temperature capability and it's not just for something like HT, it's for LCP and FEP as well.

Okay.

They have some good properties, electrical and and signal properties.

They do.

That's a big deal these days.

Performance wise they're very good.

Right they're harder to fabricate but they do have some good properties you know. Even - we talked about last time - repeat glass-reinforced PTFE materials, some of them require high  lamination temperatures.

Yeah they do.

Yeah all right. One more material I do want to mention - sorry - so this material actually is a Teflon Kapton laminate it's called...

-wait hold on - Teflon Kapton? Oh okay.

It's called 'TK' - it's a Pyralux product from DuPont and so it has a core of Kapton to act as the XY stabilizer, but then it has a Teflon material on both sides and again, this is a building block but it's very low loss, and very low DK. So a DK of about two and a half with a very, very low loss. But unlike glass reinforced Teflon systems, this has no fiberglass so, no skew and no detrimental effect from the fiberglass. It's using the Kapton instead, as the stabilizer, because if you had a piece of - I should have brought out a piece of Teflon - but PTFE films you can easily - it can be mechanically stretched.

Yeah, one time when I was in the RF and microwave board space, I had the board shop I was working for take all the materials like Rogers, Taconic, whatever and I had them strip all the copper off and I went   like the 4000 series 6000 series 3000 series all the way up to 58, 80 and strip off the copper. Because when you see them clad, they don't look that different from each other. But I'm like here's Teflon - this is like a piece of rubber, and imagine heating that up, exposing that to aqueous hot processes and so I think that really helped people to understand how vastly different they are and I think it was a good visual actually to help people understand how radically different these are and when you start stripping off all the copper and you have fine lines and all that then it's - it's a whole different animal.

TK material is - the core material is nice because the Kapton layer does provide mechanical strength. Again though, the TK, instead of requiring 600 degree lamination, it requires 550. So it's still a high temperature product which requires the right press book, the right materials, and lamination, and it also requires a press being capable. And the other too is the board shop needs to get accustomed to the dimensional changes during the lamination process with these materials.

Right.

Again - a lot of it's mechanically driven, but you need to know how to work with it so that's something I think the boardshop needs to have experience with.

Well and I imagine that you're not going to see these materials outside of sort of high performance or high speed capable board shops?

That's true...

-I don't know if that's true I guess I'm looking to you for an answer in there but it's an assumption I would make.

Here's the interesting thing about AP, AP by itself, is actually pretty good electrically. It's the adhesive layers you use that incur a lot of the loss. So then if you get into the thermoplastic systems that have better electrical performance, now you're getting into the temperature range. So it's one of those give-and-take situations, but you can mix and match the materials to some degree. You could use, for instance HT bonding film with AP clads, your operating temperature would default to the AP operating temperature, which is still pretty high at 180 °C, but electrically it's pretty good. You get away from the acrylic and the epoxy adhesives, which aren't great electrically, in terms of loss, dielectric constant so yeah, I think as I think as board shops become better equipped with high temperature systems, you'll see a broader use of these materials.

Right, I mean the market is going to drive us there one way or the other right, if there's a demand then the board shops will do what they need to do. One thing - a comment I want to make about that is - I was in one board shop and I was stunned and then just felt like wow I could've had a V8 moment, is they were providing really high speed, high performance circuits to some high-end military stuff, and they had moved completely away from rigid high performance laminates and used multiple layers of flex materials and the performance - and I'm like - oh well that seems like an obvious, but I had no idea that was even happening. Is that something you have seen, where they just use...

Yeah, if you wanted to get rid of skew completely you could use a film based system.

Yeah it was crazy, I mean that makes sense and I'm sure there's some challenges there cuz I could tell they had to rigidize the bottom, or put some kind of carrier or something, because they didn't want it to flex quite that much but they just stacked these film systems on top of each other and I'm like huh, didn't know you could do that but they were clearly doing it on a routine basis so that was interesting.

Yeah I've seen some board designs where you might have 12 cores of Pyralux...

Yeah,right.

-and then use regular rigid prepreg as a bonding system so and the board's not - when it's all done, it's not flexible it's rigid.

It is rigid, but it's a weird - it's weird to see anyway...

I actually have a board here.

Ok let's see it.

Unfortunately it's single sided so it's kind of like a potato chip, but because there's only one layer of copper and one layer of prepreg, but this is actually DuPont's AP product with Isola's tachyon prepreg, and it's a spread glass prepreg. So you have the spread glass prepreg on one side and you've got the Pyralux AP in the other. So you minimize how much glass is in here, which really drops the amount of impact or micro DK effect which would lead to skew and other signal performance issues. So there are lots of different ways you could use the flex materials even in a rigid design.

Yeah I did see that and I was shocked and I - it's something I hadn't heard a lot about. Anyways well, we're about out of time today, again. But thank you so much, every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned so, so much and it's fascinating to me where the industry is going and what's happening with flex and it's exciting it's really an enabler right and these high, high temp products and that so it's a really exciting time to see. We always break through one way or another it's just interesting to see who gets it done. So it's very interesting to see what we're doing with flex.

Oh thank you Judy for  giving us the opportunity to talk about some of the materials we supply but yeah it's - these are all building blocks and, I kind of view it as a material science company in tech...

You are yeah.

-we provide all these different building blocks to meet the need of what the customer needs.

And there is - and there's really unique ways to put those building blocks together so it's fascinating to learn about. Ok so something I didn't ask you last time, but I'm gonna ask you now. Are you a geek or a nerd? [Laughter]

So the best way I heard the two described is the difference between a geek and a nerd is - a geek is the one who gets things done.

Oh interesting okay.

So I would like to think I'm somebody who'd get stuff done, so that would put me in the geek camp but in any case.

Alright check geek, and the second question I have for you: on a scale from one to ten how weird are you?

[Laughter] Oh gosh, I would say - five.

I'm sorry but if we're in this industry we're at least 5 or above. I think we have to be a little wacky to do what we do - okay well thanks I appreciate it so much and again, we were talking on the phone yesterday we have more to cover, so I'm gonna for sure have you back again and talk about printed electronics which is on the rise and you know a lot about. And also I'm very excited to talk about - oh there it is!

Electronics, that's a whole other - whole other world of electronics and yeah.

Wait, wait, wait bring that back and tell our listeners what exactly that is.

So this was printed with a zebra label printer where the - and no changes to the machine by the way - but the special foil is put into the system where you normally put a roller with a pigment film, so instead of printing a black label you're printing metal foil so yeah, it's kind of interesting.

Yes what is that for?

Well this is something did for me at our booth this is just an antenna but you could really you could make electronic designs on the fly now...

Dude, you're still not answering my question here. What is that intended for?

So I'm gonna use that for an antique stereo I have. I have an antique FM stereo the tube, old tube radio, I'm going to use that as an antenna.

I see - oh see definitely five-weird. I say I'm gonna make that matrix instead of the hot crazy matrix I'm gonna make like the geeky-weird matrix and so yeah - you're at least at a five -high and a geek.

But anyway printed electronics is pretty exciting, I mean and again, it's all material science based. As the materials get better you're gonna be able to do more things. Higher conductivity inks, higher temperature inks, I mean there's all kinds of things you can do in that area. Typically the substrates are different - they're typically lower cost, lower temperature capable substrates, but you could - you can make all kinds of things so we'll get it the next time.

Okay we'll definitely do that and the other thing I'm excited to talk to you about - because I know nothing about it - is paste interconnects and you shared a little bit, so anyways we have at least one or two more podcasts ahead of us, so for our listeners; stay tuned and we'll make sure and share everything Chris has talked about today and hook you up with resources through DuPont, HDPUG, IPC, wherever we can find and we'll make sure and share those resources that will help you lay out a better flex and onboard as much information as you can.

So Chris, thanks again, we'll see you next time and we'll tackle another hot topic. Again this has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast. Thanks for tuning in and thank you to Chris Hunrath from Insulectro, we will see you next time. Until then, always stay on track.

Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits shares DFA Tips and a piece of history as he shares the story behind the scenes in developing quick turn prototypes. Listen to learn how one entrepreneur brought fresh perspective to the business that led to great success. And see why Screaming Circuits is uniquely positioned to handle all the leading edge components that PCB designers have available.  

 

Show Highlights:

• Screaming Circuits was founded on the premise to get prototypes built quickly. It was a struggle to get small volume prototypes built and a market need was discovered.
• For prototyping - going abroad invites its own set of risks.
• A traditionally 6-8 week process, Screaming Circuits does in hours.
• We don’t specialize in a vertical industry, so we see a lot of the leading edge components.
• Layout isn’t taught in schools or its self taught. The experts who knew how to make layouts work perfectly have retired.
• We built a business around stuff being wrong. Stuff isn’t going to be right when it arrives to us and we have to fix it.
• Why are we having a problem sourcing parts?
• Personal interests? Photography and decaying industrialism.

Links and Resources:

Screaming Circuits Website

Screaming Circuits Blog

Downloadable Circuit Talk  

Twitter: @pcbassembly, @duanebenson

Screaming Circuits on Youtube

 

Hey everyone this is Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack podcast. Welcome back to another podcast session with us. As always we have another incredible guest with us today but before we get started I wanted to invite you to please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there and share a lot of resources for engineers and PCB designers and also - I don't think I shared this in past podcasts - but we are also recording this on YouTube as well as just an audio. So you can always go to YouTube and go to the Altium channel, look under videos and you'll find these also in video format if you should prefer to listen to this and watch it in video format. And also with Altium, you can always follow us on Facebook LinkedIn or Twitter and we love engaging with you. We always love to hear from you about subject matter experts or subjects you'd like to hear or learn more about. So, without further ado,  I'd like to welcome our guest today who is Duane Benson of Screaming Circuits, out of Canby, Oregon, correct Duane?

Canby that's correct.

So Duane welcome, we've crossed paths for several years now and it's a delight to have you and learn more about Screaming Circuits and EMS and how designers can do things to to be more effective in the design for assembly and just learn about Screaming Circuit’s model, which is a very unique model by the way, I'm eager to jump in.

Well thank you I'm really happy to be here thank you for asking me to participate in this.

My joy. So why don't you start out by telling our listeners a little bit about who and what Screaming Circuits is, because it really does have a highly unique model, and kind of the why behind you guys started the company and created this model?

Well it started back in 2003, actually that fifteen years ago now. Yikes..

Yeah, I know, how did that happen?

So about that time our parent company Milwaukee Electronics they had a number of customers that were struggling to get small volumes of prototypes put together back in the back in the olden days - if I can use that term. Prototypes quite often were sort of slotted in on an ‘as available’ basis. So say you might need five prototypes and the EMS company would say, well we’ve got a big run going on and I can put you u on the machine in two weeks so you can get your prototypes then. And two weeks come along and something else came up, so another week... Even going back before that, back in my day they didn't focus, for example, building a prototype.We'd have a big bag of parts and some blank circuit boards, and we'd hand them to this poor technician on a Friday afternoon and the engineers would go, could you have these built up by Monday?

So it was becoming a real struggle to to get prototypes, get small volumes of any sort built and a couple of our customers came and asked us and said, can you can you help us out with this? It's just not working and the Milwaukee Electronics’ management thought about it a little bit and thought, why can't we short-circuit the process?

No pun intended right?

Laughter.

So the management experimented a little bit and then decided,  , there's an actual business here. So back about that time they brought Jared Store out here to start up what they called the Screaming Circuits division to focus specifically on getting prototypes done quickly.

Mm-hmm.

And  , from that time the initial focus of the initial business was basically Jared with email and phone and one of our partners Sunstone Circuits, they built the blank circuit boards - the raw fabs. They'd give us a call and say, hey one of our customers needs some prototypes built, can you guys do it? And that's how the business started.

So you guys created the synergy. Now I've had the pleasure of meeting Jared once at least, through the phone and email and Jared was young right? He was the son of the owner so, I have to insert that. Because I kind of love that those of us who are kind of old dogs in the industry - I kind of love that he said, well why can't we do this? And he just kind of, like you said, a phone and a thing and just said why not. Because he wasn't constrained by the way things were done in the past which I kind of love that.

Exactly he was a young entrepreneur, in fact, I don't know if he'll want to admit this but this was his first job out of college this was kind of an experiment for him to get into a career, into business and he did a fantastic job. Basically by ignoring all of the old rules.

I know yeah.

Yeah and then in 2004 - well somewhere between late 2003 and early 2004 - we first went online with a very, very simple quote system. We boiled it down into six different factors and based on that, came up with a quote and it was all kitted at that point. So we'd say, hey it's going to cost you this much, send us your kit, send us your files, and we'll build them up for you.

Now since that time, when we were talking earlier, it seems like it's morphed into not just specifically prototypes but just quick-turn. It could be quick-turn pre-production quick-turn production even right?

Yeah

The world of manufacturing of electronics has really changed in the last decade and a half  . There was a time when electronics were not going to be designed and built in this country. Back in the 90s, when I was working for InFocus again, everybody was outsourcing everything and then over the next decade after that, it was all going going away.

Yeah.

And there was going to be nothing but high volumes manufactured offshore. Well about the time we started doing this, coincidentally the open-source hardware movement came about with the Arduino and some of the other things that came with that. Kickstarter showed up and that really changed the hardware design dynamic. It lowered the barriers to entry to building a hardware company and over the last decade and a half the hardware startup has come back with a vengeance. The problem is, as manufacturing is really, really expensive - unless you're doing super high volumes - so these companies would run a Kickstarter, they'd sell a thousand of an electronic board and nobody would build it for them. So then,  , they'd then run off into into Asia and they toured all these shops and these people would either say, no that's not enough or they’d change the design, steal the intellectual property and, you can't. There's little details like that so, getting a hundred or a thousand or five thousand is extraordinarily difficult. And yet there's an awful lot of companies that sell just that many of something.

Yeah, it's really interesting that it morphed into that niche right?

Yeah.

You had, it sounds like you had everything, in place to fill it right? You'd built it to do address prototype - traditional prototypes - and as the market changed you were kind of ideally positioned to address those kind of start-up Kickstarter things. So you and Sunstone have worked together in parallel, I take it throughout this process?

Yes they've been our partners since the beginning, and at this point they build the vast majority of our circuit boards and we do, if necessary, go elsewhere. Or if a customer sends us the boards or requests something else, but the vast majority of our boards are built by Sunstone. They're about ten miles away over in Mulino Oregon.

Another big city like Canby…

Laughter - well compared to Milano Canby is the big cities...

Yes well it's a beautiful area. So, tell us about what you would see in a given day and then I would like to ask you to jump into speaking to designers that may be listening, and go into kind of some DFM tips and tricks. But before we do that, tell us about what are you going to see in a day?

To get a picture of what happens there at Screaming Circuits there's two factors that are pretty important. One is a traditional EMS company. We we see about as many different jobs through here in a week as a traditional medium-sized EMS company we'll see in a year.

Wow!

And the other factor that's important to notice, is that in - using that term the olden days - getting a quote and an order for a project might be a three to four week process going back and forth with all the files, component availability, making sure   the design works and then after you place the order, you've got the NPI process which is another three to four work weeks. So, you've got a six to eight week process that we do in six to eight hours.

How is that possible? I mean we may not have enough time here Duane, but I've been in the EMS industry and it’s an extremely complex process, just getting the components you need and making sure they're right and there's not obsolete parts, and that you've got a clean BOM, and it's so complex. How have you condensed it without giving away your secrets?

Well there's a lot of things that matter if you're building a hundred thousand of something or a million of something. At that point fractions of a penny count and you're going to spend a lot more time quoting. You're gonna have to worry about getting large quantities of components if you need 20 of a board you can go to Digi-Key and get the parts for a buck, that would cost you a quarter of a penny if you bought them at high volume, and that's still fine now, that's part of it and then you don't have to worry about some of the inefficiencies that would absolutely kill a high-volume manufacturing manufacturer. You don't have to worry about those because if you have to tweak things by hand, while that is more expensive per unit, if you're building 20 or a hundred or a thousand it doesn't matter quite so much. So really what we've done is, we've stepped back and we said, what is important and what is not. The objective is to get working boards into an engineer's hands as quickly as possible and you'll notice there aren't things like how do we make it the absolute least expensive, or things of that sort, it's about getting the working board's as quick as possible so you focus on just the things that matter for that.

Right, you mentioned when we talked a few weeks ago, about it becoming what you had called a transactional model, which is really a different industry and you can go online, place your order in a very transactional fashion, but it also speeds up your time to market, and gives you something highly valuable?

Yes it does, we don't we don't spend an awful lot of time on the financial component of it. For the most part you give us a credit card and we start building so we don't have to worry about the bank component of it. For larger companies we do, because some people, the government or whatever, they have to operate that way. But for the most part you just give us a credit card and that again cuts some time out of it. We also look at each order as an individual transaction, that's why we call it transactional manufacturing, or unforecastable. We don't have to worry about the fact that you're not gonna need exactly 500 every month for the next 24 months. In traditional EMS, you have to worry about that, you plan for that. We don't worry about that, we don't care.

Yeah it's interesting as well it's neat model and I see it as a real enabler. So, congratulations to you guys. All right, let's dig in and give our listeners that are designers and engineers some tips around DFA. The way that you and I originally came to know each other is, I had been blogging and writing and then I came across a little publication you put out called Circuit Talk in which you were doing what I was doing, which was giving designers some really immediate tips to apply to make their jobs hopefully a little bit easier and so, I think you've done a really nice job of that. So can you talk about why you started Circuit Talk and then go ahead and share some of those tips or tricks that are around design for assembly that's gonna make designers’ jobs easier and smooth the time to deliver a good product in time to market.

Well thank you. You  know the volume of jobs that we get - it does lead to chaos of sorts - but it also is a huge advantage in that we get to see every single mistake that anybody's gonna make. We don't specialize in a vertical industry so we don't only see mistakes related to a certain type of component tree. Name a component that's leading-edge, we've undoubtedly seen it and, so we see these things - and it's not just beginners, it's not just experienced designers, it's not just big or small or university - everybody makes the same mistakes. It's so complex and there are so many variables, so many new types of components. Geometries are shrinking and in parallel to that people have less and less time to design these things. Quite often layout isn't taught at schools, or it's self-taught. The experts who knew exactly how to make a layout work perfectly have retired now, or they've been let go, or things have changed so fast they can't keep up.

Mm-hmm.

So we see these problems every day. Case in point, one that I write about quite often relates to the QFN Quad Flat-Pack No Lead, and then the DFM. The DFM leads along one side. They have this big metal heat slug in the middle, looks like a very simple component, it's cool, it's small, has great signal characteristics. But most of the CAD software, when you try and use a QFN, the footprint is wrong. It comes from the library with the solder paste layer, not designed specifically for the component, so you've got to imagine flipping a QFN upside down. You've got a little row of contacts around the outside - very small - and then a big giant heat slug in the middle that covers almost the entire component. So most of the library components we found have a full aperture opening, so the solder paste layer is completely open for that heat slug in the middle. And what happens is you end up with too much solder in the middle, so the part floats up and the connects on the side don't connect.

Oh boy.

Yeah and this is even more prevalent with some of the open-source CAD software, or some of them with a lot of user-generated content, nobody told those folks how to make the footprint properly.

I see.

Quite often the manufacturers, in their data sheets, even specify it that way. But what you need to do is, to modify the footprint so in that center pad, you get somewhere between 50 and 75 percent paste coverage. So, you take out the default paste layer for the center pad and you put in a little windowpane-looking thing - problem solved.

Interesting. Yeah it's a little scary, unless you have a partner that's on the ball to what you can accidentally pick up off a data sheet or how to interpret that data right? So okay well, that's a good one.

Another one we run across these tiny little micro BGA's 0.4 mm pitch, some of them even 0.3 mm. I've actually seen a 0.24 mm pitch BGA. Yeah, some of the rules change with the bigger BGA's. You want non-solder mask defined pads, so you want the solder mask opening to be slightly larger than the little pad where the BGA ball’s gonna sit down.

Yeah.

With some of the 0.4 mm pitch BGAs, you want solder mask pad or defined pads, otherwise you get bridging.

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, it kind of depends on the geometry of the solder ball, but that's a pretty common error as well. So you see these things that component manufacturers haven't fully studied, haven't fully published and they are  just setting people up for problems.

Yeah, and what I have found - and not just in relation to components - I have talked to people who manufacture either components, or they manufacture laminates, and what's not widely understood is that sometimes the studies they’re doing is us.

Yeah we’re their guinea pigs.

Yeah, and then we yell and scream and we give them back data and then they produce overtime accurate data sheets. I was stunned to hear that, but it's absolutely true. They need to get stuff to market because the market is demanding it, and the testing is so complex and so widespread, and the applications are so widespread, that they can only go so far. And then the rest of the data has to come from real world.

Yeah the the hardware industry really is paralleling what the software industry did.  We had open source software then open source hardware. With software, we started calling it ‘beta test the world’ because you couldn't beta test anymore, it's too complex.

Right, it’s too complex, so we become the beta testers and I don't think that's often understood. When I first understood it my jaw about dropped because I'm from the old school, like you are and it's like; wait nothing would ever go out that was not fully vetted or understood and tested, and things have just gotten so complex. And so there's just a hard limitation there, it's not a bad business practice or whatever, but it's a reality that I think is wise for designers and engineers to keep in mind - another encouragement to work closely with people like you, that can say, we've seen this already a bunch of times, we know what's going to occur here.

Yeah we've built our whole business around everything being wrong basically, start to finish. It sounds kinda funny, but It's all about this stuff probably isn't going to be right coming into us, so we've got to figure out how to make it work.

I don't know, like what happened to the world Duane? This is not how we started but here we are. Another thing you talked to me a little bit about, you had mentioned one time in a conversation, about polarity markings.

Oh yeah. That's that's maybe third or fourth in terms of the issues that we see here with diodes especially. Capacitors somewhat, but diodes even more so. Any kind of ambiguity, when you're dealing with machines, it's a problem. If you've got a barrier diode for example, it's backwards from what you would consider a conventional diode. So if someone marks it with a plus and it's a barrier diode and they're expecting us to know whether the plus goes to the anode or the cathode, we're gonna put it in the conventional manner, not knowing it's a barrier diode it's gonna be backwards so you can't use a plus to mark a diode. You might think minus, Also, does that mean negative or is that the lion on the diode symbol you can't do that because it doesn't tell us anything you've got to say K for cathode not C - because then we might think it's a capacitor, or the full diode symbol the down - lot of people will put in silkscreen, the mark that's on the bottom of a surface mount diode...

Uh-hu.

-which at  first glance seems like it makes a lot of sense - but only if you give us the exact diode that you got the marker off of. I've seen two diodes 0.603s in the exact same package from the exact same manufacturer just a couple characters off, in the part number, and literally, on one the mark is the anode mark on the other it's the cathode mark. I've got to I've got to do a datasheet and I have a clipping from that data sheet on the Screaming Circuits blog that shows that it's got this part anode mark, this part cathode mark. I made the same mistake myself. On one of my boards I put the little marker on there and I gave gave the company the orientation and the CAD files, and then I made a substitution because one part was no longer available and used the other one - same thing but it was backwards because I went from cathode mark to anode mark.  So, remove ambiguity. A few years ago I would say, it's okay to mimic the silkscreen - just give us the exact part. But with supply chain availability being such an issue right now, I would not rely on the mark that's underneath the diode because they can reverse if we have to substitute something.

Okay I'm gonna put a pause there and talk about what the heck is going on with supply chain. Stuff about diodes like these, very basic building blocks to design, why are we having problems sourcing parts?

Well we've been told a couple of things from suppliers. One is, they're telling us that the automotive companies are buying up literally an entire line. They'll come to a component manufacturer and say this particular part: I need all of your production, all of it and so there it goes out of stock. Internet-of-Things companies - the super, hyper-mobile devices are also causing issues because they're increasing the demand in the super small components. Well then the companies that make the parts don't have fab capacity to also make the larger ones so, some of the component manufacturers are telling us that they're going to stop making some of the bigger form factors 1206s 0805s even 0603s may become even more and more scarce because if they can make 0402 or 0201 to cover all that range they'll do it and not make the other form factors.

Holy... I don't know what to say about that - if I was a design engineer I'd be freaking out - this puts people in a really tough spot!

It really does and it's gonna change the way some things are designed. We have always had a policy that we will not substitute anything without explicit approval. Even looking at a bypass capacitor - 0.1 microfarad 16 volt bypass capacitor - in some cases you need exact parameters. There’s parameters you need to be exactly the same so you can't substitute. But there are also plenty of cases where it's just sort of by guess and by golly: yeah it's a 0.1, it could be 16 volt, 10 volt, 25 volt, 50 volt, whatever. If that's the case, people are gonna have to start being really flexible in terms of what they will accept for a component and maybe at some point the industry will have a flag on a bill of material that says: this one's engineered so it has to be exact. This one, just make it close.

Another thing, our industry is changing so fast, it's just a big reason why Altium and I've   decided this podcast would be a good idea. Same reason why your Circuit Talk publication is a good idea because it's like we can't get the education out fast enough or get the news out. Like holy cow, why can't I get this capacitor? It's not a unique form factor specialized BGA they're capacitors! This is like bread and butter, so it's been puzzling to learn about that and I'm just really interested to see how these component manufacturers are going to deal with this and and again how designers are going to be forced to think hard about these parts it's really strange. Anyway sorry for taking a little side trip there.

That's important, it's a significant issue. We're being told this could last until 2020 and when we get out of this allocation, the industry is going to be different and, as I said, a lot of the bigger form factors consider moving all to 402s. It's more difficult to deal with these smaller ones but those are the ones, when the component manufacturers catch up, it's going to be in the smaller form factors because they can sell them to people building small devices as well as big. So think about that, be very, very careful when you're picking the specific component and tell us, and other manufacturers like us, what parameters are important.

Goodness that’s a great tip. You know I hadn't thought about it until just this minute when you were talking; I'm wondering if this will drive an uptick in embedded?

Embedded like embedded passives?

Uh-hu better passives.

I don't know I've been waiting to see that. I joined this company in 2005 and embedded passives were in the news at that point, and I actually made a prediction on the Screaming Circuits blog, that in ten years - I think I said -  80% of the passives would be embedded passives. I don't know that we've ever seen one. I guess technically you wouldn't see it because it's inside it.

No but you would know it was there, because I know it from my board manufacturing past, you would know cuz you would have to process it differently. It's a different process but I don't know what the cost trade-offs are there, but I've met Bruce Mahler from Omega and I've met some of those folks, and I'm just wondering if this allocation will drive, but I don't know what the cost trade-offs are or performance comparative. That makes me think, I need to call Bruce Mahler and get him on the blog because it's an interesting thing to ponder in lieu of what's going on in the marketplace.

Yeah.

Anything else you would mention off the top of your head that's something you see repeatedly that's a design for assembly thing that you would recommend designers to take a look at closely?

Well the polarity, the QFNs, BGAs as I mentioned. Something that isn't necessarily quite so obvious is the data files that is an important part of design for assembly. Ambiguity on a board is bad, ambiguity in a data file is bad. Bills of Materials, if there are parts in there that don't match the board, that's probably 80% of the jobs that come through here, have some sort of a Bill of Materials issue. So, double-check that that's accurate and that it matches your CAD files. If you can give your manufacturer the intelligent CAD files like an ODB++ or IPC 2581, that significantly reduces the chance of error, but then there's a little irony in there too that a lot of board houses still prefer Gerber's so we have seen cases where someone saves and then; oh yeah, I can give you the ODB++, but they forget they made a slight change and so now we have Gerber's that don't match the ODP++ so, make sure all of your files are consistent. Make sure the Bill of Material is clear and finalized. All in all if you add up all of the files issues that we see, that's probably one of the most common problems. I mean, I run into those problems for myself. I designed some boards and run up to the factory here, and I know how to do this, in theory I know how to do this, but I regularly make mistakes that my co-workers chide me for.

Well I think again, that leads to the complexity of the data that's available. The data sheets; whether they're right. I mean it is such a complex thing and it amazes me that we can even manufacture circuit boards and then put components on it and come out workable sometimes. Because it is such a complex process, I'm really glad that - actually I appreciate it - I don't understand all those steps but having worked for for both a really high end EMS that sold to tier one’s, very complex boards, and also having worked for a variety of board shops. I really appreciate the complexity in both those disciplines, and I think sometimes because a board shows up as a line item on a BOM that complexity sometimes can get lost on you. But yeah we're building things, even here Altium, into our own tool that helps, like an active BOM, things like that, that hopefully help. I think design tool manufacturers like us, I think we're doing a better job helping in that regard.

Right yeah, definitely!

Well the last couple items I wanted to talk to you about... well thank you for all that by the way, and again, we will share in the show notes your website. The Circuit Talking, I would recommend to anyone who is listening or watching - that you subscribe to Duane's blog or just Circuit Talk or whatever and we'll put all the links in because again, he's got his feet in the fire and runs up against these things as he said. Because they're putting through such a width of product. Like I used to work for an EMS, and like you said, it was a vertical. So we worked with military Tier one, and so the type of bores we saw was a niche, but you're seeing everything.

Yeah, literally I mean we worked on a camera board, the electronics of it, for National Geographic - it's a plexiglass globe, they drop it to the bottom of the ocean, it's got a chain on it and when the chain rusts through the camera bobs to the top and they pick it up again. We've got stuff being built for the 2020 Mars Rover so, literally down in the ocean up into space and and anything in between, we've built Ardium base stuff, real simple things, through holes; we built a board with five thousand placements. It's just all over the place and it's just absolutely the most fascinating place I've ever worked certainly, because of that.

Yeah I can see that and again, kudos for you - it's easier to do a quick podcast or write a blog post or produce a Circuit Talk that can go out to thousands of people and get that information out in that kind of global sense and be helpful right.

Yeah rather than tell one person at a time.

Exactly it's kind of a scalability of getting that knowledge out, so I really appreciate what you've done over the years. One thing I wanted to ask you about which it was a fun thing is about; I don't know six to eight months ago, I had the privilege to go with the Altium team for the first time, to a Maker Faire because we have Circuit Maker and Circuit Studio - Circuit Maker is free and and now we've bought a company called Upverter, which is also free, and in the cloud, and we also have Circuit Studio. So, we went there with those products and because of my position here as Director of Community Engagement, I hadn't had any exposure really to the Maker community, other than seeing stuff online, and I went and it was like drinking from a firehose. It was so much fun… goofiest things... it was so much fun. So, I'm walking the aisles, kind of collecting things to write about, or learn about, and I come across Duane Benson, wearing what looks like rap swag around his neck - it was like a clock you were wearing right, or something - he looks like a rapper and I'm used to thinking of him as this Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits and here you are, like fully immersed in the Maker space, and you had designed this device and had LEDs on it and I'm like: what are you doing here?

So tell me about how you've come to serve Makers. It doesn't seem like, from a profitability or a business model, that it would be a market that a company like Screaming Circuits would address. So how'd you get there Duane?

Well you could say that I'm a bit of a method actor, I mean I love... I've been designing small circuit boards for a very long time and writing the software for them for a very long time and one way of looking at it, is I'm a Hacker and a Maker who happens to be lucky enough to have a manufacturing facility. But more specifically, those Hackers and those Makers they are starting businesses.

Yes they are.

Many of those businesses become our customers whether they be crowdfunding or bootstrapping or getting investments, they are the future. The Maker community has a lot of students in it. It has a lot of weekday engineer weekend Hackers, it has a lot of people who aspire to start a new business and just such a wealth of creativity. And part of our mission I always like to look at, I'm just one person, we're just one company but if we can make our tiny little corner of the planet just a little bit better then we've been successful and all of those people who want to design electronics...

M-Hmm..

-We know what they don't know. I mean, we know what kind of problems they’re going to run across before they do, and so if we know what they don't know why don't we pass that off? And some of those people will have boards built with our competitors. Some of them will build them themselves, some of them will have us build them. Whatever, we're helping them understand this industry better. And we are helping them build better boards. That's what we really want to do. That's why we're at the Maker Faires ultimately. It does always have to lead back to more business for us, and it does. People see Screaming Circuits, they get the Circuit Talk and they read it, and it's Circuit Talk a Screaming Circuits publication so all of that winds its way back eventually, to helping the business here, and that's how we can afford to do it. But if we can help the business build and grow the business and help these budding designers - everybody wins.

This is why I love you, and love you guys. I just I love that philosophy, I love that approach. I try to live by an old Zig Ziglar thing and this reminds me of you and Screaming Circuits’ model that you just explained. Zig Ziglar used to say, you really can't have everything you want in life. If you just help enough other people get what they want.

Right.

So it's kind of knowing unconsciously that if you put good things out in the world, and you do the right thing, and you're ethical, and you have integrity, and you serve people, that good will come back to you and and you'll do okay. And I think that's a big key to your success actually, by kind of leading with service and and not ignoring the bottom line. We are in business to make money, we have to do that, or we're not in business anymore. So, I really appreciate that.

Well we're wrapping up now and I think you've listened to a couple of these podcasts now and so two questions for you. One are you a nerd or a geek?

[Laughter] I’m a Gunerd…

That's the best answer I've ever gotten yes you're a Gunerd.

Yeah, there was a time when those were really pejorative terms but I think nerds and geeks have taken it back and said, you know what, no we're not going to be ashamed of liking technology and loving it,we're proud of it. I mean, yeah so I’m a Gunerd.

Oh my gosh, I'm totally gonna steal that and use it somehow Duane, that will come back to haunt you later I promise.

[Laughter]

And the other question is, but I think I know what the answer is, if you've listened to podcasts. I always ask designers and electronics professionals in the end - this is ‘designers after hours’ - so because there is so much creativity involved a lot of people, like you said are Makers or Hackers, or they play a musical instruments or they're sculptors or whatever. So, what is your kind of guilty pleasure that you like to do after hours?

It would have to be photography. I chase animals around and take pictures of them, animals, landscapes, and then I have sort of a weird passion for old, decaying industrial sites as well. But photography would probably have to be my passion when I'm not playing with electronics.

That's so cool. Do you have a website where you share any of that or is it just mostly personal stuff and you keep your photos and share them with friends and family and whatnot?

It's mostly a personal thing I have had them on websites before but it's just my thing.

And and what do you mean about industrial sites?

Well, old decaying, industrial and rusty factories. There's a place here just north of Canby Oregon City and we've got a waterfall on the Willamette River and most people think of waterfalls as pristine, and nature and that's all wonderful, I love that. But this one: back in the 1800's they started building paper mills and  they built a set of locks. It's the oldest - well till they just recently closed down - it was the oldest continuously operated locks west of the Mississippi. And so now, you overlook the river from a nice restaurant and you see this shut down, decaying, industrial plant and - well no it's not the beauty of the river - but I see a sort of beauty in the symmetry and in the the way people constructed these things. It's almost like an architectural dig, you can see things from a hundred years ago, from eighty years ago, from sixty years ago, and you can see the evolution of that, as this thing built up and then as they abandoned it, and there's just for some reason...  I really enjoy that that sort of a view as well as the natural views as well.

They do have a really unique aesthetic and things have changed. It is kind of like a little time capsule and the rest is actually beautiful and sometimes the design itself is beautiful.

Yeah well thank you again, this has been fabulous and I'm sure we can talk more and more, but thank you so much for giving me so much of your time and sharing DFA tips and the story of Screaming Circuits, and we wish you continued success and we'll certainly share the website and Circuit Talk. And if there's anything else you'd like to share with us, give me a holler and I'll make sure we include those in the show notes.

Thank you very much, it's been a privilege to be on the show here, thank you.

Again this has been Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack Podcast and Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits. we look forward to seeing you next time until then always stay OnTrack.

 

Do you know your fabricator? Meet David Carmody, Division Manager and CID+ at San Diego PCB Design. As a service bureau, San Diego PCB works on a variety of PCB design projects. Learn why David says, “You gotta know who you’re fabbing with” and how he is using DFM Reports to help customers integrate design and assembly in this episode of The OnTrack Podcast.

Show Highlights:

• Memorable designs in telecom space and the development board for Dragon II, a SpaceX project, for the capsule they hope to take to Mars
• Package on packages, dropping the DDR - removing the burden on the designer
• Palomar advisory program - student programs for learning PCB design
• San Diego PCB acquired by Milwaukee Electronics, EMS and Engineering Services
• DFM report - a “stoplight report” for customers before starting build - customers love it and it fixes issues proactively especially with packaging
• A lot of engineers don’t know the manufacturing side and DFM reports can help with this
• “You gotta know who you’re fabbing with” 
• Will additive manufacturing processes be the answer? The business model remains to be seen.
• 3D printing - you can’t print copper (yet)
• Altium User Groups - have Altium in the title but we don’t run them! We’d love to support.
• Altium User Group in San Diego is very active and supportive.
• Advice from a Pro: Always keep learning, it will keep you fresh and make work more fun.
• PCB design isn’t the only practice David has mastered - he’s a martial artist too

Links and Resources:

David Carmody on Linkedin

San Diego Altium Users Group Website

San Diego PCB

Milwaukee Electronics

Tecate, NM Manufacturing Facility

 

Hi everyone this is Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack podcast - welcome back. Once again I have another incredible guest to speak with us today, but before we get started please follow me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to share a lot of things relative to engineering and PCB design and on Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and if you'd please subscribe and give us some comments so we know what you'd like to hear more about that would be great.

So today again we have a great guest which is David Carmody of San Diego PCB David has a new title now: he is the division manager and he also has a CID. So David, welcome and thank you for joining me here at Altium today. So, we've known each other for a little while and I've had the benefit of being over at San Diego PCB and looking over your shoulder to some pretty wild complicated designs. So tell us a little bit about your day-to-day from the perspective of design bureaus and the kind of work that you see?

Okay, we do get a lot of different designs, a bunch of varied designs, so we see a lot of military application, we see a lot of new technology - wearable technologies and things like that as well; it is pretty much all over the map though. I mean we get a little bit of anything and everything just because of the the nature of the service entity. A lot of the more upscale - so to speak -designs are the real nanotechnology sort of stuff where we're cramming a ton of the little parts into a board that's less than a half square inch total in size, or we're packing everything into a big housing that has to get heat out somehow because, I mean, we're sending up high output micro processors into into space and there is no airflow so we need to get the heat out in other ways. So there's a lot of that sort of stuff that we do get to see and and play with and and learn from as well.

I think San Diego is kind of a neat place to work too because there is a lot of Defense here and there's also call comments and telecoms, and even in our local area, although I'm sure you see work from all over the country? We do we also have kind of some neat things right here in our own backyard.

Oh yeah.

So across that variety what would you say some of your more memorable designs would be?

I was gonna say we do have have some telecom stuff that's gone on and those are those are fun boards just because they've got big processors on them and lots of high-speed lines, things like that. Most memorable, for me personally, would probably be a SpaceX design. I was able to design the development board for the Dragon 2.

Oh my gosh!we’re not worthy! Do you mean the dragon heavy that they just launched - the second Falcon that ever went?

Yeah the the Dragon 2 which is the capsule that they hope to take to Mars one day.

Oh so that that one!

Yeah.  I did the development board for that so it's just basically a big processor board with a lot of RF communications on it and things like that and they're breaking out all the other boards from that, and that was a fun project. I got to be a part of that was really cool.

Yes, I sold some R4s to them and got to go through that facility a few times so I'm like a weirdo SpaceX geek and then we also sponsor the hyperloop pod teams for universities. So Ben that's helping us here with recording this; he and I got to go up and hang out at SpaceX and see them do that.

I saw some of those pictures.

So sorry for being so weird but I’m a kinda SpaceX geek.

Yes, it’s been fun. We do have a couple of space contracts we've worked directly with NASA and MIT and also with Space Micro so, we've definitely learned our way around the Class 3A specifications and we know that inside and out.

Not easy, really dense stuff. So you talked a little bit about the nanotechnology, is that where you sort of see the bleeding edge going? What are the the most challenging designs?

I was gonna say the packaging is actually changing quite a bit, we're seeing some things that the packaging is doing that's well, quite frankly, I'm not terribly happy with because it takes away some of our place - but things like package-on packages is coming around. That's really cool technology, I mean, you put down the DSP or the PGA - whatever it happens to be - and then you can drop the DDR right on top of it. There's nothing for us to do; it's purely an assembly process, if that.

Wow.

So that stuff is definitely interesting and removing a burden, so to speak, on the designer but yeah, then the package size itself is just getting smaller and smaller. We're being pushed into HDI technology more and more often. 0.3 millimeter BGAs are pretty common, 0.4s are all over the place now. I mean even big ones. So the 0.3 three millimeter BGA's are getting common. I've been able to work on things as small as 0.15 millimeter though. So it was a flip chip sort of design where we're pushing the envelope on that thing so it was experimental, and things like that. I don't think they actually ever built it was costly, that whole get up then but that's that the trend we're seeing. Just everyone's pushing the package design more and more all the time.

Something I noticed I took a peek at, even though I've known you for a while - I took a peek at your LinkedIn profile. I don't know that I'd ever done that and I like to ask people a lot, how'd you get into this industry? Because most of us didn't start out this way, but we ended up here. So did you start out there? I notice you took courses at Palomar College which is local here, and I don't know if they still do, but they used to have PCB design courses?

That they do I'm actually on the Palomar Advisory Committee right now and we're helping to restructure some of that stuff and try to join up a little bit more, their student base through there. They've got a pretty good offering right now to make it better but yeah it's still active and it's it's one of the few places that you can really go for formal education. So it's good that they're there keeping it alive, and not just keeping it alive but updating it.

Right, and that's kind of where you started out was it not?

It was.

Or did you just join them recently as part of the Advisory Committee, or did you start learning design there?

I did technically start learning some design there but it was an accident really.

[Laughter] See, my point is, we didn't do this on purpose.

No absolutely not. Basically I had gone through their program and really gravitated - back then at least - 3d was just emerging. It was all in AutoCAD, there was no such thing as SolidWorks, it was just coming around. So I ended up jumping into AutoCAD 3d mechanical sort of stuff and and did my degree on that and then got on to nothing but waiting list after waiting list. So at that point I was talking to a guy that I was working with, he goes: call my brother in law, he does something in computers. And I talked to this guy, he was a PCB designer at Intel - I'm actually working with him now, we recently hired him, but yeah he's working out in our Arizona office but he gave me some excellent time; never actually met him face to face at the time but he gave me some phone time and told me what to look for, and what this industry had to offer and gave me a couple of places to go after. And I went after both - I ended up getting an offer from both of them, but I liked the smaller business so I took that side of things and spent 12 years back at an ‘unnamed company’ as the Design Manager.

Laughter, well not as awesome as Sandy Opie…

Well I don't know, it hasn't been a year yet, so San Diego PCB was acquired actually by Milwaukee Electronics right.

Yes it’s been about a year and four months now, time flies. So Milwaukee is a really capable EMS shop up in-  remind me?

It's Milwaukee.

Oh is it Milwaukee!

Yes, their primary branch is in Milwaukee - okay this confuses everyone - because we have multiple brands out there now. So our Milwaukee electronics brand has most of our engineering services and the EMS as well there. Up in Canby, Portland Oregon, now that's where we have Screaming Circuits - that is our quick term prototype house and there is also EMS there as well. Most people don't know that but the factory shares the floor for that and then we also have - actually it's also called Milwaukee Electronics - despite that, it's in Tecate Mexico but they've got a huge building down there and they're there literally clawing the mountain out from being behind this building.

Right I've seen photos of it, it's really quite lovely, at least the photos are, it looks really modern.

It's a very impressive facility. I was able to visit there and I had seen pictures of it when the shop floor was was only 50% filled; that place is full and like I said they're calling out the mountain now behind them, so that they can add on and I think gain about 30% more square footage. Growing like crazy.

How has that been, that acquisition, for your customers and for you, there's obviously synergy there between the two firms so how has that been for you?

The two companies, the acquisition itself was great, Milwaukee Electronics is a fantastic company to work for. I really enjoy all the people that are there. The synergy has taken some time to get things rolling, but I'm starting to see a little bit of a snowball effect and so we're starting to pick up some momentum to where Screaming Circuits is sending us customers back and we're sending them customers in and we're starting to get a collaborative database of the customers going right now, so that we can take a more active role on that and and really sell to both sides. There's been a little bit of crossover, but like I said, it took probably six months before I saw even the first crossover and right then another one happened, and then another one, but now we're up to where we're getting about at least one customer a week or something like that, that's doing some sort of crossover. so it's definitely building up speed. But it's still going to take a little bit more time.

So since our listeners and watchers here will are mostly engineers and PCB designers, what do you think the benefit is to collaborating design to EMS - what are the benefits you think that occur there?

When you're collaborating, one of the biggest things that's coming out right now, is basically  DFM report that we've been doing, it's something that I've been doing for years. Say a customer has their own design team, they want me to be a second set of eyes - something like that. I'll go through the design either on a cursory level if you just want me to look at DFM/DFA sort of issues. Do you want me to look at your circuits, do you want me to look at this whole thing - make sure that you placed it correctly? I coined that a ‘stoplight report’ a long time ago, and basically it's just - we give a nice little green note if it's informative only: this looks good it was done right, give a yellow note if, hey you might want to look into this, you might have some potential issues or, hey this part’s hanging off the board edge you're gonna knock it off, this needs a correction before it goes out - and those are obviously the red items - so customers seem to love that. I mean it's really easy, real clear-cut. They can kind of skim through it, hit the items that they want and that is really building up some speed right now with with a few customers because they've had an internal source for a long time. They've been using Screaming Circuits forever, but Screaming Circuits is going: okay you're going into bigger yields, you need to fix these sorts of items - let's fix them ahead of time and that's what we're being utilized to do.

That sounds absolutely incredible especially now, because in the marketplace so many engineers are laying out their own boards. They may or may not have time or access to spend a lot of time with their fabricators our assembler, so I think to have that sort of oversight would be very welcome. I don't know if that's what's driving it or just having a second set of eyes what do you think?

Probably a bit of both, I mean the engineers obviously get EMI and and EM theory, they do that really well, so they they always lay out the board well for that. But they aren't necessarily the best packagers, most PCB designers are puzzlers so, we do the packaging portion real well that's what we like to play with. But if you’re a good PCB designer you're going to know the EM side and you're also going to know the manufacturing side. A lot of the engineers don't know that, so they don't really look at that. I mean, I've been given boards that were completely routed and they said: rip out all the routing because this guy did it with 6mm vias with a 12mm pad on an 80mm  thick board and so, it's just wrong all the way around. And placement wasn't bad on that…

But the aspect ratio is the killer.

-and he used decent trace widths, but I mean, the most problematic piece of the board, and he killed it.

And like it's a good thing that companies like Altium and other EDA companies make such powerful, great software - but there's no place in the software that says: no, stop dummy,   you can run DRCs or whatever, but it won't necessarily flag it for for DFM if your aspect ratio is off or whatever, unless you've turned those settings on or off I can imagine right?

Yes but you can still improperly program DRCs too, you can say: hey I want 1mm holes on this board…

I've heard you and Mike Creeden say that a design tool is only as good as the designer.   

-yeah you absolutely need that and I mean, someday in the future would it be great to see the tools incorporate that sort of stuff? Yes, but at the same time you’ve got to know how your fab works too…

And you don't want to limit yourself either because you could potentially create self-limiting things that are really irritating...

-oh yeah.

So I think we're gonna just keep giving you powerful tools and you guys have to work it out.

Yeah I mean, we can just zoom up and zoom up and, hey that via looks plenty big enough to me, I could put my fist through it, but not in reality. The packaging thing that I was referring to earlier that is just starting to drive this industry just because of big 0.4 millimeter pitch BGA. I'm working with a fabricator that can't quite do the the latest and greatest and all of a sudden that pattern starts to become a challenge that’s almost impossible to break out.

Right yeah I don't know where this train’s going…

Yup I don't know - it will stop somewhere at some point…

I know, I know, except it seems like we just keep creating some breakthrough so I'm keeping my eye on things like additive manufacturing, whatever we could do it 1mm, controlled trace and pull it off but there's no clear front-runner.

Yeah, the additive processes are very interesting, haven't seen anyone really start pulling off a business model out of it. The 3d printing technologies is also very interesting but you can't print copper unfortunately, so they can't - yet at least - so there's some major hurdles there too that they have to go through.

It'll be interesting. Well I wanted to shift gears a little bit because you, along with your colleague Randy Clemens here in San Diego, run a really solid Altium user group here and for those listeners that don't know this, Altium User Groups, they have our name in the title but we don't run them - they're completely run by the users, for the users they're very democratic and we just lend support and it's something that we've been talking a lot about here, is that we would like to grow the user community and help people launch groups. So can you give us a little bit of background and give us the do's and don'ts maybe, if people that are thinking about starting a local users group from what things have worked, when things maybe haven't worked, and how do we get more people to launch user groups?

Just sign up - just for a little background on that - there was a user group that was here for quite a while that was run by Bill Brooks and it had some traction, it was running for quite a while and then either the community or whatever, started to kind of drop off a little bit. Randy and I saw that as a bad thing basically, and we talked to Altium, talked to a few people here, and then put together a general terms for the the group. Randy has always done Google boards, the blog and stuff, so he's very good at that, he's got a pretty major Altium tutorial board actually that's out there. So he took some of that and ported it over and turned it into a San Diego Altium User Group Board, you can just google that: San Diego Altium User Group and you'll find his board. If you sign up you'll get meeting invites so it's really that easy. All of our IP, as it were, is all up there and and I mean fully freely distributable so anyone can go ahead and take that as a template and start porting it over. Randy would probably help if anyone asked to set up or clone a board but Altim is really great on this thing, they're really helping us out, they help promote it you guys are actually doing lunches for us and all of that, so we really, really appreciate all that support. Lunch is a good way to get people out - just feed them and they will come.

Exactly, you feed them and they show up. So we were restarting the group, it had a little bit of a slow start and it's kind of typical. I think we had all of three people show up once plus the the huge group of Altium group and San Diego PCB group because we host the location but no I mean our last last attendance was in the 30s somewhere, so it's it's doing real well now.

What do you think the benefits are to the users that participate regularly?

One of the big things is we always bring Chris Carlson out for new updates and stuff so we can see things as they're coming out. He gave us a wonderful tutorial on 18 not long ago, really to help us all dive into it as as the interphase changed.

I thought Randy was gonna eat us alive - he came out he's like yeah bring him - he had a slide deck going, and ‘what about this?’  God bless Chris Carlson, our senior FAE, he addressed most of those things and just said, no Randy we just moved it over here, it's just over there and we tackle most of it. But what I really appreciate is that Chris actually took four things back to our R&D team, and I think that kind of real-time feedback, it helps us make better tools right? And if we make better tools we sell more software, it's not rocket science right?

Right and we're happier designers…

Right your’e happier and you’re productive and so I think it's a win-win and I think Altium is doing a good job culturally. So say you were in... I don't know... New Hampshire okay, and you knew there was a pretty good-sized design community what would you say the first steps would be to get something going?

First of all, probably to clone that board that we've already got…

And we will share this, by the way, in the show notes and we'll share that if you want to go take a look at it, because Randy has done a good job of kind of making a charter, it would be a good model to share.

-so it's a fairly basic charter but yeah, clone that board, start marketing it against that, call Altium…

Me, call me I will help you.

-so get them to put it out in a newsletter and a blog or something along those lines so you can start that foot traffic and then invite your buddies, invite your friends and get them to do the same.

I interrupted you there, so you said that Chris came out and you got to see the latest and greatest, Chris did a good thing on showing you AD18 - what other kind of benefits do you think the users see over time?

I mean we've already kind of hit on the the dynamic feedback and that's obviously great information, but just the user-to-user help is always nice too. I mean I've had people come in with a laptop and and open it up and go, look I'm struggling over here, what the heck do I need to do? What rule do I need to write to make this thing work right? And we can just basically rub shoulders and get things moving and get a workaround if it needs it just to move it along.

Well I've been really impressed since I've been down here for about a year now and just seeing the group it's just very active and it seems like a really healthy thing and yeah all I get to do, is use my card and buy you guys lunch and if you want a speaker we’ll send one, if you don't want one we won't interfere so I think that user-to-user and that you guys really get to own it, is sort of a powerful model because it's not like we're going to come down and spring a free sales pitch...

Yeah well, Altium doesn't go in they're not salesy.

Yeah but we try actually, not to do it.

No, it's been fantastic for that.

Well I wanted to bring this up because you and Randy spoke at AltiumLive and Randy took a little part of his time speaking to talk about the Altium user groups and I was so surprised! I'm like, well you can spend your time talking about that if you want Randy, but I didn't think there would be that much interest - but I happened to pop in the back door just to see how it was going and people were really engaged and then people came and talked to me after. I think there's kind of a hunger to do it. I'm just wondering... I just wanted you to share with our listeners, if people did want to do it they would see, oh here's some steps to take because I don't know, though, that maybe we've done a really good job of advertising it because we do want to stay out of it, we want to contribute but not inserting ourselves into an organic user’s group. So, thanks for sharing that part.

Hm-mm yeah, for the AltiumLive, Lawrence Romine asked Randy to do a little bit of a spiel on that and yeah, there were a lot of people from LA that sounded like they were going to be starting their own, or a couple of them, depending on the demographics or Geographics up there and then there were quite a few out of state as well that that sounded like they wanted to start one.

I went to one in Utah, which I guess has been going on for a while. So, I got connected with someone actually at AltiumLive and we ended up connecting and there was like 80 people there to see Ben Jordan talk about AD18, I'm like okay, Wow! 80 - it was huge, but I think that group has been very active and been around for a long time so it wasn't like a new thing and they actually come from Salt Lake and south of there, so it was almost like two combined groups. So anyways, thank you for sharing about that. Any final thoughts?

Nothing that I can think of right off the top of my head.

Well thank you so much for coming in today…

-Thank you

You’re a good sport and we really appreciate you in San Diego PCB and thank you for sharing. Oh one thing I wanted to ask you was because the upper-end (age-wise) is starting to kind of age out in the industry and we're getting new ones coming in, what is one - since you're sort of a veteran designer - what is say, one or two pieces of advice that you would give to a young designer?

The number one thing I would say is, never stop learning. I mean I got into a rut at one point where I wasn't learning I couldn't stand up on the the current trends, things like that, and that job got to be a drag, it really did because it's - overall - we did the same thing over and over all the time. It's very repetitive, but if you're standing up on the latest trends you always have something else to reach at and something else to go after. Always have the latest way to solve something too, so it just makes the job overall a breeze; makes it a lot easier to do day-to-day and keeps it fun and interesting.

Very good. Okay, last question: I said that was the last one but I like my very last, last question - I call this part of the podcast designers after hours okay - so there's people like you and I know in common, like Bill Brooks who started the Alts Music Group. There's the sculptor, I just spoke to Chris Hunrath earlier today, who's a scuba diver. So what do you like to do after hours?

Honestly Mike my side is a little sore right now because I did some martial arts last night so that's one of my little best-kept secrets, so to speak, been doing that for a long time done Tan Sido, got a third-degree black belt there, and then migrated over to Kung Fu and have a black sash.

Well, remind me to never make you mad! You’re so soft spoken and could kick my butt.

[Laughter]

Pat's the one that always bounces that around the office but he's honestly the only one I’d ever damage too…

[Laughter]

That's cool. See, another interesting after hour designer. Well David, thanks again and I know we'll see you soon again.

This has been Judy Warner and David Carmody of San Diego PCB. Thank you for joining us today we'll make sure to share our links below and please visit us again next time.

Until then, remember to always stay on track.

Why is spread glass popular? What can you use instead of FR4? Listen and learn from industry veteran Chris Hunrath, who joins us from the San Jose Insulectro facility for a deep dive into what material sets are used in printed circuit board assembly and manufacturing. Get expert insights and learn about new materials on the market to help with your PCB design before going to fabrication and assembly.

 

Show Highlights:

• What is Insulectro? Operating for over 50 years, Insulectro provides materials for electronics, everything from laminates, prepregs, flex materials, copper foils, conductive inks, substrates, process chemistries, imaging materials and lamination materials. With 11 stocking locations, the newest in Toronto and 9 branches, Insulectro is a leader in providing electronic materials to industry.
• Prepregs - 175 different types to cut from in San Jose facility alone!
• Spread glass is becoming more popular - electrical and fabrication benefits because it is more electrically uniform. No open areas, the filaments are spread across (aka fanned out or mechanically spread) and this has signal benefits especially for differential pairs. Better from a drilling standpoint too.
• New materials are gaining traction - with low loss that laminate at normal temperatures
• Insulectro distributes for both Isola and DuPont
• Isola’s line-up of high-speed, low-loss material sets - Isola has a suite of laminates that are low loss, some of them with DKs close to the teflon range and they laminate at the normal temperatures which makes a composite build much simpler.
• Low-loss, low-Dk materials that can help with their signal integrity requirements
• I-Speed® - Low loss system, not as cheap as FR4 but its close and could be a good next step for people looking to upgrade material
• Having the right material set for a design is critical
• Challenges are more often in the fabrication than the design
• Copper is a really good moisture barrier, you have to bake the parts prior to assembly.
• I’ve seen people underestimate the baking and end up with scrap. Moisture is avoidable.
• Bonus Material: In Designer's After Hours, Chris Hunrath shares what kind of electric creatures lurk in La Jolla!!

  

Links and Resources:

Chris Hunrath on Linkedin

Insulectro

DuPont

Isola

HDPug Research on High Frequency Flex

Signal Integrity Journal

Understanding Glass Fabric by Isola Group

 

Hi this is Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast. Thanks again for joining us. Once again I have another amazing guest for us who is the go-to guy in PCB laminates.

I am with Chris Hunrath today but before Chris and I get started I would like to please invite you to subscribe, or to favorite us on your RSS feed, or you can connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I share lots of stuff relative to engineers and PCB designers and on Altium I'm at @AltiumJudy and Altium is on Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn.

So please give us a subscribe and a connection and we’d love to interact with you and hear more about what you'd like to hear on this podcast but I'm sure you're going to enjoy today's guest.

Chris is the VP of technology at Insulectro and I'm gonna let Chris go ahead and tell you a little bit about Insulectro for those three people on the planet who might not know who Insulectro is. So, welcome Chris and tell us about Insulectro.

Okay thanks.

So yeah Insulectro has been around over 50 years. We supply materials to the circuit board industry - actually multiple industries - but mostly we've been focusing on electronic materials. Everything from laminates, prepregs, flex materials. copper foils, conductive inks. Different kinds of plastic substrates used with conductive inks, process chemistries, imaging materials, drilling materials, lamination materials. Also we have 11 stocking locations. We just opened one up in Toronto and we have nine branches. So I'm based in the San Jose branch in the Silicon Valley area so that's a little bit about Insulectro.

Yeah nothing going on there in San Jose?

Lots yeah, so since the San Jose facility is one of the four branches where we do fabrication on master sheets and master roles of prepreg and laminate we do cutting, tooling, vacuum packing, and will also do that on the lamination materials, the release films, and the press pads and things like that. So we do that in four branches…

I'm going to ask you more about that later  because you just told me about that yesterday and I had no idea you guys did that. Actually I saw you more as a distribution channel. But before I ask you about that, why don't you give us a little bit of background on your history in the industry and how you came to this? I always say no and no one does this on purpose, unless you're an EE right?

So yeah those printed circuit boards - those of us that got pulled into the industry ,, have been here a long time. So I started actually back in 1983, I was going to school for chemistry and one of the shops back east, actually in New Jersey, was looking for someone to work in plating on the night shift, and ,, the rest is history as they say. I got pulled into the business and the next thing I knew I was coming to California to to work with our sales team. So that's how I got started in this, and then I joined Insulectro in 2001 and it's been great being with this company. So many different materials we get to work with and so many different customers.

I think you're a familiar name and face - being the VP of Technology but you also do trade shows and stuff. You present a lot and are really articulate explaining the technology of laminates because it's gotten a lot more complicated than it used to be back in 1983. I started in ‘84 by the way, and it used to just be, we'll get some FR4 some, prepreg and you're off to the races.

Right yep, back then it was FR4 and polyimide. A little side note, actually the company I worked for made multi wire circuit boards so we also had an adhesive to embed the wires and that's a whole nother story for another time. Primarily it was FR4 and and polyimide and now there are so many different materials and then if you add the Flex materials on top. There's a lot to to work with, it's a lot of complexity but also a lot of opportunity. I mean electronics are going into everything and we're seeing that with our printed electronics products as well ,. A lot of interesting applications from wearables to medical to consumer electronics so that's been pretty cool to be a part of that as well.

Yeah so tell us about what you're seeing on the front lines of current technology and marketing trends that are having an impact on laminate suppliers - ultimately since our audience here is mostly engineers and PCB designers - how that's sort of flowing down and what the impact is?

Okay.

Yeah so big question  sorry.

Yeah that's okay, that's all right. It's become a bigger opportunity - a big part of our business - but if you look at  materials in general, everybody knows people are looking for higher speeds and high-speed digital and they're looking for lower loss in RF applications the Internet of Things also even data communications and those types of things; car electronics, radar, self-driving cars. All these things need low loss materials. One of our challenges - and again - it's an opportunity as a supplier to the industry; is having the right stuff available for customers and certainly the Bay Area. It's always been a quick turn market, but it's that the time window has shrunk and one of our challenges is supplying all these different materials to our customers, and of course with every laminate system, every resin system you have the different core thicknesses, the different copper weights and then you have the prepregs with different thicknesses, and resin contents. Add to that also spread glass. It’s becoming very popular I'm sure most of the people who watch this will be familiar with the spread glass systems. They have electrical and fabrication benefits but but again, it adds to the part numbers, the variety of materials we have to stock. So we we currently have here, just in San Jose, we have a hundred and seventy-five rolls of prepreg we cut from for customers. And ,, it always seems like our customers need something we don't have in stock.

Yeah.

It's the one thing they need for that application. But you know we try and up our game here and have the right things. And that comes from going to our customers and talking to the people in their design group, in their sales department and asking them; what do you see? You know, years ago we used to work on forecasts. Customers would have a very predictable usage on materials and they'd have forecasts out for some time. We would base our stock on that and we do forecasting today but it's not the same thing anymore. I mean customers may get an order and they have four days to turn it and they don't know what the build’s gonna be until the stackup’s done and and that creates those challenges. But you know, we try again, we try and improve what we stock and what we have here and get better and better at that. It's just never boring that's for sure.

Yeah right, you gotta have a big crystal ball…

Yeah just talk a little about spread glass.

Yeah spread glass now that kind of puzzles me in context of high speed so I'm curious. Teach us about spread glass?

So there's different kinds of glass, what they call standard E glass and then of course the low dielectric constant glass. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But the spread glass is basically that the the fibers, instead of having a crossover and a weave - like you would in a fabric for like clothing - the actual filaments and the weave are spread out, so you don't have open areas and crossover areas, or areas of higher density glass and that makes the system more electrically uniform. So when you have traces that go through the PCB they’re not either going through high resin content areas, or high glass content areas because they'll have different signal properties so you want to make it more uniform.

Are they more in glass spindles - are you saying it's not woven?

Well it is woven but instead of having a high concentration of glass with open areas of just pure resin, the filaments are spread across so you're filling in the open areas.

Okay so they're kind of fanned out you're saying?

Yes exactly there's different terminologies there’s mechanically spread, there's flat glass, but but basically what ends up happening is, the crossover areas where you would have what we call glass knuckles, they're thinner and of course, the open areas now have some glass. So again the system is more uniform it's a composite. So the composite’s more uniform and and like I said that has signal benefits, especially for differential pairs. If you had one trace and a diff pair running over mostly resin, and one running over mostly glass, they'll have different propagation velocities. So you'd have different electrical results, so the spring glass is better for that. It is better from a drilling standpoint, either laser or mechanical drilling. Because you're not going through high concentrations of glass where the crossovers are so there is a benefit there. There are some caveats though, to how it works with filling ground planes. Because the resin doesn't easily move through the glass fabric - you could have some problems filling, so we have to offer not just the spread version, we have to offer the standard versions as well because very often, designs - if they're strip line - you'll have a reference plane on either side of a signal and those reference planes could be heavy copper and they require a certain amount of fill. So you need the standard fabrics to use as well in a stack up. So you might have a mixture of those types of systems - so yeah it does add some complexity.

So now we're not only doing hybrid materials now we're doing hybrid prepreg you're saying?

Well there are different varieties I guess you have to do it that way anyways because if you're doing hybrid you're matching the materials to the bond ply that you're using anyways I suppose, but now you're adding in this kind of third layer almost.

Right.

And then we also have standard copper foil and then we have HVLP or VLP copper and low-profile coppers, so so yeah so it adds. And then of course, all the different copper weights - really everything from 5 micron through four or five/six ounces, so it's all over the place. But yeah actually going on the hybrid thing too we are seeing a lot of mixing the resin systems. In other words you would never mix B-stages in the same layer in other words you wouldn't have one kind of resin melt but you can mix cores so you could have one type of resin system as long as it's fully cured adjacent to another kind of resin system and we see that with RF, because very often what you do is, you have your low loss layer on the outside and then you would have your - whether it's high-speed digital or just DC - you would have that in the other layers and that system would be mixed and there are challenges there too even if you're not mixing the B-stages. Some materials require higher lamination temperatures and if you're not using a standard material that can withstand that, you would have issues or you would have to use a low loss material that has normal laminating  temperatures. And typically when we say normal laminating temperatures, we're talking in the 375 degrees Fahrenheit range. Whereas some of the more exotic PCB materials - the filled PTFE systems LCP FEP - they require much higher laminating temperatures more like 550 to 600 Fahrenheit.

For a while I was at an RF - it really never took took flight - but I'm sure you remember not too many years ago, we got on the fusion bonding bandwagon. We thought that was going to solve all our problems but I remember being at a shop where I think we were running our lamp press at like 700 - 800 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 hours with some crazy profile. That's not very sustainable but it was homogenous DK and it had some great performance benefits but it really never took flight. So my gosh let's talk about hybrid a little bit more because I left the industry for a while to raise kids, and when I came back it was like Rumpelstiltskin waking up to all this high speed stuff and I was like wow! And what I did see was an awful lot of hybrids. So can you talk a little bit about what you think - certainly RF and microwave is an obvious one - but talk about what is driving the demand of high-speed digital RF and hybrid technology overall?

Well it's - in very broad terms - it's about electronics, doing all kinds of different things from a design standpoint though it's about mixing, mixing proper material properties in composites that's what you do. You choose one material over another because of its properties and you separate those layers out to get what you need out of a design. So it's driven by cost, some of its also driven by how you would fabricate. In other words, if you had a material that was hard to laminate you could use that as a double-sided low loss layer and then bond the other layers. Conventionally that would run the DC or other signals you would have in the design. We do have some new materials, so one thing I didn't mention earlier is that we distribute for both Isola and DuPont.

Okay.

Isola does have a suite of laminates that are low loss, some of them even with DKs close to the Teflon range, and they laminate at normal temperatures. So making a composite build is a lot simpler. You don't have to do two separate laminations, unless you had buried micro vias. But you wouldn't do it because of the materials. You would do it because it's for the design but you can do it in one lamination cycle so that's one thing we're trying to bring to market and that's something that's been a growth item for us. Some of these new materials like Tera MT40 for example, the Astra MT77. Astra has the lower dielectric constant - a dielectric constant of just under three - that's for certain, for RF designs, whereas the I-Tera is for the mid-DK, what we call the 3.4 - 3.5 DK range but they're both low loss and they’re both laminated. Again at normal temperatures, so that seems to be getting some good traction.

How do they stand up cost-wise against some of the traditional high speed laminate providers?

Well as a resin system PTFE is expensive and then if you're reinforcing it with ceramic or fiberglass, that adds cost as well, so we actually stack up - no pun intended - pretty well with the PTFE-based product. It's not as well-known, many of the designers are familiar with the PTFE based laminates for RF applications so, they go with what they know very often, until they have a need and then they start looking at alternatives. And there's so many different, projects coming on with our customers, we're quite busy trying to keep that education process going.

So I'm putting myself in a designer's shoes today and I was talking to Lee Ritchie yesterday and he was talking about how the speed curve has gone up near vertical in the last five years and I think you and I would both agree that we've seen that trend. I'm putting myself in a designer's shoes, so how do I get educated fast enough to keep up with all these moving pieces? Because like I said, when I left the industry and came back it was completely like a waterfall as far as onboarding all the different laminate manufacturers and then learning about matching bond, prepregs and bonding systems and cover weights. And then, let's just throw in, that we might have this on an aluminum carrier or whatever. How can we do a good job other than hosting a podcast so I get people educated?

I think the IPC design councils are helpful for that. Some of our folks have presented, I presented, our other people presented. Certainly, if you're an OEM or a designer and you get boards from a board shop, reach out to the board shop and say, what are my options? The board shops have to live and breathe this stuff and certainly, folks like myself and folks at DuPont and Isola will also support the board shop in that effort. In fact that's becoming a bigger part of what I do. I travel with my customer to their customers and talk about their options and the pros and cons because you would think, in theory you would want the highest performance at the lowest cost but, it's not just single performance. It could be mechanical performance, it could be thermal performance, there are a lot of different attributes that you would need in the design and you don't know unless you talk, unless the designers were talking to the folks that have the materials background. You can't put all that together and I've seen projects where people have used the same old stuff and then they get unexpected results and so that's what we're trying to do. It's better for everybody if we hit it right the first time. So, that's what we do, we go in and we say, these are the options, this is when you use fired glass, this is when you use standard, this is when you go for the lowest loss possible, this is where you go for a better economy. We have a material called high speed that's very economical and it's pretty low loss, it's a 006 loss tangent and it's compact. It's not as cheap as FR4, but it's close to a lot of the other materials out there. So it's a nice scale of economy. Now it's not for every design but those who have been using FR4 for a long time and want to upgrade to a total low loss system, it might be a good next step. And that product has actually doing pretty well for us. The 4UIS has been growing pretty well and then the high-end products are growing pretty well. The products in between not so much, but, I think it's just a matter of what people need and the design.

All right, that makes sense. Does Insulectro and/or DuPont and Isola put out resources online that designers can get a hold of?

Yeah both companies, obviously all three of us actually, have websites with links to connect slash sheets, tech data sheets, and other things but I don't know if a website will ever be a good substitute for actually having a conversation with someone who's knowledgeable. Certainly that's a good place to start. The other thing too is sometimes a design will have some IPC slash sheet numbers on them, the specification sheets for different materials, and sometimes you're locked into that. So we've seen that with our customers, sometimes they're locked into a particular material set and it may not be the best. And again that goes back to having a conversation with the people involved. And sometimes they’re willing to change and sometimes not. Sometimes they have no choice. Certainly all old legacy military designs are examples where people are really stuck on very old old systems. And there's definitely a better mousetrap in those cases. But like I said, there's no substitute for having the conversation.

So Insulectro for instance, we were just at IPC Apex and I'm sure Chris, you were doing presentations there. I assume that going to trade shows also, there would be opportunities to have face-to-face conversations?

Yeah certainly, seek out - if you're buying boards - seek out your PCB shop. The folks at those trade shows, or sit in on some of the technical sessions, and then certainly, if Insulectro, Solar DuPont are there, great place to go get some information on materials.

Great.

Well I know I sound like I repeat myself often about this, but I've often said, and I used to blog on Microwave Journal to tell people, please go talk to your workshop, please go to your workshop because I think it kind of all ends and starts there and and because, like you said they have to deal with so many laminate and resin systems and all these things every day. A lot of times they could be helpful, it's just sometimes I think designers are so strapped for time. Sometimes they're doing the jobs of two people and so I'm always trying to help the designer get resources as best they can.

Yeah and it's something we appreciate, and what we see happening too, is they'll pick up a data sheet and they look at differences there - sometimes there are very minor differences between resin contents and electrical performance. You don't know the dielectric constant of a loss and they'll pick the lowest on the datasheet, but that might not be the best for the fabrication and having the right material to make the board come out right, yield well, do well after assembly, do well in the field. You're not really giving up anything even if the loss is very minor, higher in loss, but yet the board performs well it's definitely a good trade. So that's part of the problem, sometimes some of the designers who are pressed for time will pick a particular material set. Yeah it might have the lowest numbers, but it may not be the best fabrication. If you can't build it, or if the board shop doesn't yield well, it doesn't do anybody any good.

So I was just talking also to Kelly Dack, Chris.

You would probably recognize his face. Anyways we were just talking about this and it's like what looks good on paper is... First thing, it isn’t always this linear process when it comes to design and fabricating. So, back to the hybrid designs. What would you say for someone that's designing hybrids, some of the the challenges are of those boards and some of the benefits? Obviously performance is one of the benefits.

Yes performance and cost, because very often the very low loss materials, come at a premium, because of the resin systems - the cost of the resin systems - and the cost to make the materials and so on and so forth. So that is another benefit - it can be a challenge for the board shop and it really depends on the materials. The challenges are more often in fabrication than they are in the actual design part of it. Yeah, like I said before, it just varies so much, I mean one of the requirements usually for an RF design is to have a certain level of precision when it comes to forming the circuitry. When we say forming, it could be a plating and etching, it could be just print and etch, depending on the the technology used. And then you would laminate that into a standard FR4 system, and sometimes those materials aren't really compatible. So yeah, that goes back to being able to have materials that have the right CT properties, the right adhesion the right lamination properties.

But you look at some of these high speed materials and sometimes they can be more fragile. I mean they might for instance - and correct me if I'm wrong here - this is second-hand knowledge here, but they might survive the fab process, and lamination cycles, or even multiple lamination cycles, because then you introduce buried and blind vias. And then there's multiple thermal excursions and then you take it to assembly and you've got through-hole and surface mount part and they have to go through another two thermal excursions. And so that it all adds up and it it's not obvious at the outset right?

Yeah those are all good points, all things that have to be considered in the fabrication and use of the part and there's a lot there too. One of the things I'm seeing, is copper is a really good moisture barrier. So one of the things that we try and preach to our customers and their customers or the assemblers if it's a CM, is you have to bake the parts prior to assembly and you can't underestimate that. There was a really good paper put out around 2011 - 2012 at IPC that showed just how long it takes for the moisture to get around because if you have a strip line construction, or if you have a reference plane and RF design, that moisture has got to go around that copper plane. It can't go through it and I've seen people underestimate the baking and end up with with scrap. It's kind of a shame because if moisture is the only reason why you're doing the laminating and assembly it really is avoidable yeah sometimes it's a pain did it bake a board for two, four, six, sometimes 24 hours but, that's what it takes to yield well but it's it's still worth it and that’s something that comes up a lot.

Well I know that I worked for a smaller art shop and we had the case where we were doing kind of pre-production quantities and the board was cooking along, no problem, and then one day it wasn't working. Guess what, it had rained for a week and we didn't have them in an airtight storage or whatever, so we had to completely look the way we were storing and make sure we were baking this, because in California, it doesn't rain that much and it wasn't  first and foremost on our brains and when it came down to that, it was like what? Yeah didn't see that one coming at all.

I've seen that happen yeah, I've seen that it where customers or assemblers, they don't bake for years and think everything is great and they want to know what's changed and it's well material’s the same...

Had a heavy winter...

Yeah and it turns out it was something like that, it's always best practice to bake and it varies so much by design - ground planes are a problem. In fact there was a great study done recently with HD Paragon, I don't know if you if your listeners are familiar?

Maybe not, but we’ll put that link below in the show notes. Because they're an amazing asset to our industry.

So they did a great study on crosshatch ground planes on flex so there's some performance trade-offs to the crosshatch ground planes, but they do create a window. Moisture will get in more easily but it can get out more easily and when - as opposed to a solid plane - there is a frequency cut off where that is usable and one of the things the study looked at was diamond-shaped versus round openings in the ground plane. But I always like to put, or recommend putting, openings in the ground plane when you can afford it - just as a moisture egress.

Hmm, that’s new to me, so neat but it completely makes sense right? if you're locking in moisture inside of the laminate because you're capping it off, you're trapping it right?

Right, and a lot of the PCB processes are water based or aqueous based chemistries, even up to the surface finish. You know, Enog one of the most popular surface finishes, it sits in a hot bath for 30 minutes, actually two hot baths. The gold bath in the NIP and the nickel plating bath or high temperature what, 180 Fahrenheit - 190 Fahrenheit for 20 or 30 minutes in each bath. That's a big opportunity for the moisture uptake on the part, and if you can imagine, that's near when the part is finished. It usually gets routed and cleaned and electrical tests and a few other things. But then it goes out to the company that does the assembly some assemblers require the board shop to bake, which is okay if you put it in a moisture proof bag, but even that's not a guarantee because the workshop loses control over when it was opened and how long it stays in the atmosphere before it gets assembled and so on and so forth...

-or just before it gets bagged.

Yeah right.

And it may already be present and you're just vacuum sealing a moisture-laden board. It’s so many moving pieces, I always say, I wish my dear friends that were printed circuit board designers or engineers that are designing boards now understood the complexity of board manufacturing because you and I've been talking this whole time about just the laminates this is not drilling, laminating buried and blind vias, filling vias. There's so many moving pieces and I think sometimes copper bond treatments? Yeah all of that and I think in this day and age, a bare board is a line item on your bomb. It's not like pulling a component off the shelf and so I think the closer board fabricators and engineers can get together the better for both actually. Because sometimes I think the board fabricators also get exasperated with designers, but the technology is being driven in a certain way. And they're gonna be the first ones to see it and can actually help enable the board manufacturers in many cases so it kind of goes both ways

An experienced designer will know what the board shop needs and that's again - that comes from communication - things like minimum clearances, designed for manufacturability, those types of things, and in fact all the board fabricators I know are very good about working with their customers to try. And again it's in everyone's best interest to yield well and have a part that survives.

Absolutely, and back to Kelly Dack, we had a long conversation - actually two people here at Altium, all of our AEs and FEs here - are required to take the CID course and so two guys here recently took it and for the first time I got to look through the workbook. Holy cow this thing is like this thick and a huge percentage of that is the DFM things. It's understanding, so to hopefully save time and money and headache on the end of the designer.

Well Chris, I know we've only got started but we need to do this again clearly, because the other thing I want to talk with you about is flex, because flex is on the rise and I know you'll have a lot of insight there and I would love to ask you more about that. But before we go I always do this thing at the end of the podcast called ‘designers after hours’ because most people in our industry usually have some kind of interesting hobby. or a lot of us, even though we kind of act left brained, we have a pretty active right brain too actually, so sometimes we're creative or do something interesting. So do you have anything that you enjoy doing after hours, sort of unique?

Yeah so actually I've been I've been diving, gosh since the late 70s…

Diving? Oh scuba diving I thought you said dieting, okay!

Yeah so actually I started back east when I was living in New Jersey I actually did some shore diving and some wreck diving and that was a lot of fun. Now in California, when I was living in Southern California, it was Catalina Island and the Channel Islands and so on and so forth. But here in northern Cali the best place to go is Monterey. I've done some abalone diving up in Mendocino, but that's free diving that's not scuba. But, in fact, I've taken my sister my niece there. There's divers also and we've gone down to Monterey and I've done that so that's one of things I like to do. It's something I don't get to do as often as I like of course.

I know we're all so busy. Well speaking of free diving for abalone my mom and dad grew up here in San Diego - I grew up in in Orange County just about two hours north of here - but my mom, when she was a teenager used to free dive for abalone in La Jolla Cove. So about a year ago I moved down here and I'm itching to go get certified and do diving here because there's some really neat dive spots here. But we went to the area where my mom used to free dive and my daughter came up from snorkeling one day and pulled up two abalone shells, which is so rare.

Yeah

Well down here it's so picked over it's like there's divers out every weekend so it's really rare to find live abalone anymore. But anyway, she brought up a couple of shells.

Interesting fact about La Jolla, you can find electric rays down there so Rays are capable of delivering an electric shock.

Really?

Yeah well check it out they're pretty cool - but don't touch them - yeah, they're pretty cool.

Yes my interest in electronics and nature stops. Well thank you Chris, so much, this has been fascinating and I want to ask you 50 more questions but if you will say yes we'll do this again in a month or so and we'll talk about flex.

Sounds great.

Okay thanks so much Chris.

Again this has been Judy Warner and Chris Hunrath with the OnTrack podcast. Thanks for joining today, we look forward to you tuning in again and until then, remember to always stay OnTrack.

Bert Simonovich is founder of Lamsim Enterprises and an expert in innovative signal integrity and backplane solutions. He holds two patents and author of several publications. Anyone involved with the design and fabrication of high-speed circuit cards and backplanes or people who needs to estimate PCB transmission lines losses will find value in the paper Bert shared at DesignCon 2018, “A Causal Conductor Roughness Model and Its Effect on Transmission Line Characteristics”.  

Listen in to Join Judy Warner and Bert discuss copper roughness and the paper he presented at DesignCon 2018.

Copper roughness is located between the laminate and the copper

• From a manufacturing perspective, the rougher the copper the better
• But for high speed, the rougher the copper the higher the loss
• If you don’t model it correctly you cannot simulate it accurately
• The Huray model dilemma - where do you get the parameters to use for the model?
• Last year’s paper was about correcting the dielectric constant due to roughness
• New model is dubbed the Cannonball-Huray model
• The effort is collaborative, building on each others’ research i.e. Rogers, Polar
• As speed goes up, material properties are more important i.e. Fiber weave effect
• Accurate modeling is very important especially with new standards and tighter margins

 

Links and Resources:

Bert’s Whitepapers

Bert’s Articles on Signal Integrity Journal

Bert Simonovich’s Linkedin

Bert’s Twitter

Lamsim Enterprises, Inc.

 

Hi everyone this is Judy with the OnTrack podcast welcome back. If you are new to our podcast make sure to subscribe on your favorite RSS feed you can follow me on LinkedIn please.

Please. I love having friends on LinkedIn or at Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and as far as Altium goes you can follow us on LinkedIn Twitter or Facebook.

So today I am at Design Con 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and I'm delighted to have my dear friend Bert Simonovich who hails from Canada and so we're gonna chat with Bert today about the paper he submitted and all the things he's involved in. I also want to share with you about our fun history in Hobart and how we got to know each other. So Bert, welcome to our podcast and we only get to see each other maybe once or twice a year but I'm always so happy to see you.

Likewise, likewise Judy.

I'm glad you showed up this year and I'm glad I could get you. Last year I couldn't get you because you were so busy with your papers and everything; you were desperate, you were booked to the gunnels last year so I'm glad we got to run into each other.

So, to give you a little bit of background about Bert... well let me start from when Bert and I met. So what was it 2006 six or 2010?

Yeah 2010, something like that.

Yeah, so Bert was sort of in a transition period in his career and we met on LinkedIn and then we actually met at the show at Design Con and we connected through social media and we're old enough you know, and respectable enough in our careers that we didn't feel like that was creepy or anything. So we connected and we met upstairs; the top of the escalators here at Design Con, and we got acquainted and just networked and boy oh boy we didn't know the number of ways that our past would continue to cross over the years so, we hit it off immediately and Burt knew an awful lot about backplane and tell me again, you worked for a huge company up in Canada?

Okay so yeah we live in Ottawa area and I started my career at Bell Northern Research which was the research and development arm of Northern Telecom or eventually North Dell in Bell Canada.

There you go,

so it's essentially the same as like the AT&T; down here - researching, development and then that later got to fold it into the Nortel umbrella and I was there my entire career. It was 32 years until 2009 when they filed for bankruptcy and then my career ended…

Abruptly.

And that was kind of a shock. Then I was fortunate that I was able to you know - we weren't in bad shape financially - so it didn't hit us like it hit others. So I've considered myself fortunate, but what I missed was the day-to-day and and not knowing what the future was because at that time there was the downturn economy so it's hard for everybody and certainly harder for older ones and we were able to get out and fortunately got our pensions early and that kind of kept us going.

Yeah so that's right about the time I met you, not long after that right, and so you're like: mmm what am I gonna do now? I have all this knowledge and expertise how am I gonna apply it and so on your own dime you flew down here. We met and I was hoping that we were just networking to see how we could help one another professionally and whatnot, since that time - boy oh boy.

IMS came up from the UK to Montreal and we met again there.

That's right we met again there. We met at IMS so then, all of a sudden, our lives started weaving because I was in the RF and microwave space from the bare board side, and then I was doing the guest blogging for Microwave Journal and then you got to know all the folks - or you knew those folks in that space and then you got to know the Microwave Journal folks who have since launched the Signal Integrity Journal and now you're on that editorial review or review board for that magazine?

That's right.

And now, I think you just told me, this is your first year now that you're in the Technical Review Committee?

Technical Program Committee Yeah.

Right for Design Con so you actually reviewed the papers then that were being subpoenaed by some papers?

Yes.

Did they divvy them up?

Yes they basically divvy it up so there's quite a few reviewers for it to get the diversity and not just one person, several people review the same paper as well.

Right good. So, not only is he reviewing papers he's also submitting papers. So I want to say  congratulations that you are a finalist for best paper.

Oh thanks Judy.

Well I don't know that’s third time in a row now?

Actually five.

Five! You've been nominated that many times or you've submitted, but you've been nominated that many times. I see, so you are like a rockstar! So, tell us about the paper that you submitted this year.

Okay. This paper is actually a follow-up from last year's paper that I presented and last year after I presented it, there was a great discussion afterwards. It was the end of the day and people - there were no more papers after - and people that were interested stayed and we had a good little wrap of things and were discussing some of my results. And although I was close there was some doubt as to actually what it was, why there was still differences and my co-author Vladimir he had an idea that it's possibly due to causality of the metal.

Okay.

And Vladimir works for a mentor and so he had this idea and I had data and my technique and we decided to collaborate and see how well it would work. So he incorporated his algorithms into the tool and we checked it out and that brought the data exactly right on.

Wow! So this paper is kind of a wrap or closing the loop at the end of last year's paper basically?

That's correct, it's kind of a follow-up in a way and it kind of answers the question that we were suspecting. - the people who were discussing as a group were suspecting - so that was very satisfying when I had that. So we said, well we've got to publish this now so we'll do that.

So it was a copper roughness issue?

Well it's part of modeling called copper roughness, to model copper roughness properly and get the right model afterwards so you can do the simulations.

Isn’t that hard? I mean it seems like copper roughness, which is the roughness - for anyone that's not clear on this of our listeners - copper roughness is between the laminate and the copper. Not on the topside of them it's on the bottom side where it's being bonded to the laminate but it's not always the same?

No the thing is with roughness from a PCB manufacturing perspective, the rougher the better.

Right because there's adhesion.

Right peel strength. Nowadays, for high speed past 10 gigabit, now everything starts to matter and now people are talking 25 gigabit - 56 gigabit all the stuff lost, now becomes a factor. So it turns out the rougher the copper the higher the loss, so how do you model that? If you don't model that correctly you can't simulate it in advance.

Exactly.

So the bottling techniques in accuracy - so there's been different models out there one that's been very popular is the Hury model that was presented back in 2010 because I remember going to that presentation. Basically it was dubbed the ‘snowball model’ because when you look at the roughness profile under an electron scanning microscope, it looks like a stack of snowballs type of thing.

Okay.

Uh-huh and that's where it got coined the snowball model but it's the Hury model and it's very accurately  shown that you get very good results measured to simulation. The problem was where do you get the parameters to feed that model? Back then to get it, if you tuned the parameters you could get an excellent fit to the loss but that doesn't help for tools so how do I get that? Unless you're building a board or measuring the board to get the parameters so you can use those again if you're going to build that same geometry in a new design. So that's very time-consuming - pretty accurate - but not practical for smaller companies. If you need a good answer now, rather than a good answer later as Eric Bogatin always says, that never helps you. So, one of my early contract positions, because I started going in consultancy after Nortel. One of my clients they wanted to do some analysis on dielectrics but they also wanted to include their roughness and I knew nothing about roughness at that time. So I started to do my own research into this so that I could try and do the work, and found that it was all over the place in a way.

Anyway, I completed the analysis not even based on what I knew at the time and it was okay, but that seed sort of stuck. So I started in it and once you get an interest in something then try to go further and further. So it's been a pet project of mine so I decided to think about the Hury model and say: well, is there a way to get these parameters based on datasheet value only? If I know the roughness from a datasheet the, height of the roughness, can I get the radius though? So I thought about it and you know, I thought about: okay, this is the stack of spheres. If I stack them up can I determine the radius of the sphere from that stack? So you know it's basic geometry of things and eventually you can get that number if you know this height. So I thought - just out of curiosity - I'm gonna try it and when I did, I got reasonably good results, almost right off the bat. I'm not perfect, but I can tweak things a little bit more and I'm saying okay… That's how it kind of began so it's been over a few years, off and on. I did a paper earlier in 2015, when I first presented some of it, and that was quite successful and every year it's been kind of incremental and testing it against other data and then eventually other software came out like simBR and I started having success with the model there and that was great and so it kind of went. So lately, after that, then I started thinking about I never get the the actual delay property. So in order to model things, you need proper loss and then also the the delay property or the phase. So then I thought well, perhaps, how does the roughness come into it? Because I noticed the rough with the copper I get different phases for the same material. Anyway so I worked out some some things and that's what last year's paper was about, to correct the the dielectric constant due to roughness...

It was really last year's paper.

Uh-huh and so that that worked out very well and when I correct that, I get very good results with it so that's it in a nutshell how I got from there to here.

Wow. So I know you've worked also with Polar instruments. Tell us about how that came about?

Yes so last year Polar had introduced the Hurray model into their tool and I hadn't really met Martin but in his newsletters I always got it and he announced that they were going to come out with the remodel and a Polar tool so I emailed Martin and said; look let me check it out to see how well it works. So they gave me a trial thing just to check it out and I tested it out against my data and there was just a couple of hiccups, but we sorted them out and now the tool - it's a great tool - we can get the parameters now basically from data sheet to fill in. So we've dubbed the model really like a ‘cannonball’ Hury model because it's a combination of both.

Well Martin spoke, I think I shared this with you earlier that in October Martin Godean from Polar presented a talk at Altium Life in Munich and I was chairing the room he was in and he pulls up this stack of cannonballs - you and I hadn't talked about this - then he starts citing all this work by Bert Simonovich. I nearly fell out of chair, like my friend Bert? So I really love that Bert, you've like been such a collaborative force in this industry about these models and you know that you reached out to talk to Polar and really made it better. Not so much in a self-serving way but it's good for the industry really, it's good for designers right?

I think so.

And so I really appreciate that generosity of spirit that you have and it's what I liked about you when I first met you and here we are all these years later who knew.

That's right.

So, what's next Bert?  Tell us first of all, where can our listeners find your papers because I'm sure they'll want to get their hands on those?

Yes so I published papers that I have on my website at my company is http://lamsimenterprises.com.

Okay.

Well I'm sensing we'll try to put that in text somewhere I relate to this podcast so folks can find that and then they can find your consulting services there as well but then find all your papers there. Did Design Con aggregate the papers that come out of the show?

Oh yeah they have the proceedings.

But only the attendees get their proceedings right? So they can come to your website is the  bottom line, right?

Right, so anyways so for my papers, I have my papers that I published on my website and it's not just Design Con I’ve also done EDI Con papers and that's part of the signal integrity journal. There's an offshoot of that - is EDI Con - and I attended that the last two years, they were the first two. So there's Boston that was great time. Actually you went to the first one?

Yeah I went to the first one I can't believe how our lives have just crossed so many times. We just met each other here and went hi.

And you met and you met my wife.

Yeah I met  your wife on that trip.

Bert and I got to go to Fenway Park and have a private party at night and overlooking the fields and they brought out... what are those? I'm such a sports nut.

The trophies from the World Series.

- thank you the World Series trophies. They brought those out so we could you know take photo ops with and we had great food and we got to take over Fenway for a few hours and I met Bert's wife who's just a doll and we had a great time. So who knew when we met how our paths would cross?

But I think Design Con in general is about is networking, meeting new people, learning new things spreading the seed of papers. Like I was mentioning even last year's paper - Rogers took that and then confirmed the data or the theory part of it and then they presented results this year.

It’s such a great collaborative effort and I don't know I find it very refreshing because you know, like well I have a secret and if you give me a lot of money it might tell it to you. This is much more open handed and collaborative. I liked what you said earlier today - which was somebody will present something and then an offshoot will take off and then it'll take off and then someone will build on that and bring it back as something else. It's really the industry together - collaborating.

That's also for mine like 2010 with the snowball model, who knew? That room was packed to the rafters and out - that presentation from Paul Hury and Eric Bogaton’s and he presented that year and I was just dumbfounded and I'm going, well I don't understand it but that's cool, and that who knew that that would be the seed for my work, my research work.

And and then went into Polar and Rogers and it's just like an idea that sprung legs.

And that's just my example. One example of many you just look around - like Eric likes to say - come drink from the fire hose, that's the Design Con there’s just so much stuff and it's there and it's just a great place for that kind of thing.

It is a great show. So, a couple closing items. Number one what would you say for circuit board designers, are some of the kind of greatest challenges they're facing today? Looking forward into emerging technology is there any specific - one or two things maybe - that are sort of plaguing them at this point? Or things maybe they need to onboard and that they are not taking right now?

Just in general as the speeds are going up the actual material properties are really becoming a factor. A big thing is fiber - we've talked a lot about that - fiber weave effect and the industry is looking how to mitigate that effect. A lot of nice papers over the last few years, talking about that and again there's a lot of things on the roughness, getting good modeling because it's important now. And now with everything like the new Pam-4 standards, 56 gigabit. The margins are tighter, so fabricating boards is more demanding.

Yeah it ain't what it used to be I can tell you. I started in the board fabrication industry in 1984. Oh my gosh that seems like such easy stuff compared to today. I was just speaking with John Belushi from ASC and I said it used to be you just got your board, your fab drawing you had your sort of mechanical, here's the size of the footprint, this is the size of the trace plus or minus this, and off to the races you go. Now it's like a board fabricator has to think about everything they're doing and how that is going to impact. You can go to a board shop, make a board and be well within IPC standards and its’ still not performing to the designers intent.

I think it's not just the board shop, I think sort of the industry as well, you have to specify what you want properly in your fabrication notes.

What fabrication notes. What I'm saying is documentation, I think is an issue.

Yes and and the thing I'm seeing is if you want consistent results you have to nail down your design. Basically nail it down and not let the fabricator substitute material for different weaves. For instance if you have a stack up that you first designed it's got to be included verbatim on the fabrication notes. So you must use this material, this weave.You can’t substitute, and you can't play around with all the line widths and space to do things different. By specifying things on the notes that restricts what they can do you should end up getting what you want otherwise you may not.

And you had told me earlier in your consultancy business that you will talk about modeling certainly, but then you also give them the added benefits of giving them some guidelines of how to spec in these.

Yeah so typically a lot of my business is design reviewing boards before fabrication. After they do the design like Altium Board Designer would lay it out, so now there's a design review at the end so some of the clients they'd like to get some review over that visual review and I do that sort of thing for them. But as part of that, I review the stack up even from the board shop because the stack up people are human and could make an error. Typo or a lot of times they're just templates and they don't cut and paste properly or something, and it may not be correct. I haven't found anything that wasn't correct but I do that anyways, just check it, double check that the impedance is correct in things. But on top of that I also say that I'm going to review their fabrication notes to ensure there's consistency there and usually I find that a lot of these are smaller companies or startups. They're not aware of what's needed or they have one set of fab notes and they have the same design all over. They just use it over and over but that could add confusion in the shop.

Yeah absolutely.

At the end of the day part of the design review it's also part of a bit of educating as well to some clients so they realize some of the importance and they appreciate that as well.

Yeah and it is so sorely needed and people don't, like you said especially smaller companies, they don't always have the resources to go out and spend endless hours in a board shop getting educated or whatever the issue is. Or educated about signal integrity or whatever it is, so I think what you're offering in your business and in that niche is really valuable so that's great.

Well my friend I'm gonna let you get back out on the show floor. I'm sure you have a lot to do today I'm sure you're a busy guy so yeah I so appreciate you spending a little time with me and I'm so glad we got to connect I know you're getting so busy - such a big shot these days - it's been a delight thank you.

Actually, the reason I knew you were here, I saw something on LinkedIn and saw you were responding to somebody and I go: wait a minute is Judy here? So then I LinkedIn messaged you last night and I said, are you here? and yeah so let’s connect today.

See there's a lesson to everybody, LinkedIn really is useful. Gosh you and I've met a lot of friends through LinkedIn. I'm so glad to see my friends. I don't get to see you enough so I'm glad to see you whenever I get to see you, I'm not gonna complain. So best to you, congratulations on your nomination again.

Thank you Judy and the same to you.

And have a great show  and I look forward to catching up with you next time.

This has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast please remember to subscribe on your favorite RSS feed and we look forward to talking with you next time and always remember to stay OnTrack.

What is design? Have you been inside a board house? Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Kelly Dack, CID+, for a lively conversation about PCB design and becoming educated in the field. From CID and CID+ to visits to your fab house, learn how to learn for PCB design and where some of these resources are available today.

 

Show Highlights:

• Design has to do with a breadth of knowledge. The design tool is only as good as the breadth of knowledge of the designer.
• Eric Bogatin’s PCB bootcamp-style at the University of Colorado provides exposure to the manufacturing
• Dreaming a product and then embedding the process steps within the layout
• You can control so many things in Altium Designer - setup constraints, DRC rules, etc.; designers need to know how to manipulate these constraints so it will yield the best results for the stakeholders in the prTocess.
• To design is to be in touch with all the stakeholders.
• Everything in CAD are nominal values / nominal data
• Without recognizing manufacturing tolerances, we’re doomed.
• Certified Interconnect Designer or CID Certification, from IPC, teaches the start to finish manufacturing process
• Eat, sleep and breath PCB design at AltiumLive 2018 - the largest conference in the world focused exclusively on PCB design
• With Altium Designer 18, “I’m finding it easier to communicate with my mechanical cohorts”.
• Dream feature: Snap back and forth from min to max toggle
• Merging the mechanical and the electrical: Mechatronics
• Design in prototype vs .production - what is sustainable in prototype environment might not work / be scalable in the production environment
• A challenge for everyone: go visit a board shop!
• Fun facts: Kelly has a hobby farm and plays harmonica (and guitar!)

 

Links and Resources:

Eric Bogatin’s University of Colorado PCB design program

Certified Interconnect Designer or CID Certification

IPC

AltiumLive 2018 - save the date!

Kelly Dack on Linkedin

 

Hi everyone this is Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast. Welcome back, we are recording today from Design Con 2018 in Santa Clara California. Today I have another amazing guest, Kelly Dack and before we get started I want to make  sure that you subscribe on your favorite RSS feed and also please follow me on LinkedIn or on Twitter at @AltiumJudy and Altium is also on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. So, please give us a follow and we'll continue to put out as much good content for designers and engineers as we can possibly razzle.

So today I am with Kelly Dack who is a PCB designer. Are you CID or CID + ?

CID +

CID+ so he's a hotshot.  So a designer for many years, currently he is with a Northwestern EMS provider and…

How many years have you been in the industry Kelly?

Well too many dimensions, thanks for having me Judy.

I know, I know...

But I thought you're gonna introduce me; look what the cat dragged in.

Yeah no…

- well no but yeah I've been in the industry since 1978 something like that.

Okay well longer than me so yeah, I don't like to say when I started either, but I think I started in ‘84 I know Wow I know I don't want to say how old I am but it just automatically dates me so Kelly so we're here at Design Con and I know you have a completely broad perspective of this industry because you've been on the journalistic side, you've been on the design side, you know about fabrication. Now you're on the MS side, you just mentioned that the design that's being done at your current place - that you have Altium designer so we like you better already. And so tell us, you and I started to talk… I'm just gonna let you roll because I know you have a wealth of things to share. So start out with… ready? What is design?

Wow design... I've been talking about that with the cohort of mine Andy Shaughnessy all morning because we come to a show like this and we're talking design relative to high-speed and things measured in gigahertz.

Right.

Things like this typically the engineering crowd of the degreed crowd but they have to relate also. The stuff has to be translated into the classic or traditional PC board designer. There's been a lot of talk about the two merging, there's been a lot of talk about where's the next generation of the PCB designer coming from.

Oh yeah.

Now that somebody told me yesterday, you know, these guys are all dying out and I chuckled. But you know it's a fact that we're all at least hopefully retiring happily so that this generation of folks that started in the 70s doing board design and earlier, are moving on and there's been a concern about where the gap is going to be filled and a couple years ago I had a chance to have a brief stint in the Seattle area and I found the answer to that question. I worked for a Prototron for a brief period…

Yeah, oh my goodness…

- and part of my job was to reach out to designers in all of the Seattle area and so my job was to go in, drive downtown shake hands with designers and turn them on to the great things that Prototron does. Well these these people were not old designers - these people were young, hip. People that had just graduated at a university, had picked up the design tools and because they're quick studies and they're smart they learned it in a matter of weeks. At least that's what they make it seem like, yeah they're quick studies and they were laying down tracks right and left and my job was to go help them from the standpoint of how they can make their designs flow through our shop a lot easier.

Right.

So it was a little customer liaison, engineering liaison, so I was very surprised to find out that the designers are out there now.

They're out there. By the way Kelly I've talked a lot about this and if you actually read my newsletters that I sent you... just kidding, just needling you a little bit. I've actually found since I've been at Altium the same exact thing you're finding is that one, this next generation, they basically came out of the womb with a smartphone in their hand right? Playing computer games, so they learn so much faster and in the case of Altium and we’re certainly not the only ones out there who are sponsoring engineering teams and universities and so much now right? Engineers are laying out their own boards. It's not a distinct role and so these kids are bright and they're quick, and now I'm seeing globally... I would have never seen it had I not been where I am now. But I see exactly I would echo your exact thoughts is that I see them everywhere they're on Hyperloop teams, they're on SAE you know. Formula teams, they’re on there and engineering groups, there in space teams and and they're learning to lay out boards in college. And in our case we're gifting the software right, so they have a tool; a professional tool. So when they graduate it's easier for them to get a job - so I see it I and I'm so glad to hear you say it, because I feel like the only one that's kind of like, don't be afraid people, it really is gonna be okay

Well check it out now; the product is called Altium Designer and there's a lot of designer based products out there that infer and rightly so. It’s a very powerful design tool. But back to your question; what is design?

Design has to do with a depth of knowledge that's gained not necessarily by a design tool. A design tool is only as good as the knowledge of the designer, the knowledge base of the designer so what I mention (and what was fascinating) - working at a prototype bare board supplier and now - what you didn't mention - but I work at an EMS provider doing assembly work now and there's a similar stream of challenges and the same problems and issues that we would see at the bare board supplier. That needed coaching or mentorship for the designers are happening and echoing through to the assembly suppliers right. So we're seeing problems like copper pull back from the board edge. Who knows how much that needs to be. In other words if if a designer is going to design, they need to consider all the stakeholders of the process who's going to be building this board. What are the processes that are involved in building this board and there's many there are many.

Many, many along the way.

Many yes, and this is, I think many would agree, that's what's maybe - I've never taken one of those university design courses - but I know they go fast and I know sometimes they're measured in weeks not years,

Exactly. Except I will tell you I don't mean to interrupt your thought pattern here but I was overjoyed and I think you'll be glad to hear this too and maybe you already know this that Eric Bogatin is teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder so you know he he and a colleague have written a curriculum that's PCB design with manufacturing and assembly best practices included.

Right.

Right, holy cow, like to me that's like the motherload because it's in context! Like you said of all the stakeholders so, anyways continue on.

I know Eric's really good at boot camp philosophy right? Hit that ground running but you know, know where the ground is, and be able to… I can't imagine he's not, you know, encouraging the folks that go through his programs - I can't imagine he's not encouraging them to go visit.

Yeah.

Boots on the ground. Support supplier, and they send me the supplier so they can see and meet the people who are doing the work. So back to design what is design. Design has to do with having a product - dreaming a product - and then embedding or creating all the process steps within the layout so to speak. Maybe that sounds too simple but from the standpoint of what can go wrong - things can go wrong as a new board designer starts designing. One of the things that the software tools are - the layout tools are doing so well, is they have a lot of movement is - is this a word? Manipulatable constraints set up.

Right.

Constraints, DRC rules and things and being a relatively new user to Altium I am amazed at how many things you can control and Altium - it is just amazing now, from a new user standpoint, that can be a blessing. But that can be a curse because all of these setups are are off-the-shelf setups. There are default settings right? So what a designer - to be called a designer - needs to be able to have the knowledge of doing, is manipulating those constraints so that it will yield the best outcome for all the stakeholders in the process. What do I mean by stakeholder?

Yeah I was gonna ask you that.

So we can't as a designer, a true designer, we can't design in a vacuum. We can't have our own office in our own world and live in a vacuum and think that this product we're creating, this chunk of clay - I'm bad at metaphors - this chunk of clay is going to be beautiful when we're done with it. Because there's nobody else looking at it. What I'm trying to say is design has to do with reaching out and considering who is going to be putting this thing together. It's not the designer typically right? The designer is not the one plating and etching right, we define things like stack ups. We define trace widths and via sizes and placement things right? But what do we base those things on? This is at the core of design. What are we basing these design attributes on? And without getting out and shaking hands with the stakeholders in the industry right, the bare board fabricator for instance - the engineer that may have designed the schematic, the test folks. The people that are going to be having to test this board. The assembler, the people that are going to have to be putting the stenciling the solder paste onto the board and applying the parts. Who else is down the line? The customer the overall..

What about the box builder, or you know maybe interconnecting devices maybe cable harnesses?

Sure,  I'll keep it short - to design is to be in touch with all the needs of those people the stakeholders of the and their processes okay.

I 100% agree with you I've been beating this drum blogging and writing about it for a long time except I feel like people look at me and go... I remember one old-school guy that I've known for a long time - he goes it's so girly because why would you have a relationship with your fabricators?

Girlie what the heck! Like it was just sort of a silly comment but my point was; you can't design in a silo just like you're saying, you can't design in a vacuum if you don't have that design intent. One has to be communicated, and you have to need to know you can design something amazing and are not only Altium. All the EDA tools out there are extremely powerful and they can let you do really stupid stuff from a manufacturer standpoint. So do you get to be the Wizard of Oz and then it's completely unbuildable on the other end you know.

So if you're not in touch -  now I'm gonna ask you a loaded question - I know you Kelly, you've been in lots of board shops and EMS shops and you're very well connected to that stream of stakeholders. How has your CID/CID+ helped equip you for that? Has it, or does it equip you more theoretically and then you gotta go get your boots on the ground?

Wow not a loaded question at all.

Okay I just don't want to get you in trouble at IPC, if you understand.

Not at all. I’ve got to say I went for my CID back in the 90s while I was during my time down in San Diego and it it had been an evolving program and I paid for it myself. I was at that point where there was no convincing a company - a telecom company - that hey there's the certification that will help give me an in-depth knowledge of all the processes and it wasn't happening. So I went and did it on my own dime and that was CID and that was a long, long time ago. A lot of has happened with the program and with technology since then, but I've got to say that the thing that I loved about it was that it described the stakeholders of the process. It defined the start to finish process of how to manufacture a board, how to document a board for manufacturing and for inspection, and even explaining that that the fabrication drawing is not as much of a how-to document as it is an inspection document. We're not telling - with a fabrication drawing - we're not telling the supplier how to do it. They know how to do it with the data right, they have all the data in the world that tells them how to do it.

But there are parameters that right?

There are parameters but the difference is they are nominal parameters. Everything in CAD data that we know of is mostly nominal data right? You lay a linewidth down at seven mil - 7 thousandths of an inch wide. If you think that that line is going to end up 7 thousandths of an inch wide on the board when you're done, you may be in for a surprise. You know it depends on manufacturing tolerance and without recognizing manufacturing tolerances we’re doomed.

Right so let's just say that. You know this gets a little crazy to me is because a lot of engineers have not had the benefit of being inside a board house and because they are used to using a lot of physics phased holes and stuff. They think it’s 7 mils - make it 7 mils - if you don't understand how the printed circuit board is made, the print edge process, what happens inside of an etching bath, it is not possible. Let me tell you engineers - I don't mean to be condescending at all - it's that I really care about this that it cannot be made perfectly seven mills ever.

Yeah.

I mean it's that's why we have tolerances plus or minus this or that but now with these high speed stuff it's like: oh yeah can you give us a 1 mil trace,plus or minus zero and I'm like NO. No no no no...

Yeah well, very very important to understand that and like I said - back to the CID program from IPC. I had gone on, years later I went back and did the advanced. The advanced portion of that course, the CID+ and I gotta say that then I didn't go job jumping very often, but when I did, in this particular case, I was able to list my CID and they seemed to scratch their head a little bit at the interview process but I was able to define or describe just what I've described to you about about some in-depth knowledge of the processes and the people involved. That's when I got their attention so this is what I'm saying: that the CID program helps that in a lot of ways and CID+ all the more, goes into more advanced processes and ideas about circuit boards.

Fast forward to a few years ago, I was invited and Gary Ferrari was  invited - to help instruct on the program. So I get my certification to teach - I did that - and let me tell you that is wonderful. To take a class of 10 or 20 people through the materials that have been evolving, but are now pretty much set in stone, is a real solid curricula for what was a three day class. Three days of intensive review of materials that the students had been studying for months. Now it's a four-day - we've expanded. I was going, there's so much information in there, it's expanded to a four day class and the pressure that you see on some of these students faces as we're getting toward test time - because it's an exam. It's an audited exam, very official. There's a lot of pressure and let me tell you that the pass rate is very, very high now because of the the level of training and the level of study materials. I mean you need to study this material it's not easy. We're condensing a lot of material into a four day class. The expressions on some of these designers - they are designers - but now they have more of an in-depth knowledge of design, what design is. You know it's stakeholders and its processes, and it's materials and things that now we're giving them is a lot more in depth. When they pass that test I have had people jump and hop around and clench their fists and say, yes! They're so happy to have done this and it's really gaining traction, as far as a certification. We talked about University classes and you know maybe those are measured in weeks.

Yeah well, and CID, like you are saying really has to do with the stakeholders you mentioned.

Right.

We're in the university, as you said,  I've heard some professors say, yeah I teach the printed circuit board design but don't be impressed it's three 50-minute classes. One on schematic, one on routing and one whatever...

Yes and let me tell you I was in 3rd grade classes and 4th grade classes where at least we’d jump on a bus and go visit the fire strips right. We talk about the fire station but at least we hold hands and I'll walk up to it or you jump on a bus and go see it. I'd like to challenge all of those University professors right now to to get their students on a bus and go visit a board shop or an EMS supplier I mean brother.

No I feel the same because I think there really is a disconnect there and sometimes, honestly on the board side, there's a disconnect in our understanding of what the designers are and sometimes we’re like - errr we treat them like... Instead of partnering with them and going, what are you trying to accomplish and how can we get together and move you in that direction? So it can go both ways, it's not just one way.

Absolutely I didn't get a chance to attend the Altium event.

Yeah Altium Live, well don’t miss it this year.

Well I have heard so many great things, I mean,  powerful, powerful things from people that attended and the people that were there-

Thank you.

-The notables that were there speaking.

Oh yeah, we had the big guns there yeah.

Yeah but but speaking along those lines I think again you and I are just lockstep on this issue and when I began at Altium they said, ok we're gonna give you a team to pull this event off Judy, but you're gonna run the strategy and you're gonna get the speakers and I'm like, ok. And so I'm like designers need to hear from other designers right? So it's not just theoretical but they also need to hear from fabricators, assemblers. They need to  hear from the whole gamut. So we did a call for papers but we also had people talking about what you need to know when you're designing Flex circuits, because you might all of a sudden have to be doing flex or rigid flex and you didn't have to do them before. Or multi board systems, so you know we worked to kind of sprinkle that in throughout. And then also have sponsors who were there that they could interact with and, boy I knew it would be a good experience but I didn't know how good. Kelly, I can't wait you have to come this year.

Yes, yes sounds very holistic PCB design - holistic - but yeah amazing.

Yeah holistic, sounds very Zen.

And what we tried really hard not to do was just to beat the Altium drum like sell/buy our stuff. Here's our new... of course we're proud of our tools and our new releases. So out of two days we took two 45 minute slots for ourselves and the rest was about them. Resources, plugging them in and I remember Laurence, my colleague, saying oh my gosh these people - it's like they're really inches away you know - as far as functionality goes - but they never talked to each other and I said, exactly right, and so to put them all together and the energy was just absolutely electric. So yeah come, come again and yeah yeah we would love to have you. So that's been truly a highlight of my career honestly, to see that all those light bulbs go out probably how you feel after you teach a CID class you know.

The afterglow.

Yeah the afterglow. Yes we were all singing kumbaya and so - oh good I heard great things - thank you, thank you. It was really it was a blast and it was a giant team effort you know I'm not tooting my own horn at all, I just got to go get the speakers and oh my gosh our team worked really hard to do all the logistics stuff and they did an amazing job.

So I'm dying to interview you and I'm trying not to. I know I'm being interviewed I'm just dying to ask again. Being a new Altium user I know version 18’s out and I don't want to ask you about it because that would be me interviewing you. But as a new user I have to say that I'll confess you know, a lot of this 3D capability that I haven't been exposed to in the past and now, becoming new to it I've got to say it's it's a lot easier than I thought it would be and like I say, Altium is my first tool to have introduced me to that. So that's where the industry is going and I found that it's pretty easy now to communicate with my mechanical cohorts you know.

Yup,  because that’s our goal.

We're back to design - the design flavor of our discussion. It's not only electrical constraints that we're talking about but there are mechanical constraints and we talked about everything being in CAD being in nominal values in CAD so there's a natural dialogue that designers, in order to design, have to have with each other with regards to these nominal settings and these nominal layout features and geometries. So 3D CAD - 3D capability step files and things, have made things a lot easier to visualize and you can check alignments and things. But again I want to look at - I'm still learning how to use the tool in consideration with tolerancing. I can see a very nominal conditions like a mounting boss and nylon mounting bosses centered within a hole on the board. It looks really nice but I know that that hole is perfect in the step file I have to consider, as a designer, what kind of tolerancing - that locational tolerancing - and diameter tolerancing that that hole has. So that's something I have to encourage myself, admonish myself, without trying to admonish others. My purpose here is to inspire others to consider beyond the nominal condition. So I'd love to see the tools of the future as they evolve. Be able to address that somehow and you know, about the best we have in the design world is to design our maybe our part bodies at a maximum material condition or something like that.But wouldn't that be nice if we can if we get to toggle back and forth we could snap back and forth.

Yeah yes - min to max. I was picturing in my mind if you could open and close down that hole and see.

Yeah and i can see our R&D guys right now screaming when they're listening to this.

It’s encouragement you know that might be somewhere that we're going - there's a term that I'm loving right now, that's a buzz term that's been out for a while. I I guess where the industry is bringing together the electrical constraints, the electrical designers, and the mechanical designers which theoretically all are going to become merged into one designer pretty soon. Sooner than we know and as it it's called mechatronics right?

Yup.

And I've heard there's courses being taught in mechatronics and it's just that, to me, is an inspiring place to go. I'm too old to go to school again I know. I feel like I'm in school every day you know, we're learning new software tools and things. Every every day we go to work and we we lay down trax or have to address problems. It's like a new day in school: are we gonna ‘BS’ our way through something or are we really gonna get into what's going on here and learn about it? And you know, that may mean a call to the supplier. How do I handle this? What are your capabilities? And not forgetting that just because we talk to that one supplier that doesn't mean the rest of the suppliers have those capabilities and other things. That's where we're kind of freestyling...

Yeah we are freestyling.

That made me think about pet topic and that is prototype versus production. How do we design and prototype versus how do we design a production just because we can go to a supplier that'll quick turn a board for us in a few days.

Yeah

The biggest mistake - let me go with a case scenario - the biggest mistake I see engineers make, some designers - is they'll get a design made at a quick turn board house and guess what they'll get it back into their shop, they'll give it to a tech have it assembled. You know what, that thing works perfect okay, and it's made with all these special core materials and special weights of copper. It's been printed and etched just fine. It's got purple solder mask just like it's specified and then because it's working perfect they say okay let's go to print and they want to go order a million of them. But that prototype shop’s not going to be able to make a million of them right. So you know, what's going offshore? So, what do you think's gonna happen to that specialized recipe? The designer, the engineer has to cut and paste the actual recipe of the design onto the board?

What's going to happen? Yeah it's gonna be a bloody disaster it's gonna get kicked back.

Yeah it'll probably just get kicked back. So we're talking design, and design involves creating you know. Sometimes hybrid stack-ups, but we have to be so aware of where this project’s pointing.

Is it producible in production? If you're heading towards - this is going into consumer market - you have to be thinking about that at the proto level. You cannot, oh let's just do this you know, get a Ferrari with all these special processes and then think that that's going to go into mass production because that takes... By the way when you talked about Prototron and shops like that. I worked for a shop much like that and there’s guys hanging over that job, kind of hand-carrying it through and making sure that everything goes perfect. That's not sustainable in a production environment. And you know that's not always understood.

That's right it needs to be understood.

Yeah how do we get that done?

Well the awareness needs to be there. I think it gets done but it gets learned the hard way.

Yeah for sure, and this is one that makes me feel, actually a lot of empathy for engineers. I feel like they're having to learn things over and over and over again that it's like reinventing the wheel over and over again instead of there being like some recipe book or some definitive guidelines of course CID+ plus and those things are are hugely enormous Lea valuable yeah but I don't know that there's a there's a straight cut and dried answer for that because it's complex process.

Yeah back to the CID - you know the guidelines - the CID program - points the designer to our specifications and again I'm a big proponent of not only getting designers out to the board shops, EMS shops, but out to the trade shows. I mean if you're a designer, I ask the students in the CID courses. Y'all been to trade shows y'all been to APEX or PCB West, or you know SMT shows and Design Con like we are here right now? If you haven't been out to these shows you might be missing out. This is not only a great place to shake hands and talk to people that are in the business of you know, selling of the products, but it's a network. Just like we're doing right now, it's a networking opportunity and a lot of what you're learning as a designer is going to come from networking

And in a tradeshow, you can do it like at hyperspeed. You can take in so much in two or three days like drinking from the fire hose level - like you can so much!

Yeah yeah, well that's me others that to drink it from the fire hose and then drinking... So you know you can take in so much information in that period of time. So how often do you teach the CID courses?

Ep Tag has been a instructor - supplier of teachers - for many many of the IPC specifications there. They're based back east in New Hampshire, and they have - for the CID program - they have a dozen or so instructors. Again these these instructors were pretty much hand-picked out of the industry to be able to go out and teach these classes. However, you know a lot of them, myself included. We have day jobs right? It'd be nice to be teaching - the teaching is so positive - I would love to do it every day but I would never want to get burned out and the travel involved... because they're offered all around the United States, Canada even down in South America. We have instructors like Mike Creeden.

Mike Creeden he's like a globetrotter.

Yeah he is he's putting lots of miles on doing classes down South way-

Yeah, WAY down South,

We keep it to you know, three to four classes spread out among the instructors. Yeah so keeps it fun, keeps it manageable and and keeps us fresh I guess.

So it's about time to wrap up but I feel like we just got started we could go on and on. But thank you so much for this conversation.

Oh, my pleasure...

-and boy I really see eye to eye with you. I bet you've articulated it's so much better than I could so, thank you so much Kelly. Okay my last question for you - I think I already know the answer - when I ask it. So at the end of the OnTrack podcasts, I've observed that many people who are designers have interesting creative hobbies or things they do. So this part of the podcast, we call ‘designers after hours.’ So I know one talent you have after hours. So tell me what you do for fun with that creative brain of yours after hours?

You know I just recently moved to Spokane so there's not many after hours. After hours gets dark really fast up there, in the wintertime. However in the summertime it's just the opposite. We have lots of daylight up in the Pacific Northwest and I don't know if this is the answer you're looking for, but one of the purposes of the movement up there was to fulfill a bucket list of getting a hobby farm and raising cows,

No way! I wasn’t going for that, but that’s cool.

I  know you weren’t so we did the hobby farm part. We moved to Spokane…

When? Wait time out, what’s a hobby farm?

A hobby farm is where you really don't know what you're doing some folks call it gentleman farmer but that's too nice of a term. I call it a hobby farm and so far we've got the chickens down we had 16 chickens laying eggs and we have 26 acres - and a barn - that we're gonna put cows on. But a sage old guy, one of my neighbors told me: You know Kelly - I asked him about what do you need to do to get cows going - he says, the first thing you need to do is build good fences. So, for two years now I've been trying to build good fences and the only thing I've been doing is tearing them down in the industry by shaking hands. How's that for an ending, yeah tearing down fences, shaking hands with the stakeholders!

That was corny! You’re a stand-up comedian as well. What I was really pointing at - and then I swear we will stop talking - is about your musical outlet?

Oh that, yeah did a lot of really really fun stuff over the last couple decades with the Porch Dogs, remember Pete Waddell and the Porch Dogs?

Oh my goodness, yeah they used to play at shows sometimes by the way.

Every time yeah it was - or it it's even fun to think about. So I'm a hacker, I uh play a little blues harp and a little guitar I'm a guitar hacker but it's another thing where this industry needs an outlet and interestingly enough the designer type is typically right brained.

Right that's what I'm saying.

A lot of them are musicians or like Bill Brooks’ sculpting I don't know... I really love hanging out with designers.

Yeah so to get together -  you know it was a natural occurrence to just start playing music and jamming it. So Pete Waddell was a great mentor for me way back.

So, for our listeners, Peter Waddell is the publisher at UP Media, so not only an industry guru but founded the Porch Dogs.

Yeah, yeah, and so we played and played and I met so many great people through that and we still carry on. At trade shows somebody will bring their guitar, somebody will bring a harp and that's all we need.

That's all we need - fun! Okay Kelly thanks so much for joining me, I could talk to you all day, it's so great to connect and you only get to connect at trade shows.

It’s my pleasure Judy.

But now I want to come to your hobby for…

Where are your boots?

I have them I suppose. Well that's it for this edition of OnTrack Podcast. Thank you so much for joining and we'll see you next time.

 

What material do I use? Many PCB designers ask this question. This is an episode about RF and Microwave PCB Design as well as Design for Manufacturing or DFM and it will help you to understand material choices and where to get answers about high speed laminates. Join John Bushie, Director of Technology at American Standard Circuits and Altium's Judy Warner in a discussion about High Speed laminates and the exciting world of RF/Microwave PCBs.

 

Show Highlights:

• John and Anaya's new book on iConnect007 about RF/Microwave PCBs
• You can design something that meets IPC standards and still have problems.
• What kind of material do you need? That depends.
• There's what you simulate, and then there's physics. Physics trumps theory.
• PCB101, a manufacturing educational experience pioneered at ASC

 

Links and Resources:

• American Standard Circuits website
• The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to Fundamentals of RF/Microwave PCBs
• The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to Flex and Rigid-Flex Fundamentals
• John Bushie on Linkedin

Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast, welcome back. Today we have a really great guest for you. I'm really looking forward to sharing my guests with you and please, if you would follow me on LinkedIn or on my Twitter which is @AltiumJudy and if you would like to follow Altium you can go to our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profiles.

So let's get started. Today I have the great pleasure of being with John Bushie who is the Director of Technology for American Standard Circuits which is outside of Chicago area and ASE specializes in both RF microwave circuits and also flexible circus but today I want to talk to John about a new micro Ebook that they have published through iConnect007 and this book is near and dear to me.

Some years ago I wrote a guest blog on a microwave journal because so many RF and microwave engineers and just engineers in general are being tasked with designing their own boards. And particularly in the RF and microwave space a lot of these designers, these guys are designing boards and haven't had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in a fab shop.

Yeah, and they really just don't get a chance to be exposed to as much as we do being a fabricator. Since a lot of the people at our organization tend to be a little bit grayer in appearance we all have a lot of experience and the reality is is we can share this with them. One of our most important jobs is being able to educate them, and that's really how I think of myself, educating other people sharing the knowledge that I've gained over the years and just trying to help them out with their designs because ultimately we just both want to be successful.

Yeah absolutely and as you know, I spent 25 years or so in the fabrication industry and when I had a stint in the RF and microwave industry and it was like culture shock, John, like it just felt like a whole different animal, it was like drinking from the fire,

Were you working with the designers at that time?

Yeah so it was like... and I felt completely inept at first when I started there to talk about laminates but all of a sudden we're talking about performance instead of just mechanical dimensioning and making…

- sure we're just used to meeting specifications right?

Right!

- And those have a physical dimension to them and the route is you start getting into this realm of higher frequencies and you start to find out what's really important to these designers.

Yeah, and I started to feel it, the more and more I learned the more kind of stupid I felt and the more I realized; holy cow there are so many ways that a board shop could screw up and there's literally…

There’s literally thousands of different ways we could manufacture the same board and the reality is is we always have to try to manage any of the risks that the design presents and certain aspects of certain designs actually will will present problems, or they'll complicate other features that are important to the RF designer’s ultimate performance goals, and so working around those issues is what is so exciting about it.

It is exciting.

It's really challenging and fun and what was really stunning to me is to really get to the point where I realized; oh my gosh we could be 100% compliant to IPC standards...

-and still have something that doesn't work...

… and make a trash board - that's exactly correct.

Because you know we’re within tolerances so we did a little of that, but you know what, if we over etched and you know that circuit had a little too much under or over etch or whatever that the performance went to heck and and they're like, no this is not what we simulated in and we're like, too bad so sad it's the IPC standards so it's a lot more complicated. So why don't you go ahead and talk about, sort of this is now? This is a book I wish I had enough brains to write so I'm glad you did.

Don't give me too much credit.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about it? Well first why this book?

I just wanted to share the knowledge that I've gained and I've had the opportunity and the great fortune to be able to work at several world-class fabricators. Poly Circuits in my early days helped get Mega Circuits into PTFE materials and now with American Standard circuits. But in the middle there - I was also able to work for an RF circuit board laminate company at Taconic. Well I got to work very intimately with the designers in North America as well as Asia and Europe so it's the ability to be able to interface with what are some of the most brilliant people I've ever met just taught me so much and when you talk about coming into something feeling completely ignorant… well that was me a long time ago and the reality is now I I hope that I can share some of the knowledge that I've gained through all this experience.

So since I know you've been it Taconic you probably told me that before, and just wasn't remembering it. But let's just pause there for a second and just talk about composition of high speed materials.

Sure.

Because that was kind of the first place I started and the realization of you know with Upper 4 you've got some fiberglass resin…

- resin, glass, maybe fillers and there you go and you're off to the races. Now talk about high speed materials, the different compositions what, they are?

What they are and… traditionally high-frequency materials were generally all PTFE based and what that meant in the early days is that there was very few flavors I think everybody knows the term Duroid. great materials fantastic from an electrical performance standpoint. But some of the mechanical properties were perhaps a little lacking and that's really the largest improvement we've seen in materials throughout the years.

It’s the increase in strength and dimensional stability of these materials which makes it easier for us to fabricate because honestly if a material moves around a lot during the physical stresses that we put it through then we have tendencies to have registration issues, or it causes other issues within our manufacturing. The biggest change in the materials nowadays is the change to higher thermal conductivity materials. That's where we see the market going and respect to those types of products as the power levels go up and designs get small. Everybody's got to deal with these heat issues that they've got.

And I'm sure automotive is driving a lot of that.

Well automotive does too... that's an interesting… another realm that we're talking about, is these very high temperature materials and a lot of the underhood automotive application. It's something we just get a little bit of exposure to but it's also a very interesting field.

Yeah just one of the things you mentioned too are... I neglected to mention to our listeners that we are here at Design Con in Santa Clara, so if you hear some voices in the background it's because we're here at a trade show and so just wanted to mention that so ASC is here with a booth and also rolling out hard copies of their book so. So the going back to the laminate side. So, I know from the RF experience I've had that each of these compositions of materials behave differently right?

Mm-hmm.

Like when I think of PTFE distinctly and there's a completely different system, you know?

Distinctly, and when you go from the the thermoplastics to the thermoset materials both have their advantages you know. PTFE is a fantastic material in that it's largely inert. It's inert to the effects of high frequency radiation and it doesn't change and that's what yields the fairly consistent results that you get with PTFE materials.

Now there's the introduction of the lower-cost thermosetting materials that also have pretty good electrical properties and that that can be a huge benefit just in the rigidity. Overall dimensional stability and the fairly low CTE values you know. At the same time, they've been filling PTFE materials for years in order to alter their properties and they've actually done a phenomenal job and bringing the CTE values very close to those of copper, which is the ideal since every board, every layer is clad with some level of coppers.

Right.

Yeah I mean we could devote…

You know I this is an interesting subject and there's a new material that comes out virtually every couple months all right and there's just a lot of good materials out there there it really is which is really what the whole key to this.

Yeah which is really actually good for industry great for designers right?

Which is why when we get asked the first question that everybody asks is what's the right material for my design. That's an impossible question to answer on the face of it but the reality is, as we dig deeper and deeper into these designs, we can kind of get a sense of where their price sensitivity lies, what level of performance they need, and just just seeking to go through the process and understand what their requirements are.

Before we got down that road... if I read - I had the pleasure of reviewing your book before it got published - and don't if I remember correctly. Don't you have a chart there or is it on your website that shows, like side by side, all the differences?

We do, it compares all of the various laminates that we use and actually, I had had a ex-colleague from that company that I used to work for mention that.. hey I left out a few of the most recent materials particularly in Europe. I apologize Manfred, I did not know that there were materials released, but thank you for catching that and I appreciate your insights. Because you know again going back to that subject. I've been phenomenally lucky to have worked with some fantastic minds as well as fantastic people in this.

Which I'm sure is an awesome asset for you at ASC. So okay so give us a quick rundown again. This is a micro book this is not a textbook?

Yeah and it was never intended to be a treatise on the subject it's really to touch on some of the major - I'm gonna call them issues for lack of a better word - because if we don't deal with them at the beginning of the design they can end up taking what is otherwise a fantastic board and make it virtually non manufacturable and this is really about DFM.

It really is.

You know we go into all the subjects - obviously not every subject as it relates to circuit boards - but from material selection, to copper roughness, to choosing the right stack ups and balancing your constructions whenever possible. How does copper thickness play a role in the ability to be able to manufacture? To find fine lines and spaces, edge plating, cavity constructions, thermal management. It touches on that wide variety of subjects and it just kind of gives you an overview of what we deal with. What to be thinking about when you're going through this process and hopefully it'll be an aid.

Yeah well,  I can imagine that this will be a great sort of starting place because I'm sure you get asked these same questions over and over again?

Yes and the reality is, is we want it to start the dialogue right you know - and we want to be able to put something in your hands that can aid you right now. But also help you think about certain aspects so that we can work together right. We've dealt with some designs that deal with basically a composition of every circuit technology known to man in one board but since we've worked so in-depth with this customer for a very long period of time we've ended up balancing out the performance requirements that they need with our ability to be able to manufacture right. Because it doesn't matter whether it's the highest performing smallest assembly in the world, if we can't make it or we get 10% yields, it's it's not going to end up satisfying the customer.

Yeah and that's another thing I remember feeling kind of pounding my head against a wall like you know now that I'm on the EDA side of the market right, there's such good powerful EDA tools out there and, but they won't necessarily flag you and say, no dummy you can't...

Yes indeed you're right, and that's exactly what ends up happening. I mean we've gone through designs where people expect to get a certain level of performance and all the materials are there, the components are there and we find that one aspect was missed and you know, there could be copper roughness. Oh we didn't account for that right. So you know we get, hey I'm getting minus 3db down from what I expect to be getting that's a huge loss it’s almost double.

Yes so there's what you model and then there’s reality.

My friend used to say, there's what you simulate and then there's physics.

Exactly then there's, yeah physics gets in the way right? And then John Toussaint who actually works for you guys, his favorite line used to, be physics trumps theory.

Right very true.

Right? So you know there's just limitations to what we can manufacture so well this is a really, really great again as I said I wish I had the ability to be the one that wrote this but I'm so delighted. I think it's truly a great service not only to your customers but just to the industry to get this information out because it's sorely needed and to my ability no one has really put this out you know...

No I'll be very honest if an a hadn't worked so hard on this project it never would have been realized either so thank you for pushing on this project and driving it forward I do think it will be helpful to great many people and who knows, maybe there'll be some addition to this in the future.

Yeah that would be great and I know you guys have written one actually which maybe is another Podcast series we can talk about…

The rigid flax which is that is becoming more and more.

We're actually seeing the two integrated in some instances. Yeah when I was referring to that one design that's exactly what we're talking about. Yeah IMS flex RF FR4, multilayer blind and buried vias and flex later. Right and the middle core I'm sorry I left that out.

Oh good lord... but manufacturable - piece of cake! Can’t you give me. you know $10 off that board John?

Sure exactly we're gonna deal on price, but you know, you do what you can there and you know you've got to try to make it. You've got to try to make it successfully and usually we try to make it for a cost.

Of course like people, not everyone really understands. I wish I could take every designer and engineer and they would be like forced to go through board shops like five times.

You're right. I mean we even created a tool for that called PCB 101 just to kind of give you a good overview. Once you start breaking it down and you think of the circuit board processing as each path is in itself a process right. Then you start to add up all the processes that the board is exposed to as it goes to the manufacturing operation. When we get to some of these complex designs it might be going through 150 - 200 different operations.

Yeah, exactly right.

And all of them have potential risks so absolutely...

Yeah people don't really… you know, we've come to sort of take for granted printed circuit board manufacturing. I think we're all impressed with semiconductors and their performance and bla bla bla - boards are… they're dumb and they’re just boards and they just lay there or whatever.. except unless that that board is made right none of those parts work.

And with high-speed digital ou have controlled impedance with RF its dielectric constant line width and loss. So I mean you've got one or the other.

Yeah and now with the added dimension of thermal management, since people are becoming a much more... which is fantastic because it can offer performance levels that weren't even theoretically possible just you know five ten fifteen years ago you know.

So let's talk about where people can find the book first which I think is on the iConnect007 website correct?

That's correct.

And and then where can people find more information about ASC John?

They can go  to www.asc-i.com.

Okay let me check that one more time - www dot ASC (that’s American Standard Circuits) dash-i dot com - okay very good.

So is there anything else that I may have not covered or asked you relative to this awesome book you just put out?

No it's just all I do, is just encourage people to give it a read, say that it's downloadable for free.

Yes it doesn’t get less expensive right?

It doesn't get less expensive.

So you basically just put in your name and your email and download it and it’s a PDF right? So it's a digital ebook.

I'm gonna look over just to get a little bit of agreement, that is in PDF form is that correct?

Yes it’s in PDF form.

Excellent okay PDF form and, here at Design Con you guys have brought a limited number of hard copies to give away so I'm sure those will be appreciated and and I'm sure once you start getting readers you'll probably end up printing out more of those but, well thanks so much for your time okay.

So now for the fun stuff I'm going to ask you two fun questions. First what is your favorite techie gadget that you own?

Wow that's difficult…

Like that you can't live without...

Well I mean everybody's gonna say their smartphone nowadays but besides that, yeah I'll be honest, no I always go back to home entertainment. I'm sorry okay.

Well hey that is totally okay. Do you have like a pimped-out home entertainment?

I have a pimped-out setup at home.

Okay let's hear it let's hear the specs!

It's got over a horsepower of wattage, it’s considerable it's got 13 speakers. It's a little excessive - nuts. People say I’m nuts when they go into my house but that's alright.

Is it like a home theater.. little home... wait how big is your screen?

It's only 60 inches I'm trying trying to talk five feet I'm trying to talk the wife into the 80 inch OLED but for some reason that thirteen thousand dollar price tag is a little steep. So we're gonna wait for the price point to go down.

My second question is… I know you're not a printed circuit board designer but a lot of us techie people have kind of interesting creative hobbies and things.

I'll be honest I'm the exception to that. No I shouldn't say that actually... actually I've been a bit of a computer nerd always have been, uh used to spend way too much time on computers. I think I set my first network up at home to be able to online game with, or at least network game with buddies back in 93.

So you're dating yourself?

Yes I am.

I was there.

Right but I know you can't stop getting older Judy, so...

That's right.

Okay I decided I'm gonna start counting backwards on my birthdays, that's how I'm solving that.

Okay so anything else or shall we wrap up here? Is there anything else you wanted to share that I might have left out John?

I think we pretty much covered everything Judy, appreciate the opportunity.

Oh and is there anything of note that you guys, other than booths and talking to a whole bunch of people for a couple days. Is there anything else that you guys are bringing besides your book to this show that may be of interest to or listeners?

I don't have any specifics that come to mind. I mean the reality is this is what we're working on right now. We're bringing this effort forward and hopefully, like I said, people will find value in that but the nice thing is there's our rigid flex expert Dave Lackey and myself so when we come here we try to bring some value to the people that might stop by

Okay so while I have you recorded on it, will you promise to say... send Dave Lackey back to talk to us about rigid flex?

Well we will round them up and send them in here okay?

Great tie them up okay!

Great well John thank you so much and thank you again for taking the time and effort to put this book out. I think it's going to be of great value to the industry for certain. Your customers and I really appreciate that laminate chart you put together - I wish I had that a long time ago.

Exactly.

Well thank you very much and have a great show.

Thank you again this has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack Podcast please remember to subscribe and add us to your favorite RSS feeds and we look forward to talking to you next time and always stay OnTrack. 

More than ever, people are doing Flex and Rigid Flex for the very first time as industries drive for smaller, more user-friendly devices. Join Altium's Judy Warner and OmniPCB CEO, Tara Dunn for a conversation on industry trends and cost drivers.

 

Show Highlights:

• What is driving growth in the market? Space, weight, packaging.
• Flex is everywhere especially handhelds and medical devices, uptick in flex and rigid flex PCB across every industry.
• Three main cost drivers for Flex and Rigid Flex: Materials selection, Panel utilization and Technology.
• And a fourth consideration - understanding your fabricator capabilities and making sure you’re matching your design to their capabilities.
• Most common materials: copper and polymide.

 

Links and Resources:

• OmniPCB Company website
• Tara Dunn’s AltiumLive presentation
• Geekapalooza
• PCB Advisor site
• Flex Talk
• FlexFactor by NextFlex
• Jabil’s Blue Sky facility in San Jose

Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack podcast. Welcome back, if this is your first time we're glad to have you. Before we get going today I've got a great guest for you, but before we get going I wanted to remind you to please subscribe to this podcast, and you can follow us on iTunes, on your favorite RSS feed, or wherever, whatever app you like to use for your podcasts.

 

Today I have with me Tara, oh before I get going on Tara I wanted to also say, please follow me on LinkedIn and also on Twitter, I'm at Altium Judy, and Altium you can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Okay, Tara, hi my friend, so good to see you, welcome to La Jolla, California.

 

Thank you.

So, Tara was a recent, is a dear, dear friend of mine in the industry. There's not many of us women that have actually been in the printed circuit board business and understand how circuit boards are made, but we do indeed know how that's done, and Tara owns OmniPCB. She's based in the Minneapolis area, and she is a real flex expert, and we've been friends for, how long has it been now?

I don't know, what six or seven, eight years? Probably something like that. Anyways, Tara and I met at a trade show and instantly started introducing each other to our friends and colleagues and next thing you know, we just created this energy, and we both have written columns for iConnect 007. Tara has an event in Minnesota called Geekapalooza.

Which Judy helped bring out to California. California, so I brought it out here to Irvine, and then we brought it together to Boston, so we've had lots of professional adventures together, so it's my joy to have you and for us to

learn more about your expertise in flex. So, how are you liking La Jolla?

I know you're here for a few weeks, I bet you're glad to get out of the snow.

Oh yeah, it's no hardship to leave Minnesota winter this time of year.

I'm loving the sun and the beach, so like- What was the temperature when you left?

Minus five, something like that, and slippery roads and cars were going into ditches, we're driving to the airport I'm like "just please make it there so I don't miss my flight"-

Oh my gosh. -and I landed here, it was sunny and beautiful.

Right? I know.

I know, that's why we like it here. It's expensive to live here, but we love it.

So, welcome to the La Jolla office, anyways. So we want to talk today about your deep knowledge on flex circuits, which are becoming more and more commonplace, right?

You and I started out in our careers really focusing on Rigid FR-4, very standard boards, but it's really evolved now. Oh yeah, flex is a significantly growing portion of the market.

And what do you think's driving that?

Space, weight, packaging. You know, it's small it can be smaller, lighter, folded, it's really perfect for all of those electronics, the handheld electronics, medical devices.

Right. So what would you say, give us an overview, you just said medical devices, what other things are you seeing an uptick in the flex market?

You know, really across the board. Across all industries.

Really?

Absolutely. You know, we've got companies that have been working with flex that are developing maybe more complex flex or rigid flex and, you know, easily once a week somebody's contacting me brand new, just trying to figure out how to work with flex and how to design flex and what's different, what do I need to know. So a lot of new applications cropping up are people that are just trying it for the first time.

Well, that's why we invited Tara to be our flex expert at this year's Altium Live, and we'll share the link below but there's a really great presentation that Tara gave at Altium Live, and we have the video and her slide deck, so we'll share that at the bottom here so you can check into that later.

So, let's talk a little bit about that presentation. That was speaking a lot about cost drivers. So, for the designers and engineers listening, what are some of the just overview, basic overview, of what cost drivers are for flex and rigid flex?

Okay, so we often talk about three primary cost drivers, materials selection, panel utilization, and technology. I kind of like to throw, a little bit tongue-in-cheek but not really, a fourth one in there, which is understanding your fabricators capabilities and making sure that you're matching their capabilities with your design. Yeah. That's not just true in flex, by the way.

True, it's across the industry. It's across the board.

Yes. [laughter]

So, start with materials. How does that affect cost? Okay, so there are just so many materials you can choose from with flex, so, but just for this quick discussion let's focus on the most common which is copper and polyamide.

So, even focusing just on that segment, your fabricators are going to purchase laminates. They come in generally three different types which would be, two of them are adhesive-based, one with a standard acrylic adhesive, one with a flame retardant version of that adhesive, and then adhesive-less materials.

So, all of those types come in a range. Typically your copper thickness is going to be a quarter, or a half ounce to two ounces. It doesn't mean you can't get a flex circuit greater than two ounces, it just means that your fabricator has to create the material themselves.

Right.

And polyamide thicknesses are generally between half mil and six mil.

When you said your fabricator has to create that, does that mean they actually take the material and plate it up in their tanks, or you're buying a specialized material from the materials supplier?

Right, you would buy the polyamide, the adhesive and the copper and the thicknesses that you need.

So, like I said, huge range of options that you have when selecting materials for flex. So cost drivers, keeping that in mind, you know, why would you choose one over another or how does that progression go?

Typically, the adhesive-based options are going to be a little bit less expensive.

Okay. Okay, and they are typically used in single- sided, double- sided, maybe three or four layer flex is where you'll see those applications.

As you go into higher layer count, or rigid flex, the adhesive-less material becomes necessary. Highly recommended for rigid flex.

There's a z-axis mismatch between the FR-4 material and that acrylic adhesive, so you don't want to introduce the acrylic adhesive into the FR-4 stack-up.

So that's why, you know, your fabricators are always going to recommend adhesive-less materials.

All right, that makes sense. Mhmm. So, it's kind of like cost versus function-

Right.

-at certain point-

Right.

-that you need to keep in mind.

Right. So, other than materials, I know, what are other things that help drive the cost? I mean I think that's what people are afraid of, right? They think "oh flex is too expensive, I can't go that way" but they really need to go that way, route, for functionality, and I think really what you taught us at AltiumLive was it's not that cut-and-dry, right? If you evaluate all these different things then it may not be as expensive as you think.

Exactly, and as you decide to move to flex, you know, working with your fabricator on the materials side specifically can really help drive out cost.

Is it looking at just the raw material? You know, you're generally going to be FR, flame-retardant, material, LF adhesive, and adhesive-less, but if your fabricator is building a lot of rigid flex they're gonna stock more adhesive-less materials, and your adhesive-less material is gonna be probably less expensive-

Because they're buying more of it, they have it in stock you don't have to worry about minimum.

Make that match, and so finding someone that does a lot of flex and rigid flex is going to help you right off the bat. Exactly, and understanding the material sets that they're using, and you know a great way to do that is to ask their field applications engineering group to help you with a stack-up.

'Cause if you're not directing them in a certain direction they will default to the material that they're using most commonly.

So it's a really good way to make sure you're fitting that gap. Right. So what are some of the other cost drivers?

You know, we look at different types of coverlay. Coverlay kind of follows a progression.

So like, explain what coverlay is. So, with flexible circuits there's two types of coverlay.

There's a flexible solder mask, which is very similar to our board type solder mask other than formulated to be flexible but applied the same way.

It's a good option for circuits that might be single sided, double sided or less than two ounces of copper. Okay.

Tends to be a little bit less expensive. I see.

It does have a limitation in flexibility. It is flexible, but if you're having a highly dynamically flexing application it's probably not your best choice.

Right. But another advantage is it does allow you to form those nice 90-degree angles on your surface mount pads.

Of course. But when you need to, when you're concerned about reliability for flex life, the polyamide cover length, so it would be the polyamide that's the same as your base material and a layer of adhesive.

That would be the next option that you would want to go to. The limitations on that tend to be, you know, because you're drilling or routing that coverlay, you're gonna have a round or an oval opening.

Oh, okay. So as your circuits get more and more dense, it gets more and more difficult. We jokingly call it the Swiss cheese effect-

Right, you drill it and you take off the back route entry and there's not enough material there to even hold it together. You know, it looks great on the screen when it's this big but when the part's little. So your fabricator will watch out for that if you're doing a design. We all do try to minimize that impact.

The circuit board designer may be asked to gang open or, you know, make a larger opening over several pads to kind of alleviate that problem. And then continuing on that cost spectrum if you need the polyimide coverlay and you need that individual pad coverage, laser-cut coverlay would be the next option.

Okay. So that allows you to get the nice 90 degree angles for the surface mount pad, much tighter registration.

I would think from a cost standpoint too, in this case like laser cut, again a fabricator that doesn't do a lot of production of these kind of circuits may not have that equipment, may have to send it out, which drives the price up.

Exactly, exactly.

So, you know, I could see, that would be another benefit to making sure you're finding a fabricator that's really good at this technology.

Exactly.

Okay. Are there other areas or did we did exhaust that one?

I think on the materials, yeah I think that those are the two primary things to look at, is the base material and the coverlay.

Okay.

So, it's always easy to kind of relate to that if we can hear a case study or an example that you've had, you know in your career, is there a couple stories you could tell us?

Sure, sure. So, there is a medical application, for example, and trying to reduce the material cost it was designed as a three layer rigid flex and flex being on the outer layer in that case.

Oh on the outer layer, okay.

Because of the three layers, okay?

So, but then in this case that required the flex to be button plated to maintain the flexibility and it required the circuit to have to be sent out to laser-cut for the coverlay to maintain the surface mount pads. So those two together required it to be done on a smaller manufacturing panel for the tighter registration.

So, very expensive circuit and very difficult to manufacture. After a review with a fabricator, they decided to go to a four layer rigid flex, more standard construction. So the material costs are higher but it eliminated the need for the laser cut of the coverlay, it eliminated the need for the button plating and it was processed more standard. So although the material costs were higher the overall cost of that flex circuit dropped dramatically. So it's not always about look at the material cost and run, right, it really is about collaboration, which you and I both over the course of our careers have sang that song, you know, in a variety of circuits right? It's not, but I can see how in the case of flex and rigid flex it's even more important, right, because there's all these variables.

Exactly, and that tends, flex and rigid flex tends to be a product that people are a little less sure of themselves when they're designing, have a lot more questions, so my advice is always to identify a few fabricators that you think will be good partners and then involve your fabricators early in the design. You know, because they're doing flex and rigid flex all day.

Right.

They've learned a lot of lessons so we all might as well take advantage of those lessons. Yes, absolutely, and that reminds me, another plug for Miss Tara is that she writes a column for the PCB 007 magazine monthly?

Yes. Monthly, specifically about flex- Yep, it's called Flex Talk.

Flex Talk, there you go.

So there's another resource that, and she usually covers a lot of these in that magazine and I always, I always look forward to reading your columns. So another case study?

Okay. A second case study I can think of is a military application.

The product was, I would say having probably 90% failure in the field after assembly. So, very very expensive after a fully populated board and what happened was it's a rigid flex and it was being bent and it was cracking.

So back to the drawing board, what can we learn from that?

Turns out, simply re-did the stack up and went from adhesive based materials to adhesive-less materials.

Oh wow.

So it eliminated only three mils thickness in the overall stack up but it was a thickness, and the bend radius was causing that cracking. So by making that one simple change in that stack up, you know they've had 300 assemblies completed now with no cracking at all.

And there's the expertise, right? Like who would know that three mils could fix that problem. I would have never guessed that in-

Yeah, it seems insignificant, especially when we're used to looking at thick rigid boards 3 doesn't seem like anything at all. It doesn't seem like anything at all.

That's so cool.

Well, thank you. Those are great stories.

You know, since you and I started in this industry, there were, I'm kind of shifting subjects now, a little bit and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about women in our industry. So, there are far more women in this industry now than there used to be. There still isn't that many of us who actually are on the front lines of sales and marketing that kind of thing. How did, I know I didn't end up in this industry on purpose. I love it and I love the industry, so how did you find your way, and I don't think I've ever asked you this?

I'm here completely by accident. See? We didn't do this on purpose.

No, my first job out of college was in the accounting department of a flexible circuit manufacturer. Okay, what was your major?

Economics and industrial relations. Well, there you go.

I didn't know what a flex circuit was when I started there. Right.

Because of that, they required me to work out on their manufacturing floor and learn how to build a circuit, so I was out on that manufacturing floor for a few months.

No way, I did the same thing but- Really?

Yes, yes I-

I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but the first circuit boards shop I worked at, and they had this whole language, these terms and things I'd never heard, you know what is SMOBC and I'm like, I don't know, solder mask over bare copper, and so I asked a production manager

I'm going to come in on Saturdays and he's like, I'll put you in every department.

That was like the best education ever, wouldn't you agree?

I agree and I totally didn't appreciate it at the time.

Yeah.

But looking back I would have never learned the process as well, because I was running equipment and, I'm really terrible at registering coverlay. I've learned this. It's not something I should do. I don't have that hand-eye coordination, but it was it was a good thing to learn.

Yeah, absolutely. That's so funny, I never knew that about you.

So, what do you think we can do to sort of encourage, I mean we're doing a lot to encourage women in STEM and encourage them to become exposed to these types of careers. What do you think would be a good way, or how are some ways that you've seen, oh I know one thing you're going to tell me about right!

Okay the Flex Factor program, Flex Factor, put on by NextFlex, so centered around flexible hybrid electronics, they have a program that reaches out to high school kids and it's an entrepreneurship program that ties in advanced manufacturing.

So they go to Jabil, they get to see all the cool things, it's a month-long program.

And this is in the middle of Silicon Valley?

Yes.

So fun.

And I believe it's expanding beyond that.

Wow.

I was lucky enough to be on the judging panel at the end of one of their last ones.

So much fun, but what it does is -  it takes students who may or may not be interested in a technical field, they might be interested in marketing or entrepreneurship, and it is a month program.

First week they kind of get the charter and you have to develop, it's about product development, what kind of need do you see around Health and Human Services and what how could you solve it using a product that's using advanced manufacturing?

Uh-huh.

And then they get to go into the fancy Jabil building and see all the really cool things that they do there. They tie that into the next step, is entrepreneurship at a community college, and the students are actually given credit, college credit for this program, and then the fourth and final week they need to pitch kind of shark tank style to a panel and go through the whole product development process, profit and loss, and I mean it's just it's an amazing program, and it's so fun to watch kids you know who, I talked to one girl

Jordan and she had really no interest in manufacturing or advanced manufacturing until, she wasn't exposed to it until this program, and now she's got a lot of ideas.

Which is so great! I don't know how kids otherwise would get exposed to manufacturing, and when you go into a facility like Jabil or TTM or some of these big facilities, you know I think kids think manufacturing is like a dark, dank building with, you know, I don't know, something awful and you go in and there's robotics and chip shooters and all this amazing high-tech equipment and these clean rooms and you have to wear the whole bunny suit and the glasses and you go in and you're like wow this was not what I was expecting and that's so great. I forgot that you told me about that program and the whole shark tank, which makes it so- oh it was so much fun.

-so what did the students pitch? Or like what are a couple things that the students pitched?

You know there was all kinds of different things. They tended to kind of centre around babies or athletes.

What?

Well, different injuries that you might have as a student-athlete and how to rehab those injuries.

Oh, okay.

Or baby monitoring devices.

Oh that kind of, okay.

Yeah.

So, what was the winner? Was there, is there a clear winner, do you remember?

I don't remember who won for the panel I was on because they didn't announce it the day that I was there.

All right. And so you're continuing now, right? To be involved with this initiative, and is this gonna be each year, or how often do they offer it?

They do it throughout, throughout the year. I think they just had another round that went through so, and I might mix up the numbers slightly, but I think that the first program that they did which would have been the fall of 2016. I think they had eight students participate and its teams of four. So now they are up to thousands of students participating in this program. It's just growing and growing so fast.

We're going to make sure that we put that website, so you have to make sure and share that, the URL, so people that are listening can look into that. Such an exciting program and I, you know, here at Altium we're doing so much with the universities and stuff and I love to see it happening, and it's so fun when you see the light bulbs go on and, you know, we love our industry and we want to keep it vitalized.

Yes, yes. I think this is a great tool for generating some excitement. I know, I love it.

I want a program for people our age to go back and do that.

Right? Wouldn't that be fun?

Yeah. What would we call it?

I don't know, we'll have to think about that later.

So okay, here's a really wonky question I think I already know the answer but I'm asking anyway. Are you a nerd or a geek?

Geek.

I asked the woman who runs Geekapalooza, that was a really easy answer.

I know, okay but why do you think a geek? Why is it not Nerdapalooza?

Like, why do you think you're a geek and not a nerd?

That is an excellent question.

Other than geek sounds better than nerd. See, I know, well- It's the general excitement over something that other people-

Right, like geeking out over something right? Geek Squad.

It's become cooler.

I think geeks are cooler than nerds still, like just generally. I think that's the consensus. And my other wonky question is, on a scale from one to ten how weird are you? Well, pretty high up there, yeah.

So like, what are some wonky things that make you weird?

You know, I -

Well first of all you're in this industry.

First of all it's the industry right? I laugh because I'll go out to have lunch, a work lunch, and sometimes I think if anybody is listening to our conversations, we're talking about impedance control and stack-ups and EMI and I'm like, what are they talking about over lunch?

I know I posted a video of me talking about fusion bonding on my personal Facebook page, and it blew up and people are like who are you? What are those words? They had no idea that I spoke this whole other tech language. And if you're out of the industry, you know, most of my friends, you know, my parents, my family, they don't know what I really do.

I know, I know. We're gonna put your podcast, this podcast.

We're gonna put this podcast on your- Can you cut that part out?

No we'll put it on this and see what they think of you on a podcast talking about coverlay. They'll be like what? And my final question would be, well, one thing I know about Tara Dunn is that you love the beach even though you live in the snowiest place in the country.

I live in a landlocked state.

Yeah, there's that. But I noticed that a lot of technical people have really interesting hobbies, so what kind of things you like to do with your family or places you like to vacation or things you like to do in you're very few off hours that you have Tara because you don't have a lot of off hours.

I don't, but with the job that I have it allows me to travel quite a bit because I can work pretty much remotely from anywhere and make that easy. So, yeah we love to travel.

Specifically the beach. It's one of my favorites or in the winter anywhere warm. Desert area, everything's great, and I don't know what happened this year but suddenly I've become a music buff.

Oh. I haven't been to a live concert in a few years and all of a sudden I think I have six or seven things booked so..

That's so funny.

I don't know why. It's because your son went to college and you have a little more free time. That could be it.

I don't know, I'm picking up new things now that my kids are out to college so that's probably the reason why.

Well Tara, thanks.

It's always a blast to hang out with you, and it's so fun to have you in California.

Thanks for having me here. Usually we're on the phone on conference calls and we actually get to see each other in person, it's fun.

So again we'll share lots of informative links for, that Tara has shared on this podcast and some that she didn't have time to talk about, we'll share them below so you can tap into all the interesting resources that Tara has, and I want to thank you again for what, for listening and or watching the OnTrack podcasts today. Please remember to subscribe at your favorite podcast app. Until then, always remember to stay on track.