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Design007-Nov2019

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30 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2019 things without some sort of electronics in them. Being in the manufacturing area for electron- ics opens the door for all of us to succeed and help build something. The altruistic view of it would be to help to build the next thing that will help to save the planet. We get to be a part of that every day, helping to create the next big or better thing, or even a planet-saving thing. In conjunction with that, everything electronic is getting smaller and faster and has more memory and more stringent requirements in terms of the materials or the manufacturing, especially the bare boards. To fit everything required for the design, and all of that power into a small chip, you must have very dense circuitry. Gone are the days of scope drilling and big-format panels; now, we enter the world of high-density microvias and all of that other good HDI stuff, which is going to continue. It will get to a point even- tually, where physics will be the barrier that needs a breakthrough to keep getting denser and smaller. But for the time being, probably for the next 25 years, things will continue to get smaller and more complex. Shaughnessy: Everybody was worried about Moore's Law. Then, they predicted the end of copper. Stevenson: They have gotten around a lot of that so far, in part due to the exponential cost increases to manufacture these newer tech- nologies (Moore's second law) on the smaller scales. Shaughnessy: Do you see any of the new tech- nologies, like IoT and 5G? Stevenson: We're starting to see it. Sunstone primarily has been used over the years for rapid prototyping, so we've seen a lot of the early design concepts come in and out. We're starting to see a little bit more of the produc- tion levels, especially in the IoT realm, but we haven't seen a lot of 5G stuff yet. I am curious to see some of the PCB layouts that will result from these. Shaughnessy: A lot of people are waiting to see. Stevenson: That's going to be an exciting program to see rolled out. It will be quite a feat getting all of that technology developed and implemented into the infrastructure. Shaughnessy: Do you do automotive work? Stevenson: We do business in about every industry. Automotive, for us, is not a huge player at this point, but we're going to make strides to get a little more in-depth and ingrained into the ever-growing automo- tive electronics industry. The number of electron- ics going into cars today is crazy, including everything from lidar and collision sen-

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