Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/992528
8 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2018 I live in Pennsylvania, in a town of 4,000 people, and I can walk to the library, grocery, post office, and a couple of restaurants and al- ways meet someone I know. Running into peo- ple I know at the farmer's market and drug- store was something of a shock to me when I first moved here but I enjoy it quite a bit. I'm writing this a few days after our Memo- rial Day parade, which consisted of two bands, the local veterans organizations (French & In- dian and Civil Wars are especially studied around here), several parade floats, a number of county and town officials in cars (includ- ing Miss Pennsylvania), and best of all, numer- ous fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I can count 11 or 12 volunteer fire companies with- in a 5–7-mile radius of this little town—and that's nowhere near the whole county. I'm a big fan of volunteering, so I find this kind of thing heartening, as I do with the fact that our recent Day of Giving raised almost $340,000 for local charitable organizations. If you don't have this where you live…move! And let me move on now to our topic for this month. My undergraduate degree is in chemistry (a zillion years ago) so the PCB wet processing area was a natural for me. Ah, the smell of am- monia and formaldehyde and acids! The beau- ty of an automatic plating line and the precise- ness of a well-synchronized conveyorized DES line! The sense of triumph when we actually processed thousands of innerlayers with 5 mil line and space—in the early '80s—successful- ly and with high yields (yeah, manual inspec- tion). Of course, I haven't worked in a PCB fa- cility for quite a while now, having branched off into marketing, sales and R&D as well as other parts of the process. And now, "I are an editor!" (How did that happen?) But, back to wet processing. More than one of our writers has said the PCB manufacturing has not changed much—and in a sense that's true. There are still the myriad steps: image, etch, strip, laminate, drill, PTH, image, elec - troplate, strip and etch—or some variation of these. What has changed significantly is the required precision of those steps to achieve ever fi ner features at ever higher quality and reli- ability on ever more persnickety materials for Patty's Perspective by Patty Goldman, I-CONNECT007 Staying Current on Wet Processes Figure 1: A small contingent of the award-winning Kit- tanning Firemen's Band marching on Memorial Day (one doesn't have to be a volunteer fireman to be in the band).