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JULY 2018 I FLEX007 MAGAZINE 27 We also do interoperative neuro monitoring equipment (IONM), which monitors your neural pathways, both motor and sensory, while you're in surgery, to help guide the surgeon during a procedure. This reduces the risk of a patient suf- fering from some sort of neurological deficit after a procedure. The IONM world is fascinating, my description just scratches the surface of what our equipment is capable of. For example, when I was in the service department, I was doing phone support as well as repairing and testing equipment, so occasionally you'd get a call with people who were in the OR and something was wrong with their equipment. You have to get it back up and running while they're monitoring an active surgery. It's no joke, but it's good stuff. It made me feel like I was sitting in the OR as part of the surgical team. Shaughnessy: With these devices, reliability is your number one watchword, right? Schulte: Yeah, reliability is very high on our list of priorities when we're building products, especially anything that will be near the OR. We want to build things that you can depend on not to fail while in the middle of a procedure. Shaughnessy: Do ever have to use HDI, any of the real cutting-edge technologies? Schulte: We're starting to push the size of our products smaller and smaller. We are just starting to dip our toes into the high-density and BGA design. If we can avoid it, we will for now. Conventional densities are easier to fabricate and assemble so there is less fallout during production. It makes troubleshooting designs during R&D a lot easier and it's a more reliable if you can use big- ger parts, so we lean that way if we can. We've got some prod- ucts coming down the pipeline right now that really pushed our abilities. We are cramming com- ponents on, adding layers and just trying to keep it as dense as possible. Shaughnessy: Do you know generally where your flex or rigid boards are going to be fabri- cated and assembled every time? Schulte: Our volumes are low enough that we tend to stick to one or two fab shops. We have a pretty intimate relationship with the people who are building our devices. That's one of the ways that we can keep our reliability high—by working with people we can trust. So, I have confidence that if we make a mistake, they're going to catch it. Shaughnessy: That's one of the things fabrica- tors always say. "We wish the designers would talk to us early in the design." Schulte: Here at Cadwell, the designers and engineers are the ones who are ordering the assembly, or ordering the boards, and so we get to make that call on who's building what, and who is assembling what. It's more engi- neering-driven rather than from up on high saying, "We've got keep the costs of these boards down, send them to China." That's not really a driving factor around here. It's actu- ally a small enough company that I can walk downstairs and talk to the CEO if I want to. Shaughnessy: I know a lot of fabricators are considering getting into flex because it's more profitable. Schulte: It's only in the last year or so that I've started building flex designs, so I can't really speak to that directly. It seems to me they're pretty simple, really, at least in my recent designs. Especially when compared to a multilayer rigid design. The flex designs are mostly just a couple of connectors, some cop- per, adhesive and polyimide tape. There aren't any compo- nents other than connectors on the designs that I've done lately. But it has allowed us to tighten up the dimensions of the hous- ing that we're wrapping around Figure 2: Jarrod is a wood- worker in his spare time.