Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1038326
OCTOBER 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 19 HDI could be our niche. There is no other ad- vanced HDI supplier in the U.S. market that does this advanced level of work profession- ally with all of the latest equipment. The oth- er shops use older equipment. Their process- es are more manual and horizontal. Ours is an automated vertical process. On top of that, it's all green. This line doesn't make one drop of waste; it's all contained in the line. Matties: For such a new facility, what's it like in the quoting process? Stepinski: We are going through our quoting exercises right now with multiple clients. We already have a couple that we are starting with and everything is lining up with our original plan. Matties: Because this is a real data-driven fac- tory, the data that you would get from your customers might not necessarily align. How do you build that bridge? Stepinski: We have to talk to the customers a lot. There's an established process in North America. Everybody basically uses almost the same process—pattern plating, ammonia etch, and HDI. We're pursuing panel plate almost exclusively. We do either panel plate subtrac- tive etch, or SAP—that's it. We offer a modi- fied SAP and an advanced modified or straight- up SAP. We don't have regular alkaline etching with traditional pattern plating. Pattern plating results in 40% to 50% or more copper thick- ness variation on the surface. With panel plat- ing, we are down less than 5%. Thus, when you look at microvias made at GreenSource, you will see every layer of copper is exactly the same thickness. You can't discern it with the human eye. If you look at the rest of the U.S. market, ev- ery layer is a different thickness. This is a ma- jor contributor to the microvia reliability fail- ures that are present in the industry, among many other things. The GreenSource team re- viewed the top 10 items that we—and experts around the world—believe contribute to reli- ability failures. We also looked at cases where there are no reliability failures, like the cell- phone market. We've combined all of these ideas into our facility plan and process selec- Figure 6: The planning and layout of the service walks show the same attention to detail and functional access as elsewhere at GreenSource.