Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1116895
MAY 2019 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 31 it depends a lot on demand. It's hard to find new vendors for copper foil. Capacity that was dedicated to electronic circuit boards has gone to battery production. Some dedicated suppli- ers have gone out of business, and there has been some consolidation. It is a very low-mar- gin business as well; all the copper foil suppli- ers are competing on the foil that's going into high-end products because they can eke out a bit more profit there. The glass business is a similar story to copper. The price of glass hasn't changed very much. In fact, it has gone down over the years for style-to-style comparisons, which has allowed most of us to keep our per square foot price of FR-4 down. But a lot of the companies, in this business, have chosen to not develop products on the low end because there's no profit in it. No matter what the glass cost is, it's unprofit - able. And the new innovations in glass cloth are much more expensive. For instance, quartz glass, which is the lowest loss glass fabric you can buy, is over 10 times as much as E-glass; everything else falls somewhere in between. We have gone from a commodity-based raw materials supply to suppliers that are trying to survive by making specialty materials. Wheth- er the resins are PPO, cyanate ester, polybuta- diene, polybenzoxazine, etc., all of those are very low-volume engineering thermosets that have been adopted to our business. In most cases, we're not the biggest part of their cus- tomer base, but we're still a significant part of those suppliers' customer base that they can afford to develop new products. That means that we are all using a supply chain that is not set up for huge volumes of inventory and in- stant access to a never-ending flow of material. This has created a very crowded space at the top of that technology pyramid. This is one of the things that drives the fact that we need to know the end users and their customers as well as the markets that drive change. Are they telling us the true story? And not because our customers and their custom- ers are lying to us, but because these things are all projected based on assumptions that some- times are true but sometimes not. When you go to a glass supplier, the question is, "We love your E-glass and use it for our FR-4. It's per- fect, and we can count on it. We also like the low Dk glass that you developed 10–15 years ago. We started using it about two years ago, but we need something a little better. What can you do for us?" These people trying to report to their boss what they're going to do look at you like you're from another planet because they don't even want to ask the question, "How much are you going to buy and when?" They know we don't have a good answer (laughs). It's a waste of time to ask us that question. They go straight to the end users now. Laminators are talking to end users, but so are raw material suppliers because they're trying to get a handle on how much time they have to do this, and when they get it to the market, when are you going to buy some. Our challenge is driven by cost and the supply chain. We are no longer in a commodi- ty zone. Everyone in the supply chain, because of what has happened in terms of transferring to lower cost areas of the world, is hugely risk- averse. They are looking for the next thing that's going to disrupt the status quo. Highly magnified images of various types of solid compounds used in the production of epoxy resins.