Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1116895
92 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 Johnson: For you to do your work well as a ma- terial manufacturer, you talk to key teams and involve expert customers to help guide you in the product development. The 80/20 rule prob- ably comes into play here where 80% of the product is made by 20% of the companies. The other 80% of the companies are probably not in a place to be serving as a key expert for you, but they still need to be looking at the mate- rials that are available and figuring out what works for them. Senese: Right. When Panasonic's electroma- terials division first ventured into this type of research, we called the group "research and marketing." We had three people 12–15 years ago. I was not with Panasonic then, but I hap- pened to know the people involved, and the team was targeting one specific type of prod- uct and a couple of big OEMs, so they could drive it. It was not even 80/20; it was like a 95/5, and five was all the bandwidth we had. It has become a bigger program now and has expanded around the globe. We have research and marketing people in all the global areas, and in the areas that we don't cover, we travel a significant amount. As products become successful and custom- ers look at the product and say, "Well, that's working for them. I need to try that product," we can't talk to every single person who's de- veloping a product in the segment. The 5G are- na is a perfect example (laughs) because there are a lot of new companies and types of tech- nology, and it's very hard to figure out at this point, who, what, where, when, and how is this going to roll out over the next 5–10 years. Our bandwidth is expanding by getting more people involved. Realistically, though, we have to narrow our focus to some key players that we think are going to drive the technology. We have a group developing next-generation materials to compensate for the kinds of chips that are going to be put on a substrate. That group of people probably drills down into the top half of the companies that design new ICs. That's a very tough business to predict what's going to happen next. Johnson: I think you're spot on. You can only go so deep into the market that you're going to be able to penetrate proactively. You're going to need designers to reach out to you too. How should a design team become knowledgeable with these products that are in Panasonic's portfolio? Senese: As our products have become more well-known globally, we have expanded our sales force. We have trained specialists. Be- cause we're developing for every segment of the market a little bit at a time, we have peo- ple in charge of the roadmap for each of those areas. And if we get an inquiry through our sales group, we direct it to the specialists. If the inquiry is technical enough, we'll do some sort of a seminar, lunch-and-learn event, face- to-face meeting, or conference call. We try to cover everyone we can. Unique to North America, we also have a distributor that we've been working with for about 10 years. Everybody talks about dis- tributors as value-added partners, but what they're usually talking about is somebody with a warehouse, a shear, and a refrigerator, cut- ting, tooling, stamping, and shipping material. While that's definitely a part of the value-add- ed partnership with the distributor, a higher- level partnership is required when you're deal- ing with so much global NPI. Some customers want to know specific de- tails, including the Dk at 10 GHz of a con- struction that uses 1035 prepreg and a 5-mil core. Twenty years ago, the only person who could answer that question was a fairly high- level OEM marketing person within one of the Panasonic industrial devices materials (Taiwan) .