Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1140547
JULY 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 95 ment suppliers, such as Viking, to contribute and help us meet this challenge. Matties: You started as a design business. Are you still providing design services? Johnston: I bought the business out in 2000 and focused solely on manufacturing antenna PCBs, so we rebranded the company as Track- wise. We are AS9100 accredited for the manu- facturing of products using printed circuit tech- nology. Generally, the first conversation with a new client is, "Here's a wire harness. Tell us what it would look like in flex." Our design re- quirements and needs have come back to full, so we have readopted the name Trackwise De- signs and are changing our AS9100 accredita- tion to include design and manufacturing. Matties: What is the primary motivation for customers to come here? Johnston: Either to save weight and space from their current wire offering or to get more functionality into the same space. Sometimes, those two trends combine. Matties: But it's more on a large-scale format; you're not looking at building small flex. Johnston: We are deliberately declining any of what we would consider to be standard. Matties: You can get that anywhere. What you are offering is unique. Are you the only shop offering this with your patented process? Johnston: Yes. Matties: There must be an incredibly large mar- ket for you. Johnston: This has been one of both challenges and opportunities. In theory, the total address- able market is wherever wire is used. We have smart buildings putting sensors into walls, medical devices, and electric vehicles, which is a very interesting growing market for us as well as industrial and resistive and conductive circuits for heating various aerospace and in- dustrial applications. Matties: Does a typical customer look for de- sign services, or do they already have a design? Johnston: The initial conversation is to hand us a wire harness and tell them what it would look like in flex. But because a wire harness is so linked up with the system, touches lots of different equipment, and is a 3D geometry, etc., ultimately, the design will be done by the OEM rather than us. But certainly, the initial phase and convincing of the benefits start with the design being done by Trackwise. Matties: And the benefits are obvious. Are they already looking to eliminate weight or add functionality? Johnston: Yes, and if you imagine a bundle of wires with 30 conductors, you know approxi- mately where in the circumference each indi- vidual wire is. However, in a PCB, you know to the nearest few microns where each conduc- tive track is, that precision and repeatability has great ENC performance and predictability benefits, amongst many others. Matties: So you were doing a lot of antennas initially. We see antennas being printed on al- most any surface these days. How are you ad- dressing that? Johnston: Our main market is still on Teflon and PTFE boards because that remains the in- dustry-leading substrate for low-loss and very tightly controlled Dk, but we always say we're etchers of copper. We've etched antennas on polyimide, polyester, and a lot of things. We're etchers rather than additive, so that is one of the confusions these days with the PCB. It was probably a good description when it was first coined, but it's now a little confusing with the arrival of additive manufacturing, which is a printed circuit approach. One of the other advantages of a PCB is that it can be flexible, which, coupled with its planar nature, makes it entirely suitable to being em-