Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1265351
62 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2020 Berntson: There are a couple of responses to that. One is just supporting our current cus- tomer base. And the good news there is when you're a high-end, high-quality supplier, there aren't a lot of problems. There are mostly opportunities to engage with customers on new programs, as well as existing business. But most of our customers are also in a tough spot right now. They don't have a ton of extra engineering resources with which to pursue new programs. We're in this mutual "stagna- tion" in terms of new programs. But the good news is—like any good company when you're growing, and you're bringing new materi- als science to the market—there's a good fun- nel of activity that's already underway. We've been able to maintain significant engagement remotely with our customers not only on sup- plying their current needs but also on their new technologies. Some examples to that point: As people have ramped their ventilator production, they may have needed help with profiles or improving their line throughput. We've been able to do a lot of that work remotely. We've also been able to complete trials on new materials that have been underway around the world, including in China, Taiwan, Mexico, and France. We've been able to continue the trials of new mate- rials and advance those programs. And finally, just in terms of spreading the word, we have a great deal of technical knowledge, which we want to spread from one engineer to another and to our customers. We used to spread the word through trade shows through technical seminars in addi- tion to face-to-face customer visits. We have moved that communication online. Our Indium Insider Series, which we launched in the last few weeks, serves that purpose. We've built a whole list of topics to keep the program going. We're still able to do an amaz- ing amount of work with customers, despite the fact that we can't cultivate new customers quite as easily. Matties: Do you see some shifts in what your customers are looking for? Has this created any changes to the product roadmap? Berntson: I can't say that it's a change. Network- ing overall continues to be a huge driver of a lot of innovation. For example, there's innova- tion in fiber optics, transceivers, edge comput- ing chips, and all the IC module advancement that's happening for servers. That's driving innovation in semiconductors and semicon- ductor packaging and the counterpart of the 5G phones. These are all well-documented trends, including the move to heterogeneous integra- tion and all the needs for advanced materials to accommodate that assembly process; con- sidering beam-forming and all the power that ends up in the top of these towers; and figur- ing out how to manage the thermals in that application and the ability even to do the old standards, like getting a good, low-voiding bot- tom termination component joint. All of that is going on right now. The urgency with which those challenges need to be solved has prob- ably gone up. What I find fascinating is that the semi- conductor industry is super robust right now. Whether you're at the front-end fabs and fab starts or anywhere along the supply chain, semiconductors are booming right now. I look at that and ask, "What's driving that?" A lot of it is this desire for everyone to make sure they don't run out of chips when the rebound hap- pens. There's some pantry loading going on, but it's also because we were at this innova- tion inflection point, and now everyone wants to gear-up and get their product out ahead-of- We've been able to maintain significant engagement remotely with our customers not only on supplying their current needs but also on their new technologies.