Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1295812
72 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2020 back and forth, as opposed to doing it in silos today? We still have the same problem there. Finally, there are three technological areas. Perhaps the biggest focus areas are system-in- package (SiP) options, and where that's going over the next 10–15 years: 3D and 3D intercon- nect, and wafer-level packaging at the wafer- level, fan-in, and fan-out. It also covers mod- ule system integration and different substrates. That's my quick overview. Johnson: How can people access it? Wesling: On our website at pwesling.com/hir, you can pick out any chapter. In addition, there is a PDF of the full roadmap (>600 pages), or you can unzip it on your machine and have it locally with a full text search, which is kind of handy. It's the way I structure conference pro- ceedings. You can also find a video overview that was prepared for ECTC and broadcast in June; it's a six-hour webinar with an index. For example, if you want to see what's going on with single- and multi-chip packaging, you can skip to the 176 th minute, which will show a 10-minute summary by the head of that working group. We also have nine one-hour video over- views of many of the chapters that are more in- depth, and we're still working on similar videos for the other chapters. Johnson: Some portions of the HIR directly apply to PCB fabrication; not all of them do, but some come pretty close. How is this road- map intended to be used by the industry? Wesling: There are four different groups that we see using this. First, research labs that need to look into the 10-year or 15-year period could use it. As we find out what they're doing, then we can reflect it every year or two in the roadmap and see what's integrating with other stuff. Second, the academic com- munity could review it as well, such as Ph.D. students, depending on the projects on which they're working. Third, corporations that are either suppliers to this or users of it will want to keep an eye on it. They don't want to end up down a blind alley somewhere, working on a technology that does not seem to be getting support. Fourth, technologists can use it to ask, "Where should my career go in the next 10 years? If I'm working on high-level PCBs or things like that for power electronics, where do I see that integration for automotive electron- ics and 400-volt power distribution? Where is that going?" We monitor these four communities because that's who could use this roadmap. Our next roadmap is supposed to come out soon. This is a large group of volunteers. But the idea is that we'll take the pre-competitive information that we can glean from our 400 or so volun- teers and put it into updated roadmaps with, for example, new projections and issues with line width, or whatever it is we're tracking, and where it's going. We see it working for those four communities and being an interac- tive resource that's freely available, so we hope it gets passed around. Johnson: A lot of information on the roadmap tends to be related to integrated circuits (ICs), which makes sense since much of the technol- ogy is now inside the packaging. Paul Wesling