Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1309864
38 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2020 ed interconnect that I've ever done, whether it's HDI, etc. There are people who could explain that, and there's even someone who wants to write a paper on that subject matter. That will go be- yond what my understanding is. But my prac- tical application is that these were all done with conventional DC; these weren't even pulse plated. We have high throw pulse lines. I didn't want to run the first test vehicles in the high throw pulse because I wanted to under- stand the mechanism. I expected every one of them to fail. When they didn't over and over and over again, we realized we have some- thing really amazing here. This is convention- al plating solutions, and conventional throw- ing can handle this type of interconnect. It's a similar phenomenon with via filling with the resin. Matties: What system did you use—an auto- mated plating line or dip tanks? Dickson: The very first test was manual plating tanks, but for two and a half years we've been running all of our test vehicles through our standard plating lines with no change in the plating cycles. We run them just like we would a through-hole. The only change is compensat- ing for the increased surface area when there are very deep slots near each other, which is a pretty simple compensation. Johnson: Just a different order? Dickson: The sequencing is similar. The VeCS and VIPPO processes are almost the same. The only additions are the bottom-rout and cross- rout steps to remove the plating on the sides. Matties: Joe, you've been in this industry now for 40 some years. What are some of the things that really stick out in your memory as signifi- cant or surprising in our industry? Dickson: The biggest surprise is how little influ- ence the PCB industry has on technology inno- vation. You hear chip designers going smaller and smaller and how they want to move into the next generation of AI. They need mobile, regional AI systems that are so advanced, and it never seems to percolate down to the PCB until after most of the technology is already mature. Then, how are we going to assemble this? How are we going to put this on a PCB? We've advanced the manufacturing capability of subtractive interconnects, or subtractive in- ner layers, and plated through-hole to pretty amazing levels, but we've never had anything really jump over the top and replace the tech- nology. We're still buying laminate materials and trying to put these 3D structures laminated to- gether and make them into flat 2D structures. That is so surprising to me that technology has never evolved beyond that. It stayed that same way for all these years. We make an amazing technology for what we do, but there's no dis- ruptive jump over the top. That's where I see VeCS and some of the other technologies. We have an additive inner layer process that we call embedded inner layers, which isn't like any additive process today. When we brought it to customers, they asked, "How do you do this? This doesn't make any sense." And we responded, "You need this be- cause subtractive technology can only go so far." MSAP and some of the newer technolo- gies are evolving, but they're still just evolu- tionary maturities of current technology. Su- per disruptive technologies seem to never real- ly touch this industry, and that's the most sur- prising thing to me. Matties: I agree. A lot of people are still using equipment that's 30 years old. Johnson: Where do you see VeCS technology five years from now? Dickson: For WUS, we're a very large rigid PCB supplier. Including all of our business units, we're one of the biggest in the world. But we don't do a lot of consumer-level products. That's not really our business focus. We're au- tomotive and network and advanced commer- cial PCBs. We see immediate needs for devel- opment in the next-generation network cards