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34 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2021 MivaTek Global will be an- nouncing a live web demonstra- tion date in the coming weeks. Johnson: What can you tell us about the next offering from Miva Technologies? Hogan: Our new offering will go way beyond the cur- rent concept of direct imag- ing. It is a broad re-think- ing of the notion of digital imaging to establish tools for the factory floor that allow us- ers to correlate multiple pro- cesses in a highly efficient ap- proach to make wider process windows and total process control a reality. Miva Technologies has been very active in development through a span of products from PCB to microelectronics. For example, at the University of California's Center for Environ- mental Implications of Nanotechnology we are now producing 2-micron line and space for ad- ditive technologies. The registration challenges we faced in substrate imaging were the catalyst to this new technology we will be introducing. Johnson: If readers are starting to work with some of the newer exotic materials and ap- plications, especially those that are sensitive to dimensional stability—some of them are quite flexy—that becomes critical in this case, doesn't it? Hogan: Yes. Our thought process originates from trends we see in PCB and our experience in mi- croelectronics. The requirements and consider- ations are of the two markets which are starting to collapse into each other. The densities are get- ting tight. The early materials, FR-4, pretty much move linearly. If you are in the press, that's go- ing to have a coefficient of expansion and it's go- ing to move a certain amount. It is pretty predic- tive as a system. But the new exotic materials with exotic prepregs, copper weights, and the de- mands that the circuit board industry has today, it is not linear, and it is not as predictive. Couple the material set is- sues with increased drill and line/space density and you have an unsolvable scaling equation. Miva's new techni- cal direction will provide the tools to solve the equation. Johnson: What is the general approach you are using? Hogan: As you know, direct im- aging systems already collect a lot of data through vision sys- tems and a literal measure- ment of every panel processed. The issue with most systems is granularity of the data (resolution), direct ex- perience with adaptive software development, or the limitations of the PCB design due to the non-linearity issue that is beginning to present itself. Miva's new technology will approach the problem more holistically with involvement of all affected processes in the solution. Too often the factory floor is littered with equipment that has blinders on. The modern factory floor can directly interact with other processes that also collect data; to have total process control, data collection must be integrated. Johnson: That is the cutting edge of the Hetero- geneous Integration Roadmap, isn't it? Hogan: The CHIPS consortium at UCLA is just an outstanding organization for futuristic de- velopment; it's been a big investment for a company of our size to make. We became Plat- inum Members of the consortium, but we have already altered our paradigm of thinking on where we need to go from a technological per- spective. We must step up and build the re- search sources internally to capitalize on that. But we did not stop during the pandemic; we worked around the clock. We built machines, developed a whole new technology, and ad- vanced the company without the benefit of air travel and in-person meetings. Obviously, this year was challenging across the board from a logistics point of view, but Brendan Hogan