Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1330321
36 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2021 Hogan: Thirty-five years ago, my first project in the industry was working with dry film solder mask, smallest pads were 50 mils not microns. I have immense respect for everybody in the circuit board industry because it's the millions and millions of hours of circuit board engineers working and toiling away that make the iPhone interconnect possible, but somehow Steve Jobs gets all the credit. That's okay; it's part of our deal in the circuit board industry—people are not amazed at how our industry has evolved. My kids look at a new iPhone and say, "Look, they doubled the resolution of the screen, it's five times faster, it's got more memory and it's only $1200, isn't that great?" That's the sum total of the amazement they have. They don't think about how it came to pass that Apple manufactures 63 million iPhones per quarter at an almost 100% yield (laughs). But where we live here at MivaTek, we see both ends of the spectrum. We see the issues of the microelectronics guys and the circuit board guys, and we essentially use the same technol- ogy. So, we can see where these things are go- ing, over a decade or more, to collide and in- termingle in a way that I don't think the mar- ket is really seeing yet. Johnson: Does data security play a part? Hogan: Absolutely. There are two sides of this coin. The first thing that matters to OEMs is the design data, the CAM data, the raw Gerber file—how to build something. The second is the know-how of building this unique product—that's the IP that needs protecting. Data security is important but the majority of the data that we're collecting is the result of manipulations to their initial design data. By the time we take action on the data file it doesn't resemble their data file any- more because we generate our own proprie- tary file formats; in general terms you could not reverse engineer into the design of the product. Johnson: That makes sense. After all, by the time it gets to your machine, really, it's just a string of Cartesian coordinates. Hogan: That's right. Our data doesn't contain anything about the finished product. It has no correlation to reality. It's correlated to a job with several other pieces of information; sep- arating the lock from the key is the security element. That's one of the beauties of the heterogeneous program, and that is one of the reasons why so many security-driven compa- nies are members of CHiPS. If you think about how defense electronics are manufactured, at some point all the information is in one place right now: how to make the chip, how to assemble the chip. With the heterogeneous approach, the lock is separated from the key. Very complex integrated systems will be manu- factured with true compartmentalization. Johnson: It's going to be very interesting to watch what happens after the 2020 presiden- tial election process has completed. Hogan: Hard to say at this point which path the country will choose regardless of who is elect- ed. It's unfortunate that with the access to in- formation we have as Americans so little of it is policy driven. Facts now have agenda and perspective—they are not just facts. The last four years have bluntly tried to deal with serious trade issues on a global politi- cal scale. I think more than anything it dem- onstrated just how difficult global trade prob- lems are to solve. It is a complex problem that must encompass technology transfer, IP pro- tections aside from basic economic interests. The main outcome, I think, for the large-scale producers is a recognition that diversification We can see where these things are going, over a decade or more, to collide and intermingle in a way that I don't think the market is really seeing yet.