Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1359517
42 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2021 sitting at our home offices globally now, and you just have to do something different. Shaughnessy: Right. It seems like the work on the committees has just kept on going, despite COVID. Pedersen: ere's been a lot happening. At the same time, Elmatica had its best year ever in 2020. at's amazing. And with all this effort put into IPC, it actually started with automotive and then went through the medi- cal addendum. e spinoff from the medical addendum now is that we are looking into ultra-HDI lev- els, what we call Level D. at's something for the future; it's not far into the future but the near future, almost today. We are a group of people in IPC that is working toward 5–10 micron tracks. Shaughnessy: Wow. Pedersen: Yes. Now we're out to change that to something else. But we see that just during the last, say, two years or so. If you go two or three years back, most of the PCB suppliers had a big struggle if you asked them to go below five-micron tracks. Today, if you go out there, most of them do 50 microns, two mils. ere are enough of them that that can do one mil or 25 microns. at's a big change, just in the last two and a half years. Shaughnessy: at's something else. Well, it's a really good time for the industry, despite all the craziness in the last year. We've seen a lot of companies saying that they ended up doing really well. I understand you're doing more with traceability in the committees. Pedersen: I'm working with the automotive and medical traceability, so it's a big thing there. Since IPC-1782, when they went into revision A, Michael Ford asked me to engage in that and do some jobs for traceability at the PCB level. We didn't come to the final stage. But what they're going to do next is at least, for me, I want to have a case study and see: How can we use the 1782A, the trace- ability standard, at the PCB level? How does it fit in? en maybe I have a column in your maga- zine, or a webinar. Well, not many of us have talked too much about the traceability of the PCB. If you think about it, automotive and medical should require a full traceability down to the PCB level and the materials there. It doesn't. at's something we need to work with. As I said, that's a case study that would bring us closer to where we are and see if we need to update that standard again. Elmatica CEO Didrik Bech (left) posed as a FedEx delivery person to hand a special envelope to Jan Pedersen. Click here to watch their creative video.