Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1361971
APRIL 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 81 customers in Israel from the medical and mili- tary industries who have been working with us since day one. It's a vested interest. ey want us to be better, and they want us to be up to date in terms of technology because they are getting better. As their competition is getting tougher and their market demands get higher, it only makes sense that we combine forces as early as we can in the design phase. We do not take these relationships for granted. Einhorn: We're a company that really likes the challenges. is means that, oen, a lot of our competitors won't take on projects that are too complicated, but we believe that these chal- lenges make us much better and expand our capabilities. is is one of the reasons why customers are staying with us for so many years and why new, high-end customers are approaching us. Johnson: Speaking of the U.S. market, as an Is- rael-based company, what's your competitive advantage? Why do the U.S. companies work with you over other options? Eliya: In terms of production and technology, we are serving the high-mix, low volume, high- performance markets. We are producing rigid- flex, rigid, ceramic, high power and high-fre- quency boards up to 120 gigahertz. at means that we are working with a variety of resin sys- tems and materials from all over the world— from Korea, Japan, the U.S., and Germany; from the IC substrate industry, the PCB in- dustry, the flex industry, and from the hybrid PTFE base vendors. Just to emphasize this complexity, if you take a rigid-flex board made of polyimide, and you press laminate with an external layer of PTFE, it's very difficult to have a process window that supports such a stackup because PTFE and other kinds of a Teflon® are very so material, and polyimide is a very rigid material. You need to drill and rout it, you need to plate it, you need to learn the behavior of the material (CTE impacts dimensional stabil- ity, etc.) before and aer lamination. It's a full process learning, all the way to the PCBA (as- sembly step) and, sometimes, even field envi- ronment impacts. All the above should match the reliability required by our customers. Remember, the variety of applications we offer to our customers is almost unlimited. We are talking about coin, cavity, air cavity, heat sink, and high power solutions and more, all in rigid and flex-rigid stackups. When you are combining our variety of high-end technolo- gies with our knowledge base of many differ- ent raw materials and the ability to integrate all in the same stackup, you see what makes us very special. Before getting into the 1-mil line/ space we saw the benefit of buried passive, space-wise, for our customers. So, we went and implemented several technologies for that purpose. For several years now we have been doing buried capacitors, buried resistors, bur- ied heaters, and buried thermocouples inside the PCB. It's easy to see how you can minimize things with buried passives and 1-mil line/ space. And we have more plans on our road- map for miniaturization that we will reveal a few months from now. Einhorn: Our roadmap is very ambitious and has some game-chang- ing milestones. It is im- portant to say that we are constantly "checking the pulse" either with our customers' needs, new material, or new capabil- ities. It is safe to say that today we are ahead of the curve. Johnson: You've wrapped some services and customer programs around that technical ca- pability; tell me about that. Einhorn: In that manner, we are doing "verti- cal integration." We recently added a design Arik Einhorn