Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1367446
MAY 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 31 Matties: How do people access these hand- books? Is it membership only or is this some- thing that they purchase? Tell us a little bit how the industry can take advantage of these. Rowe: ey're products just like our standards, and they're available in the same formats. Matties: Regarding committees with the zero identifier, do they have a written mission state- ment, goal, or purpose? Rowe: Yes. Each one has a charter and that's available on our website. Matties: Okay, great. What committee has the most attention from the industry right now? Crawford: Yes, that's a good question. I think it ebbs and flows. Right now, I think it might be one of John's documents because we don't have necessarily anything out right now for me. Perry: I'll answer this for both design and fab- rication at the same time, and this is for the arena we call ultra-fine features which includes ultra-high-density interconnect (HDI), addi- tive and semi additive processing. ose are all buzzwords for one big bucket that refers to circuit boards with very fine, very small con- ductor width and spaces—"line and spacing" as you oen hear—where you've got conduc- tor widths and they're spaces that are below 50 microns in width and BGA packages below 75-micron pitch. Our design standards like IPC-2226A for HDI currently only go down to 50-micron spacing. ey don't address ones below that. And the IPC-6010 performance specifications such as IPC-6012, IPC-6013 and IPC-6018, they presently don't deal with these very ultra-fine, ultra HDI features, either. We've got some groups getting together now that are going to build proposals for updates to both the design standards and the board per- formance specifications to address these very small features. Some of these are so small that some of the traditional ways that you would test and evaluate them in production lot test- ing, such as inspection of microsection evalu- ations, can't really be done within large pro- duction runs. With these really small lines and spaces, we are looking toward more electrical- based, performance-based testing. We need new printed board design and performance standards, not only for design rules and how to accept those features in a fabricated printed board, but also how to properly test for them. e traditional way of testing is going to get more difficult the smaller these feature sizes get. Crawford: If you're looking at just purely mar- ket drivers, a few of the standards I work with are the materials declaration standards. ese are standards that allow companies to commu- nicate within their supply chains and declare what chemicals may exist in their products that they sell to their customers or to consumers— are they in compliance or not? ose standards have been very high in demand for the last year because of new regulations in the EU. Not only is every technology area going to be critical to whoever's working on it, but also, especially from the regulatory landscape, some of these drivers come out of nowhere. Within a year I have had two separate standards groups work- ing on the same issue. I just want to throw that in there. I think that there are a couple of con- crete examples of, "is is really hot right now," with regulatory issues being one of them. Matties: You just said something that's interest- ing: You had two committees working on a sin- gle topic. Were they working on it from differ- ent angles? Crawford: Yes. We have the IPC-1752 materi- als declarations standard and then a separate standard, the IPC-1754 materials and sub- stances declaration for aerospace, defense and other industries; the first one being more gen- eral, the second one being for industries that