Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1392944
JULY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 e fact is, we can sell every square meter of laminate we make; pricing in Asia now is high- er than pricing in the U.S., and higher than pric- ing in Europe. Certainly, when you volume-ad- just, the size of the orders you're processing is a better business in Asia than it is in the West right now for the Asian laminators. Everybody in the U.S. and Europe says, "It cannot be that laminate prices have gone up like this." At least in Asia, they work with a commodity mentali- ty, so they know when markets are tight or im- balanced or to expect increases, and they'll do things to mitigate it. ey will try to stockpile, and manage supply and demand. ey'll try to give you bigger orders. ey'll try and give you visibility. One thing we're still not getting enough of is any kind of visibility from a European and U.S. customer base, and that doesn't make it any easier. In fact, it makes it a whole lot worse, and I keep hearing people talk about how we'll bring it back onshore. Who's going to make that investment? Where are they going to get their raw materials? It's not happening. Offer- ing quick-turn manufacturing solutions in key regional locations close to customers makes sense to me. But having a volume manufactur- ing facility—why now? Because in real lam- inate volume terms, there is no volume any- where but Asia. We're saying we don't want to make rigid laminate anymore because we can sell all our capacity making thin laminate, and just look at the relative price today. Rigid laminate is still underpriced. Feinberg: And that's another factor. We have this pull to raise prices that has been delayed. Once that rubber band snaps… Holden: Why should boards be 0.062"? Goodwin: You tell me. I tried 20 years ago in Eu- rope to get people away from 1.6 mm, 0.062". Why not make them all on 1.2 mm and get rid of two plies of glass fabric? ere are no edge connectors anymore. It's not like the old days where it all used to be driven by edge connec- tors. at's all gone. e product is still rig- id enough to support the components, and it saves two pieces of glass fabric. Will anybody do it? No. Holden: People are going to say, "What's the eas- iest way to cut costs or material usage?" Well, make the board thinner. What's important is the distance between signal and ground or pow- er and ground. If you arbitrarily just put cores in there to make it 1.6 millimeter or two millime- ters, then you're just wasting money on some- thing that is not buying you any performance. Johnson: Do you see this confluence creating a drive for new technologies or new manufac- turing techniques? Moving to additive rather than subtractive is one way to save, it seems. Changing the thought patterns with respect to laminate specification is another. en there's redesigning so you're using less material, cop- per, or laminate by having fewer layers. Goodwin: e technologies exist today, but the question is how to get the market to adopt them. ere are things that we could all do to- Mark Goodwin