Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1392944
JULY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 17 Johnson: Mark, you made the point that the copper pressures are going to be here for five years or more. What other pressures concern- ing materials, raw materials, finished goods, do you see here in the next two years? Goodwin: Glass fabric is still a big one. ere are a lot of industries using glass fabric oth- er than ours. In the UK now there is a major shortage in building materials, and there's a lot of glass fabric in the construction industry. e green economy requires glass fabric for wind turbine blades and these kinds of applications. e pressures are everywhere. Feinberg: Another factor of copper is the use of electroless copper for through-hole intercon- nect. Happy, what's the variation in cost of di- rect metallization vs. electroless copper? Holden: Half the price. Not only half the price, but now we have tests to show it is higher re- liability. In other words, we're going to put in millions of dollars of American taxpayer money to try to figure out what's wrong with electro- less copper when we already know that direct metallization doesn't have the failure mecha- nism of electroless copper. But the U.S. gov- ernment and the U.S. Air Force don't allow di- rect metallization, so until the military switch- es and comes up to the 21st century, they're going to spend taxpayer dollars to try to figure out what's wrong with electroless copper. Goodwin: is is the problem. is time around my belief is that the market is going to have to ac- cept some technology change because this one's going to go on longer than all of the others. e question is when will that thought lodge in peo- ple's minds and they start thinking that we've got to do some things differently now? Johnson: Mark, a lot of this conversation has suggested current standards are behind the times. In your opinion, where should we be right now about laminates and processes? Goodwin: Our belief is specification should be driven by performance, not resin chemistry, for a start. at could be performance in many ways—reliability, electrical, thermal—but as long as the chemistry is, should we say, envi- ronmentally and health and safety compliant, that should be le with the polymer chemists to deal with. It's performance that is interesting to every- body but, from my perspective, that's not any- thing to do with the supply chain. On the sup- ply chain question, I still don't think people are grasping that there is a fundamental change this time, and this is just the first wave. e second wave is once we've got all this 5G infrastructure, smart people will build lots of devices to talk to each other. When IoT happens, everything's going to have a print- ed circuit board in it, and that all requires an interconnect of some sort. At the moment the interconnect of choice in our industry is copper. is story is just so much bigger than our in- dustry. at's the bit that some people aren't getting. We've all been here before when our industry has had a bit of a crunch and that's been sorted out by adjustments in capacity, but we are now competing with other indus- tries. And these industries are prepared to pay more, or they have easier fulfillment require- ments for the suppliers than our industry does. We must give our suppliers reasons to do busi- ness with us. Johnson: Is now a good time to be getting into this industry? Goodwin: Yes, if everybody accepts what's go- ing on and understands that, in the end, we're all going to be paying more for our electron- ics. We've had a deflationary cycle in this busi- ness for 30 years or more. China has been ex- porting deflation. My feeling is that wave has hit the back of the pool and it's coming back the other way now, and we're going to have in- flation driven into our business for a period of