Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1392944
74 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2021 have the greatest amount of lead time right now. Is that the case? Kelly: It all depends on what high-end special- ty material you're referring to. Some of it de- pends on where it's being shipped. As men- tioned earlier, those lead time issues may be because it's going into certain countries where there are container shortages or the ports are full; for the most part, it's just across the board. Right now, our issue is the ports are full. A ship was supposed to land five days ago, and it's out in the ocean waiting for a spot. So, I wouldn't just say it's HSD material or high specialty products. Matties: In past conversations, you were refer- encing new products for some higher-end ap- plications from Isola. Give us a quick product update of your portfolio, how that's going, and where you're at. Kelly: We're very excited. I think you spoke to Michael Gay just recently about IS550H; that's getting a lot of momentum out in the industry. It's a very exciting product for the commercial sales team. TerraGreen 400G is a platform of products that should be out in the next sever- al months, and we are excited about that one as well. TerraGreen 400G is being qualified and tested at numerous customers and OEMs who are excited about the capabilities of these products. ey are being produced right now and we look forward to seeing the momentum build behind those products, because so far, the early adoption even exceeds our expecta- tions, especially on IS550H. Matties: And what do you have in the pipeline? What are you looking to in the future? Kelly: We spend a lot of our budget on R&D and we call it big R. We have research and de- velopment, as a lot of our competition does. We must continue to be good business part- ners as we look at alternative materials. We do spend a fair amount of money on big R, which is looking forward to the next five to 10 years and where we think the industry wants and needs to be. We have scientists not only in Sin- gapore but here in the United States who are working together to develop those materials. We always have at least something in the pipe- line; we're asking, "What do we want to do in the next two years? Where do we want to be in four?" And then we have a couple of scien- tists that look out five-plus years to determine where the industry is going to be and what it will need. Matties: at must be interesting. And what do they see five years out? Kelly: I can't tell you that, but I will tell you it is interesting for two reasons. ere are differ- ent processing techniques, so we stay abreast and try to anticipate, "Will there be significant changes to the way material will be processed in the future?" Obviously, there are character- istics, such as signal integrity and thermals that we constantly look at based on where we think the technology is going. Isola also works close- ly with a handful of OEMs, on what their needs will be over the next five-plus years, to ensure that we're staying on the cutting edge of tech- nology. Johnson: Travis, regarding the pressures from copper, as we were discussing earlier, how do you see that pressure influencing what hap- pens with materials? We hear about the need to move to materials that don't have copper at- tached, for example. Kelly: Constraints spark innovation, right? Anytime you have a constraint in an industry that's not going to alleviate soon, that typically sparks innovation. We have spent a lot of time talking about the next material if copper con- tinues to be constrained, what processes could be unique, where you don't have to use the same amount of copper that we're using today.