Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1401769
36 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2021 be changing the fabricator that you're going to target this design to because those guys can't do it and he can. It's an intriguing idea. Holden: at's why I think that AI and some of these chips and things like that will provide the soware environment so that once the fabrica- tor puts in his encryption key he can edit, up- date the proprietary information, but every- body can use it not knowing what it is, but how the soware interacts and gets answers to its questions. You're facilitating the communica- tion. Especially if it's part of the EDA tool and you're laying out, routing, and placing parts and things like that, that's when you need an- swers to questions. You may not be able to pick up the telephone to call. Now, I go back to a vertically integrated company where if you had a question like that you just picked it up, you could call down… Joe Clark: You could just walk down the hall. Holden: ... to the next building or walk it down the hall. Now it's on the other side of the world and you don't have that luxury. But you need some way to replace that, because of the sched- ule, you're not going to stop and wait to get the answer. You're going to punt. You're go- ing to pick the best guess that's possible, the way you did it the last time and ask your boss, "What should I do here, boss?" And keep on trekking whether it's right or wrong. Most of the time it's probably not the best guess, but it's the only process in town. We need a better way to facilitate what's going to become more and more complicated, unfortunately, not less complicated. Yeah, because the guys design- ing single-sided boards don't have those. e bad thing about our industry is we're still mak- ing single-sided boards because they're the lowest cost and the technology may be in the semiconductor that's placed on a single-sid- ed board. So, it may replace this 14-layer mul- tilayer and now it's a single-sided board with this SOC. In fact, I've traced the generations of our RISC computers, our big ones from a 14" x 16" 14-layer board to a 4" x 4" MCM, to a 2" x 2" 2+2+2 HDI SLP. Joe Clark: But isn't that what we're going to be dealing with? I mean, the differentiation, the technology is part of the component. e PCBs are just becoming a carrying case.