Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1419905
26 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2021 had come from four or five different lots, but at least everything gets shipped. It doesn't get thrown away. Dickson: Happy, you're dead on. e carriers for assembly and automation in high volume man- ufacturing are fundamentally different than for low volume. Your cost per square centimeter is critical. If you're able to utilize all that material set, your costs go down by a significant mar- gin. To me, that's the fundamental difference between the West and other parts of the world is that people aren't putting in low-cost vol- ume manufacturing. My experience building manufacturing plants outside the West is they are five times the size of the largest plant. When I hear people talking about bringing technology back to the West, I don't think they fully rationalize where technology is going. You put a 300,000-square-foot facility in the United States, for example, in a low-cost region with lots of water. Even still, you're going to spend over a billion U.S. dollars. e high-volume laminate manufacturers will tell you that the quality goes up because they're able to repro- duce very, very high-volume materials. And if you're dealing with high-volume, high-quality materials that are lower cost, you have a huge advantage. But that's just because that's where they put the manu- facturing plants. Johnson: Joe, I'm listening to all this and I'm thinking, there's no way we can keep up. ere's too much. To use my capital expen- diture well, I need to be planning not for what I'm going to be doing now, but what I plan to do with my facility aer that. Dickson: We've been talking a lot about layers above the PCB. Now, if you move down into the PCB, the technologies that are "mature" are, say, 0.2-millimeter drills with a finished hole size of 0.16 millimeters. I think most of the Western manufacturers can do that. at's moving up. ey'll probably get thicker. ere will probably be some power distribution in that so they're going to be able to do that. ose are more traditional manu- facturing. VeCS could benefit them dramati- cally because they could lower the layer count and assist in that. If you move it into the HDI type of technology, you're building facilities that are really expensive, or you're doing small volume. For the Western companies, innovation is in the medium size capabilities. It's in new cus- tomer applications just coming to market. e traditional network suppliers are coming up with their own ASICs. ey're coming up with their own systems-on-chips. ose markets take a while to mature. ere's an entire mar- ket right there for them that won't require a lot of equipment changes, but they're at the bot- tom of the food chain. To stay influential in the design curve, they have to be involved in pre- design chip ecosystems way before a design is started. is is tough as many customers, even new to PCB customers, treat PCBs as a com- modity. is isn't the case with interposers or systems-on-PCBs. ey are created in parallel.