Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1428512
64 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2021 Matties: Who drives this in the organization? It's not going to be the quality manager, and it's probably not a skill set that already exists inside a fabricator. You're special in that you went out to create something new, fresh, and innovative, whereas everybody else is in a business cycle, if you will. How do they exchange that mentality, and what do they need to do? Stepinski: From my perspective, this is gen- erally a low-margin business and that's a fun- damental challenge. R&D is expensive, and there always needs to be some dedicated R&D resources to evaluate these technologies. ere is some R&D overseas; one of the biggest PCB shops with R&D is AT&S, with a large organi- zation based in Austria. But you must have a certain scale to afford the R&D resources. It could be a challenge for smaller shops, and there isn't really a blueprint yet in the market. Once you have a case study, everybody can copy it. at seems to be what we do in the PCB industry for anything. I think we just need to get a case study that people have access to, and it will propagate because it's a copy-paste thing. Matties: To make the change into this approach, the payoff obviously must be there. How do you measure that? How do they justify that? Stepinski: In my experience there's a very good internal rate of return on many of these invest- ments. It comes down to just knowing all your costs. In our industry we're oen still 50 years in the past, buying things on price; we don't look at the total cost of quality in many cases. at is because of a lack of knowledge about the process, insufficient understanding of where all the costs are coming from, and all the different subroutines that happen because of poor quality. If you look at the whole pic- ture and think of it holistically, there are a lot of small investments that can be deployed; even in small PCB shops high returns can be achieved that prevent scrap. is it's never been fully industrialized with auto- mation. ere are some tools in the market, but you don't see them spread everywhere. It comes down to whether it's much better to do quick microscopy, or to use a 3D back drill- ing technology that will sense the location of the plane layers internally. If you take these methods and integrate them with serialization using QR codes and things like that, you can map a whole panel and find out how thick your prepreg and your cores are, and know the width and height of the features. It's all about taking this information, throwing it into a data lake like they do in many other industries, then running your analytics, fore- casting, predicting what will happen, and doing some spot validation. It's the next phase in the market. Digital transformation is a very common topic in many industries, but not so much in PCB. ere's a lot of other sensors out there as well. ere are gravimetric techniques that can be used. We hardly use any gravimetric tools to do process control. ere are imaging methods to look at roughness on the surface, to make sure things are clean. ese things have all been developed for other industries, and you see us just starting to incorporate them. Alex Stepinski