Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1453746
FEBRUARY 2022 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 41 It seems that if we can prepare the material correctly, we can apply copper to anything. If a company can have foresight as to what the future can bring and start to think about their design for manufacturing, and engineering, and how they take the next step to utilize an additive technology, or even use thinner foils, that's a first step into mSAP. Just use some thin- ner foils, and start to baseline your Cpks, and how you can keep going further and further. No one can flip that coin that easily unless their capital expenditure budgets allow for rapid expansion. We're still working at the numbers, but we believe it's somewhere in the realm of a couple million for a small shop that's already in business, just to add a couple of spe- cialty materials, specialty imagers. It comes down to needing low-stress chemis- tries, some different prepping chemistries, and different etching chemistries because of adhe- sion. I would also suggest that additive tech- nology is not that far away from what you're already doing. It is not this complete change; well, it is, because we're adding instead of sub- tracting. But you're still using a lot of your same traditional pathways to bring the tech- nology to bear. Nolan Johnson: Can you foresee the additive process being as economical as subtractive in the future? Is it as economical already? Brassard: Maybe it's not about additive being as economical as subtractive, but rather what new opportunities are opened to migrate a shop toward a more profitable business. Sure, there are cost tradeoffs between subtractive and additive manufacturing. ere are the cap- ital costs of upgrading a factory, consumption of specialized chemistries and direct materials; it really depends on how the additive technol- ogy is applied in product realization. For instance, a designer may take an existing design that needs to drop from 75- to 55-micron traces to achieve the desired fanout for a high density I/O chip. Converting a couple of lay- ers from subtractive to additive processes will allow this, but it's going to be a pure cost adder because nothing else about the design changed to take advantage of the economy of scale that additive can achieve. On the other hand, taking full advantage of the small scales of copper traces and fea- tures that additive can achieve, designers can meaningfully reduce cost by reducing board size, eliminating layers, and running fewer lamination cycles. If a standard 18" x 24" panel originally fit six parts, the new smaller board may fit 80 parts. Dividing the panel cost by 80 rather than six results in per part cost savings. is scenario adds cost for additive, but removes cost by reducing size, layers, and