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10 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2022 Feature Interview by Nolan Johnson I-CONNECT007 Recently, Eddie Mok, product innovation development AVP at WUS, spoke with us at length about the state of the materials mar- ket from the perspective of a fabricator. In this excerpt from the conversation, Eddie details some example interactions between what materials, design, and manufacturing bring to the ultimate goal of meeting your design spec- ifications and manufacturing costs. It is clear from this conversation that materials and tech- nology are increasingly interconnected. Nolan Johnson: Eddie, what's your background? Eddie Mok: I've been with WUS for 16 years, and before that I was at Nelco for 15 years. I'm still working with materials, but I'm applying it now. While materials are changing, there's room for more. And, because of emerging advanced technology, such as VeCS and others in development, that's where we realize that we still need all the material manufacturers to offer our customers innovative PCB solutions, plus we need different versions of the material to support the new fabrication methods. And yet, material alone is not enough. Johnson: VeCS is a great example of innovative developments in fab. Besides additive technol- ogies, of course. Happy Holden has been say- ing, "is is the next thing. is is the thing that's going to replace HDI. is gives a lot of capability to designers." Mok: I've been saying something similar to cus- tomers, "Imagine when HDI came along 25 years ago and people said, "What is that? It's too expen- sive. It doesn't work." Over time and refinement, HDI established itself as a key technology. Now, hopefully, VeCS is another type of interconnect solution that causes the next paradigm shi. We seem to be getting a lot of traction. The Materials Connection