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APRIL 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 63 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. You're just going to need low-stress chem- istries, is really what it comes down to, and some different prepping chemistries, and dif- ferent etching chemistries because of adhe- sion. But the other thing I would suggest is that additive technology is not that far away from what you're already doing. It is not this com- plete change; well, it is, because we're adding instead of subtracting. But you're still using a lot of your same traditional pathways to bring the technology 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 is the capi- tal cost of upgrading a factory, consumption of specialized chemistries, and direct materials; it really depends on how the additive technology 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 features that additive can achieve, designers can mean- ingfully reduce cost by reducing board size, eliminating layers, and running fewer lamina- tion cycles. If a standard 18" x 24" panel origi- nally 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 cycles, and the panel is cut up into a greater quantity of parts—like how components have been miniaturized to reset profit margins by getting more parts out of the same materials. e result is cost savings and a reduced form factor that may benefit the final system in which the final PCBA is placed. Johnson: Same question, but on your operat- ing costs for an additive line. Can you see that reaching parity with subtractive in the future at some point? Brassard: As Meredith indicated earlier, we do not have a separate factory where we're doing additive manufacturing. Ninety percent of the processing that we do for an additive board is identical to what we do for a subtractive board. In some cases, we will realize the traces by etching and in other cases we'll grow the traces. Todd Brassard