Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1494936
50 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2023 started to utilize it also. Now you see more military designs that are acquir ing HDI or complex and ultra-complex via structures. Now, many people say producing HDI costs more money; Happy Holden, who wrote the book on HDI years ago, says it actually saves you money. Where are your thoughts on that? You must look at it from a value standpoint. It's like a rigid-flex board. If you look at the flex piece and the rigid piece sepa- rately, it's easy to conclude that the rigid-flex board is obvi- ously more expensive. But you could be saving your money in space and increased reliabil- ity because you're not assem- bling additional connectors, so you're gaining real estate on the board. at's how you save money—by taking advantage of the technology. One has to look at saving money from a total system perspective. to make that investment and purchase a sput- tering unit. We did all that before we had a single customer for it. e Averatek process was the same thing. We made this investment because it makes sense; then we'll go find the customers. I would say 80% of our investments from a technology standpoint are driving toward what customers are looking for, or because of quotes we have to no-bid right now. Are the customers moving to HDI for functionality and/or cost reduction? It's functionality for sure. But aerospace defense is always a late adopter. e world has been doing HDI for about 10 years, or even earlier for consumer products. From there, some of it ended up in networking boards, as BGA patterns got very dense. When you have thousand-IO BGAs, you must have a way to fan it out. en it ended up in microvias. But about five or six years ago, the military