Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1499197
34 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2023 be very involved with their customers' design teams and help guide them through that pro- cess. It will make it a lot easier for both parties, and result in a board that's more cost-effective in the long haul. Do you see substrates in ASC's future? Is that a direction you think you want to head? Yes, we do. We have some testing going on in that realm, and package substrate demand won't be filled by the U.S. market—it's just too large; Asia will always have that market. But there are areas where IP becomes a concern, where it's defense-oriented, where they need that source stateside, or at least in North Amer- ica. From that perspective, that's really where we will have a play in the marketplace for pack- age substrates. How close are you to doing package substrates? We're starting to build some demonstrators. Do you find you need to hire toward new skill sets for the UHDI work, or can you move existing staff to this area? We're moving people over. Ironically, the tech- nology behind A-SAP™ has been in the industry now for a while. To do ultra-fine lines requires discipline and handling and special techniques for that. But once you have that in place, you can get someone off the street and train them. You can take someone that has been building boards in our facility and bring them in. I've recently brought in two gentlemen to work with me to get to that level of expertise, and it's going along quite well. How has offering the Averatek process, being able to move toward UHDI, changed the dollars per board metric? So many PCB shops are finding themselves squeezed down into single-digit margins. Pricing is just razor-thin. If you go into ultra-high-density interconnects with the same mentality that this industry has had for the last 30 years, you're making a mis- take because there is a learning curve. You can- not give it away and you do yourself a disser- vice if you do. At some point, we need to have a technology and a market that we can make money on. e North American printed circuit board operations need to do more R&D, and you need profitable businesses to fund R&D. Ultra-high-density interconnects is one of those businesses. If we give it away now, like the song says, "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." We won't help our customers or the defense infrastructure. We have to charge more for that type of technology. Final thoughts? What you see with American Standard is that we have capabilities here that are really excit- ing, separate from ultra HDI. We're building 34 layers and a lot of metal carrier work. We do quite a bit of multilayer flex. We can do book binders, rigid-flex. I've run my own operation for a lot of years, and I'm really impressed. We had a lot of great technology back in the day. But our technol- ogy now is awesome. To be able to walk into ultra HDI or ultra-high-density interconnects is a lot easier from that perspective. When do you think you will be doing full production? It will be soon because the demand is there, and we need to fill the demand. I would say by the second quarter, we'll probably be in what I would call a low volume production area, where we'll have customers that are actually building all their projects. As that grows, we'll get into higher volume later. It just makes sense all the way around. That's a great place to finish. Thanks for talking with us, John. My pleasure. PCB007