Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1514628
64 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2024 So, we've done fairly simple things. We've streamed our product line, taken mid low- loss material and a high-performance material, which happen to be our tec-speed 3.0 and tec- speed 6.0, and we've packaged those in bite- sized quantities, cut to size, prepackaged into quantities of 10 or 20. You can get these prod- ucts in your plant very quickly from point of order. If you're close to one of our distribution centers, they can be ordered today and deliv- ered tomorrow. If you're a little further away, order today, and it will be delivered in one to two days. So, you can have products in your plant loaded and running within one to three days. Morgan: I am thinking back to IPC and slash sheets. As Mark said, it provides the oppor- tunity that if you do not have all the suppliers but you know it's "slash sheet X or Y," you can go to the suppliers and look at the datasheets. You'll see who meets that requirement. We just need to refresh and repackage it a bit, so when you say "slash sheet X or Y," you know that's a group of performance characteristics, not a group of chemistries. Do you think the next generation of designers is looking for simplification? I've heard there are about a half-million designers worldwide. Morgan: at sounds about right but elec- tronics is so big now. e design community is massive. I have talked to designers across the whole gambit—a designer from Tesla, a guy designing Hyperloop, and others designing consumer products. You don't have one design community. You have hundreds, if not thou- sands, of communities, but they all have the same issue. ey do electrical and electronic design. e material side of it is far away from them. at's where we can help. What would be nice is if we could package this into the IPC-4101 series of standards to give the designers more help, and I think we will. I may not see it in my working lifetime, but we will get there. It's an evolution, not a revolution. Goodwin: e only thing that matters to the design and manufacturing communities, and even the consumers, is that the products we make meet all the performance and compli- ance standards. ey don't need to know how we build them. We're polymer chemists; let us worry about that. All they need to care about is performance and availability. Morgan: At IPC APEX EXPO in San Diego, we had a great group, and I felt far more con- sensus than I've seen before. We were sitting with our competitors, PCB fabs and OEMs, and everybody had a good connection. It was a super meeting, and we were hugely impressed. What was it about the meeting that made such a difference? Morgan: First, the structure was different. IPC worked a lot on how the meetings are run. at was important because a roomful of engineers is great, but you must also get things done. IPC certainly has tried, and we saw the benefits of that. Second, the industry has the same goal now. We understand that this needs to be done Mark Goodwin