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86 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2024 evacuation purposes. We put in doors with glass panels so visitors can get a good feeling for the entire process. As you move your way through the different process steps, you see drill, plating, test and inspection, and finally return to where you started. It serves as a nice showpiece, and as part of our grand opening, we invited our global sup- pliers, government stakeholders, and criti- cal customers to take a tour of the facility. e grand opening represented a significant mile- stone for us. Tom, as a high-tech facility, what is your pro- duction sweet spot? Is the work regionalized based on where product is shipping? From a product standpoint, we're focusing on high-layer-count boards––16 to 22 layers, used mostly in data centers, computing network- ing, and industrial instrumentation require- ments. Much of the production will be deliv- ered to EMS manufacturers in the Penang area. Every major EMS manufacturer has an opera- tion in Penang, so we will either ship locally or to other areas in Asia and North America. Tell me about finding a qualified workforce in Penang. Ultimately, we will need 800 to 1,000 employ- ees at full capacity, and we're about halfway there. A significant part of the workforce will be indirect, primarily because of automation. We're now adding operators as we progress through our volume production ramp. Along with hiring seasoned engineers, we brought in new engineering graduates about a year before the facility started up and signed them to two- year contracts. With that commitment, we took them to China, where they were trained in real manufacturing settings. at group is serving as our core of engineers. Interestingly, we discovered that amongst our engineering ranks are many Chinese Malays who live and work in China, includ- ing in TTM facilities. Many are eager to return to Malaysia, and this is one of the reasons we sharpening. at might sound mundane, but it is a very important part of the process in terms of keeping the drill points properly calibrated. We have a large facility just above the produc- tion floor where we feed chemistry onto the first floor, and we have a sub-basement for tak- ing the waste which delivers the spent water and chemistry to the adjacent waste treatment center for recycling or treatment. Automation is certainly key, so tell me more about the AGVs. ey move the panels around from the ware- house to the loaders, between the pieces of equipment for each process step, and finally back to the warehouse. You can see these little robots all over the facility. We incorporated manufacturing execution system (MES) soware to dictate their move- ments. is soware runs the shop floor pro- cesses and ties into our Oracle® financial sys- tem. As we proceed through the ramp-up, this last step toward automation allows us to mini- mize scrap because we have eliminated manual handling errors. We have a very long hallway that runs length- wise throughout the middle of the facility for " We put in doors with glass panels so visitors can get a good feeling for the entire process. "