Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1533339
46 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2025 Article by Manfred Huschka e recent announcement by Nippon Denkai about the closure of the U.S.'s last ED cop- per foil plant in Camden, South Carolina1, prompted me to look back over the past 40 years, 13 of which I spent at the world's biggest FR-4 manufacturer at that time. My journey in the laminate world began in the summer of 1994 when I joined Norplex GmbH, a UOP company, in Wipperfürth (Germany) as a young technical service engineer, aer having manufactured PCBs in Braun Ireland's captive PCB plant for more than four years. Within a few weeks of joining the company, a decommissioned horizontal treater for phe- nolic paper laminates was sold to the Soviet Union and dismantled. My story is about cop- per-clad FR-4 laminates, CCL, and prepregs. The FR-4 laminate business unit of Univer- sal Oil Products (UOP) traded under the name Norplex, with UOP acquired by The Signal Com- panies. In 1984, Norplex consisted of four factories, three of them located in the U.S., with headquarters in LaCrosse, Wisconsin (Fig. 1). In 1984, the Oak Materials division (the fac- The Rise and Demise of AlliedSignal Laminate Systems MANFRED HUSCHKA MANAGEMENT CONSULTING (SHENZHEN) LTD.