Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1541985
54 PCB007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2025 after paying tariffs, most non-mil/defense custom- ers are willing to do so. I understand you have non-electronics custom- ers that you source for. How did that come about, given that it is really beyond the scope of your core business? It's all about advertising and marketing, and we have a slightly different rep network that's work- ing on those opportunities. It's just a good business diversification strategy. For example, we have a customer servicing the automotive collision marketplace. When an auto body shop is work- ing on a vehicle, they need racks where they can lay different pieces of the vehicle as they're fixing it. We source and ship the racks that can be used in body shops. In another example, we are working with a customer on pharma- ceutical pill dispens- ers, doing all the plas- tic associated with the pill dispenser. That approach says a lot about how ASC approaches business success. Now, let's talk about the ever-popular subject of ultra high density interconnect (UHDI). Touring your facility, I was particularly struck by a nine-foot-long flexible cir- cuit with lines down to 1 mil—to name one example. Something that sets us apart is that many of our UHDI applications are being built on flex material. That's different than what many other UHDI manu- facturers are doing. We've built applications for the quantum comput- ing world. We've done applications related to radar and power that utilize flex circuits combined with metal backs for thermal management. We build designs for sensors. We're also building RF circuit boards with filters that require near-perfect rectan- gular-shaped edges on the traces. That is another distinguisher for us in our process. Typically, in a normal printed circuit board process, your lines tend to be trapezoidal in shape. Because of the way we etch them in our UHDI process, regardless of whether it's a 25-micron (less than 0.001") or a 4-mil line, we can achieve a rectangu- lar shape. Which means your traces have smooth sides, correct? Yes, and a trace with smooth sides will have signifi- cantly better controlled impedance properties and is much better for RF signal performance than a line etched using the standard PCB process. Anaya, what is the most interesting or the most challenging technol- ogy ASC is currently working on? We're doing a variety of different things, and that variety is exciting. I like our leading-edge tech- nology. We are work- ing with UHDI 25-micron lines and spaces. We've started shipping chip carrier boards where every layer has a microvia. That's another exciting area. We are also doing RF boards that require coins—heat sinks, basically. Historically, we've done metal-backed circuit boards, and that approach worked well for many years. However, as component densities increase and people strive to remove heat from localized areas quickly, one factor that has become particularly significant is the use of "coins." The coins used to be little squares, maybe a half- or quarter-inch square. We're now working with coins that are extremely small, literally placing them into our lamination process with tweezers. We might put several of them down on one board. That is heat relief for a small network of circuits, which makes sense. Isn't that a natural outgrowth of what has been done on a larger scale? Yes, but we are talking about coins that are 90 mils in diameter. They're like little cylinders that we are inserting into the lamination, and we are seeing