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December 2015 • SMT Magazine 47 Las Marias: how do you satisfy your members' need for technical information? Maiser: In a number of ways. First, we do that by individual consultation. A member can call me and can ask for help in any way. I'm a physi- cist so part of the job description for me is to re- ally find out the new technology hypes and be a translator, so to say, between research organi- zations and the small- and medium-sized enter- prises. Bigger companies always have their own research organizations within the company, but even those guys usually don't dig very deep into the latest technology. You have to make them aware of things happening at university level or be the one really digging into things. This is actually my job. Individual consultation comes with that, but we also have events and the workshops. The road mapping workshop is exactly what you're asking about, where we sit together and really have a methodology on how to go through the next 30 years, for ex- ample. We discuss what's happening in the next 30 years in terms of electronics manufacturing or the equipment. We also dig for new opportunities. In the last 15 years, I have built subsidiaries under Produc- tronics. I went into displays, organic electron- ics, photovoltaics and battery. You also have soldering, you have something like the position technology—you have all the technologies that Productronics guys provide. Those were new opportunities to dive into and create new busi- nesses. It was my job, so to say, to tell them, 'Look, there is a business opportunity for you in, let's say, photovoltaics, wafer slicing, wafer connection, wafer soldering, and so on.' Las Marias: You mentioned part of your job is to find new technology hypes. can you highlight some of the technologies that you consider the most important in the future? Maiser: Yeah, that's a tough one. It's easier prob- ably when I start with the semiconductor side because it's public domain. Going into a bigger substrate is something you always have to do when you want to bring down prices and then raise efficiency. This is the same for semiconduc- tor wafer sizes as well as PCB sizes. The hard one for the semiconductor side is that you go down to below 20 nm structures, feature sizes, and there you have this famous extreme UV switch. You have to go from ordinary light sources like laser light and you have to go down to X-ray. With that, you don't have the optics you usu- ally use. You have to use mirrors and that causes trouble with the light sources. You also have a lot of trouble, of course, creating a vacuum and creating the precision in deposition. There are so many things, but that's all written down in the semiconductor road maps. The trouble is not only technology wise. It's basically that there's only a very few customers that can go that road. For extreme UV, the whole story boils down to basically five customers worldwide. Of course, if all of the machine mak- ers fight for these four or five customers, then the whole story becomes hard from that part alone. Even if you are able to do the technology part, it's not so easy to grab your customer. It's a little bit different for the PCB and the electronics assembly side. I think the future there is also very closely connected to what's happening on the semiconductor side. Feature sizes going down always means that you have smaller feature sizes for the PCB. How to really get along with that is the name of the game. From the manufacturing side, this is basically it. We could dive deeper into the technology of the PCB and also the SMT manufacture, but what comes along next, then, is Industry 4.0. You have to produce all that stuff in a manner that FeATure inTerview VDmA ProDUcTronIcS Special shows on trade fairs, Messe Munich international gmbH.