Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/612684
96 The PCB Magazine • December 2015 volunteer, and we just keep it going continu- ously. It's a non-stop operation. Goldman: That has to be very effective. Milad: It is, and we accomplish a lot. When we come to a meeting like the one held here, people who walk into the committee meeting where I was giving an update talk about what we've accomplished, what we are doing and what we hope to accomplish in the future, but we do not have what you would call a working session like other committees do. Goldman: Because you got all of your work done during the calls. Milad: Exactly. I mean we meet 26 hours a year. We meet every other week and have one full hour meeting. It's very different. Goldman: You may be the only committee that does that. Milad: I think we are. We started it, and it's worked very well for us and people are accus- tomed to calling. And now we use GoToMeet- ing, so if we have a document we can share the document also. It is very effective. Goldman: Switching gears a bit, I know that you want to talk about copper via fill. Tell me about that. Milad: Uyemura has a very unique via fill sys- tem. I believe we are the number one supplier in the U.S. for via fill. We also can fill through- holes if they are very small. Not by plating it with copper, but filling it. It's got to be very small holes and a very thin board like an inner- layer of 10 mils or less. And we know how to set up a via fill tank. We learned that over time. It is very important how you set up the tank, where you place the anodes, the cathodes, and how you move the solution. Goldman: This is an electroplating process? Milad: It's electroplating, yes. The logic that you use in copper electroplating is not what you are going to use here. You are going to use a differ- ent kind of logic, because you have components in the tank that prevent the hole from dog-bon- ing and closing. You keep the hole open so the bottom can fill up first. If you don't suppress the corners then they will grow and they will close and you will have a cavity in the middle. We have customers do their own thing most of the time. We have peo- ple plating at three hours and we have people plating at five hours, but the last installation we had we completed the work in two hours. Initially, we said that we could do it in two hours, but most of our customers have extend- ed the time. Recently, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a customer who just installed a via fill, and he filled different types of vias in two hours, and it was phenomenal. They kind of did it on their own. We set up the tank and we had the design and everything, but when they put the chemistry in, their plating engineer—they have a phenomenal plater—decided how it was going to plate. He brought it home. The first set of panels came out filled. The customer was convinced that we had the best chemistry in the world. For us, the plater Rodriguez was the man. He was the man. But it's a very good process with very good potential. So these are the excit - ing things. We also have various types of acid coppers for high aspect ratio plating and so on. Goldman: George, thank you so much for sharing this with us. Milad: Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. PCB FeATure inTerview UYEMURA USA'S GEORGE MILAD ON UPDATING FINAL FINISH SPECS