Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/636678
42 The PCB Magazine • February 2016 Matties: It's not competing but it could be disrup- tive, for sure, in a number of years. Tzhori: Theoretically, yes. But the challenge for them—as far as I can see, and maybe I'm miss- ing something—is much bigger than the chal- lenges we are facing in terms of qualification. We are now struggling with qualifying the sol- der mask, which is only just the cover layer. For their technology to become commercial they would need to qualify the entire structure. This means the entire material, the conductive lines, everything. It's a huge challenge and even to pass all of the stress tests it's going to take years of effort to be qualified. Matties: I may be wrong, but I'm thinking in 15 years we're going to be printing our circuit boards. Tzhori: I agree with you. As I said before, print- ing is going to take most of the existing pro- cesses, but it is really dependent on the printer heads, the chemistry, the size of the drops, the materials, and so on, not the PCB industry. It is improving, but what we don't know and won't know is how fast. I'm not a chemist, and I'm not an expert in the printing industry, but you can see that this is one of the industries that keeps on innovating and actually we can print almost anything now. Matties: It's a really exciting time in this in- dustry; I've been in it for more than 30 years and back then it was all manual. There's been a lot of equipment change, like AOI and things like that, but there hasn't been a lot of actual process change, and we're right on the verge of seeing a lot of changes that you're talk- ing about. Tzhori: One thing you can see is that the semi- conductor and PCB industries are getting closer and closer to each other. Some of the semicon- ductor equipment producers are stepping down towards the IC substrate market, and the IC substrate producers are trying to shrink their technology to wafer level packaging. In the semiconductor industry there is no doubt a dif- ferent level of innovative technologies, and I think this relationship is going to change the PCB industry as well. Matties: I think so too. Tzhori: It's also true for us. Actually, most of our high-end AOI equipment is being equipped now with a metrology solution that comes from the semiconductor AOI solution. We are no lon- ger selling AOI to only scan traces. We are doing traces and then we are doing 2D and 3D and all kinds of other metrology measurements. So the tool is being used as a production tool, but also as a QC and process improvement tool. Matties: If we're not improving the process, what's the point? When we look at the high- reliability markets like medical and automotive, inspection and the cost of inspection is not even an issue. They have to have it because many manufacturing processes just aren't stable enough to not inspect when the cost of failure is so massive. Tzhori: You can see those are two drivers for in- creasing inspection demand. It used to be ca- pacity, but you don't see a lot of capacity. The Gryphon. CaMtek takes inkjet teChnology into the future