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58 The PCB Magazine • May 2016 people and your design people? What do you need to be producing to satisfy that market re- quirement? Gaby Waisman: We need to offer digitaliza- tion. Digitalizing the production floor, we need to cater for thinner materials, tighter line-space. We need to do it faster and we need to do it more efficiently. We need to find ways to also increase the yield. And I will discuss it specifi- cally with one of our machines. If we take a look at the booth over here, the first machine that is catering to such requirements is the Sprint, which is basically an inkjet. Its purpose is sim- ply to digitalize the world of silk-screen, con- verting it from analog to digital. Now this vision is not new. This is not the first time for us to present the inkjet machine. I believe we've been doing it for the last ten years, approximately. But we've moved gradual- ly from offering solutions to quick turnaround, mid-production levels. For the first time now we can offer a solution for mass production. We are looking at the markets over here, Asia Pacific and definitely in China. The need is for mass production. We can offer a machine that of- fers similar, obviously better, cost performance, and cost per print, compared to the analog, silk screen solution. And in addition, it addresses the waste, saving steps along the process, sav- ing on operators, saving on other factors re- lated to the abilities of silk screen in general. And it offers better registration, alignment and tion in panel format because then you're load- ing manually, you take it off and then you can remove the excess material from the work table afterwards. Starkey: What is the laser technology that you're using? Riechel: We have historically used UV nano- second lasers, but as we've expanded our laser portfolio we are moving from not just diode- pumped UV lasers, but to fiber laser technolo- gies such as on our GemStone product. Starkey: Your laser will cut clean through copper-Kapton-copper, straight through the three layers? Riechel: We can perform this type of through-cut processing, as well as blind-via pro- cessing on very thin materials. It's very impor- tant to have excellent power control and also control other factors related to what we call la- ser fluence. Laser fluence is the laser energy per area that you're drilling on. To have very good control of that fluence is critical to not overdos- ing a specific area of material and cutting too far through your blind-via area. So for a blind via to stop in that second layer of copper, and not damage the material, you have to have very good control of the laser fluence. We do that very well. We also do through-vias, through copper-Kapton-copper. In some cases, in multi- layer constructions, we are cutting through not just the copper-Kapton-copper, but adhesive materials as well. And in some situations we're cutting through four or five layers of copper. To read the full interview with Patrick Riechel, click here. Excerpted from, "Orbotech's Gaby Waisman: 'The Future is Digital'" Pete Starkey: If we begin with your assess- ments of the market requirements, what infor- mation do you need to feed to your development automation is tHe talk of tHe town at CpCa sHow 2016 Pete Starkey with Gaby Waisman