Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/808383
April 2017 • The PCB Magazine 27 both of those and do you have any opinion on those, for the registration issue? Partida: I have an opinion on the pinless one. What they do is they weld the outside of the panel core to core through the pre-preg through heat, but I don't subscribe to the theory. Cores will shrink. The different glass styles or the glass weave in a core is what's going to allow that core to shrink and the pre-preg is the activator that moves it. If you have a 14-core 2-ounce over 2-ounce and a 3-core signal, they will want to move differently. You can't weld the outside and tell them to stop and not do it. I don't believe that works. With the information we have with our reg- istration software, we track our yields and we know how many panels we scrap, when I tell the folks with the pinless system, where they align the cores, the number of panels we scrap per year, they're shocked at how low it is. It's not a problem. We scrap less than 12 panels a month for missed registration. I don't see the need to change the system that's been working tremendously for us with jobs that have no reinforcement and multiple lamination cycles. As long as we have a predic- tion of what it will move, it generally will keep us in a safe location when we're done laminat- ing. It took about two and a half years to put the whole system together, the complete feed- back system, but it's a wonderful system. Matties: That's great. It sounds like you guys have really put a lot of thought into this. It's never easy, you know. It's 90% planning and then once you implement it you just reap the benefits for years to come. Partida: I think that's what has helped us to be successful with the RF community. It's very crit- ical that these features are where they're sup- posed to be for the best performance. In RF, you could look at it cross-eyed and it will act dif- ferent or act funny. We've been working with RF materials, but it was mostly for semiconduc- tor customers. When we started with the RF community about 9 or 10 years ago, customers would call us back and ask, "What are you do- ing?" and we'd say, "What do you mean?" "All FABRICATORS SPEAK OUT ON HIGH-SPEED MATERIALS Menning: For us, it's about really understanding your base materials and how they move. Unlike Gerry, we don't have the software to monitor it in real time, but we try to limit the number of base material configurations we have and, when necessary, we'll do engineering evaluation runs to develop scale factors so that we can predict- ably scale the artworks to compensate for that shrinkage. Matties: A lot of the new process equipment can make modifications on a per-board basis. They're finding best center for alignment and x-rays and that sort of thing for drilling the optimum hole. Is that technology what you guys are seeing and utilizing? Partida: We're using that with the XACT soft- ware, so what it does is not only tell you how far off the layers the registration is, it tells you what to do for the next time you build that same pan- el or tool. It will put in brand new tooling to square up the panel so that all of them will pin to the drill machine consistently the same. So if there is any variation, it kind of zeroes in on the variation of each panel and squares it up. Matties: Per panel. I understand you're pushing lots through, but when you're processing a panel, making modifications to individual panels, that re- ally brings it down to that lot size of one mentality though, doesn't it? Partida: What it does is it gives them all the same zero tooling on all the panels. If one is, let's say, slightly rotated half a degree to the right and the other one is half a degree to the left, one is shifted down one mil, one is shifted up one mil, when the new tooling goes in they've all been squared to each other back to one zero. It improves registration tremendously when you go and drill on the machines. Rather than having random pinning now you have brand new pristine tooling, pristine, never-used, and they're all squared up with each other and it is a big boost in final registration and cross-sections for meeting annular ring. Matties: Regarding tooling, there are the pin sys- tems and the pinless systems. Have you explored