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28 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2017 yesterday and where they are today—faster than most other industries have. They have to buy the latest chips and those chips are com- plicated and dense. We see them adopting HDI faster probably than most other industries have. Maybe the same will occur with optical inter- connect once it is available. Matties: I would think that you're going see that with companies like Nissan, which is one that comes to mind that's really driving automotive technol- ogy and electronics. I would think that these guys would be knocking on your door sooner rather than later just because it seems that the electronics is the advantage that they have in every vehicle, aside from the standard seat and steering wheel luxuries. It's really the differentiator. Davidson: Yeah. They really do need speed in the Internet connection and the information back-and-forth with the car, and that's all going to be done wirelessly, of course. Matties: This is great. Does anyone else have any questions for Craig? Andy Shaughnessy: From what I know about op- tics, it seems like it's not perfect, but it seems like a whole lot better method for transmitting a signal than copper. From what I understand, there are almost no resonance problems, a lot of the EMC and signal integrity problems go away, and you can make optics 10 times the density of HDI cop- per. If we could ever get it standardized, designers are really praying for it. Davidson: Yes, I think you're right. The ben- efits are there, for sure, and I think there's a big flywheel that has to be spun up in terms of understanding how to use this technology, having PCB designers who are familiar enough with it that can actually integrate electrical and optical on the same board. These kinds of skills aren't all that prevalent out there. And some- thing we are also considering as we ramp this technology and evaluate new materials is look- ing at reliability. TTM already is a high-reliabil- ity supplier including aerospace and defense and the safety-critical automotive. Even in our telecom customers, when we build a backplane for them, they're worried about the reliability of that backplane. Line cards can more easily be swapped out if something goes wrong, but a backplane…no. Just as in today's designs, the designers' understanding of this technology will also be important to reliability. As of now, we haven't seen reliability issues. Most of the early work has been done to prove out the technology and assess its capabilities. Now TTM is looking at some of the reliability aspects, including the materials and the manu - facturing techniques. We're fairly confident about it. The industry is still not able to offer it in volume as a solution including second sourcing and having designers who are famil - iar with the manufacturing techniques and the design space to be able to effectively use it. Patty Goldman: I'm wondering if most of this development is being done here in North America and what sort of interest there is in foreign markets like in Europe and in China? Davidson: TTM is a global corporation and the Corporate Technology group within TTM is also global. We have people located around the world including Asia, Europe, and North America. This particular development activity reflects the or- ganization with project members from all geo- graphical locations. We fabricate boards with em- bedded optical interconnect with participation from our global technology team and involving many of our sites around the world. This also rep- resents a broadening of our internal experience base and gives more confidence to our customers. The customer base we are working with to- day in optical interconnect product are also tru- ly international and located again in Asia, Eu- rope, and North America—everywhere that you Figure 3: 20-layer optical line card with embedded polymer waveguides (20L+1Opt). TTM SHINES A LIGHT ON OPTICAL INTERCONNECT