Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/834021
June 2017 • The PCB Magazine 57 the web that allows people to put in their num- bers, like cost of surface mount components, number of solder joints, layers, size, etc., in or- der to see if there is an opportunity to embed it [illustrated in Figures 1, 2 and 3]. Once you find an opportunity then there's a lot more interest in the second and the third step. Brandler: I definitely have a different point of view from Happy. Ten or 15 years ago, when I first came here I would agree with what Happy said. I think that was right, there was certainly a cost issue and tradeoff and how many resis- tors per square inch you need to replace surface mounts, but I think we've moved on. Let me ad- dress some of the issues he raised. First I want to be clear, our intent was never to sell Ohmega- Ply as a way of saving money on surface mount components. That model would not fly. Our main thing had to do with performance and density and miniaturization and signal integri- ty, and so forth. Yes, there were some cost ad- ders at the worst possible place—with the ma- terial, because we're basically a material suppli- er. The reason we're still here, being the most expensive product at that time, was because of other technical reasons why people used them. Certainly, if you're building a satellite that's go- ing to cost a billion dollars, you don't care if you have to spend another $100,000 to make it work. But here's what we did and how we ad- dressed those issues. First, we did address cost tradeoff issues, in terms of providing spread- sheet programs with the goal of selecting a sin- gle layer. The single layer is the lowest possible cost adder; if you have to use two layers, say one for the terminating resistors and one for the pull-up and pull-downs, you just doubled that cost-adder. So our goal was to provide a sin- gle layer. We would have customers give us the bill of materials, we'd go through the resistors and say these are the ones you leave on the sur- face, these are the ones you can embed using the terminating resistors. For the applications, if we had a BGA we could do something with a BGA that you couldn't do with a surface resis- tor, mainly terminate every lead onto the foot- print of the BGA and free up a lot of space on the surface. All these were ways to reduce cost. A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY Figure 1: Cost analysis software developed by NIST and CALCE.