Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/834021
64 The PCB Magazine • June 2017 whole wide range of products that we didn't have before. That's something else that we're dealing with. Fortunately, we're in very large fa- cility here so we're able to do it. Matties: This is really interesting, especially when you mention embedding actives. Happy, do you have any thoughts around that side of this? Holden: Well, we had to spend an awful lot of money to make embedded actives work because the little secret that they don't tell you until af- ter you sign the licensing is that you have to have a yield of 99.7% on very complex HDI, oth- erwise you throw away more money in the ICs than you save. We had to switch to a third fa- cility in Northern China, which is basically em- ployees made up of North Koreans. And there we found the discipline it takes. You can do this in Japan, but outside of Japan nobody else can really make this thing work except for these Ko- rean workers and we got to 99.85%. Now we're shipping 10,000,000 modules a month that use both embedded capacitors and resistors and ICs because they're so small. The surface is taken up with an active device either with the MEMS mi- crophone, the optical sensor for the camera, or the antennas for the Wi-Fi, and things like that. But this is all mostly dedicated to the mobile phone market. Matties: Aren't those also in applications like hearing aids and other medical devices? Herrera: We have seen them in applications where they're calling them micro-fluidics or mi- cro-fluids, where they need to heat up a liquid and move it through these small channels on a MEMS sensor. That's an application in the med- ical field and that's the one that comes to mind. Others had medicine delivery applications; the heater would heat up the medicine and help push it through a patch. Brandler: Since resistors are heaters, we see a greater demand for, usually, flex heaters in which the dielectrics are extremely thin because you want the heat to go right through it. I'm sure it applies to our competitors as well, be- cause it's very thin; the advantage of using these as heaters is that it takes very little power to get a very fast temperature rise because there's so little thermal mass—you can get a fast temper- ature rise even though there's not a lot of heat. There are applications for that and it's not real- ly big, even though Manuel is involved with de- signing this. I would say in terms of percentage of our business it's very low compared to the other things we were speaking about. Herrera: Maybe the reason it's gaining a lit- tle traction is due to the way these devices are being built. They're more modular. Imagine a motherboard for a computer—this has actual- ly been done—with embedded resistors, say 700 Figure 6: OhmegaFlex rectangular and circular heaters. A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY