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66 The PCB Magazine • June 2017 on the interposers—a big advantage in perfor- mance and cost. Nobody has written an arti- cle that says this doesn't just apply to mobile phones or to earphones, but let's step back and see how miniaturization can improve things in general or take away problems that are plagu- ing you now. Matties: You mentioned the North American market is not really tied to the mobile phone; what impact or advantage or opportunity exists for North Americans with this technology? Are we missing something, or is there a story to tell here as well? Herrera: I think a lot of the designs are creat- ed in America. Now, the actual fabrication and such may be going overseas, but a lot of the de- sign work is still happening here, by OEMs such as Qualcomm and others, and then it's being sent out to be mass produced elsewhere. Matties: Are there other applications that might be a competitive advantage? Perhaps for some- one that says, if I use this in my automobile cir- cuits, for example, I'm going to need function- ality, space, etc. Herrera: That's interesting you bring up the au- tomotive market. In my opinion, the millime- ter wave, the radar stuff, the sensors that are go- ing to be going into the cars, again those are modular designs. I think that's a great opportu- nity there, and the opportunity is performance related. Like Dan was mentioning, you remove the chip component and you're reducing the parasitic inductance involved with the surface mount chip package and the PCB footprint. There are less physical transitions for the sig- nal to propagate through. And when you're go- ing out to these 66 gigahertz, 70 gigahertz fre- quencies, a small improvement can make a big difference. Matties: Is the reliability improved as well? Herrera: Yes, especially in operating environ- ments exposed to wide spectrum vibration and extreme temperatures that may occur under the hood. Replacing a surface mount component with one embedded in the PCB adds an extra layer of protection. In automobiles, as in aero- space, there will be a lot of redundancy, so that can be an opportunity there, but then who's to say that, as these things are being designed, the manufacturing and the processing won't be sent overseas because it can be done Goldman: What types of components are em- beddable? Is it just capacitors and resistors, or are there more? Brandler: The one other thing is inductors. There are just three kinds of passives that we usually talk about. We don't call diodes pas- sives, but there are resistors, capacitors and in- ductors. Inductors are basically little spiral de- signs, fine-lined things. There may be other chip- type things embedded in the cavities and so forth, but basically when you're talking embed- ded passives 99.9% of them are going to be either resistors or capacitors. I don't know how many people are making inductors because they don't have to buy anything from us to do that. But the rest of it is some form of active component. A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY Figure 8: BioMed heater application—fluid delivery.