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22 The PCB Design Magazine • June 2017 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 after you sign the licensing is that you have to have a yield of 99.7% on very complex HDI, otherwise you throw away more money in the ICs than A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY offer different ohmic values. In terms of copper, most of the time half-ounce copper dominates the whole world, but now we're supplying a significant amount of 12-micron copper. Why? Because for fine-line etching they want thinner copper. We're seeing some 5-micron but that re- quires a carrier we don't like. It's very expensive. If you think the costs are high now, that's really expensive. Also, it's not available in the United States so we have to get it from Japan or Taiwan, whereas 12-micron copper is made here in the U.S. Because not only do you want conductors for high frequency, you also want it for fine line etching. We're seeing smoother surfaces and thinner coppers. All this of course is still half-ounce so what that means is when we add six or eight products now we have 20 products, and since we basically ship from stock, rather than man- ufacture to order because the lead time would be too long, it requires us to now inventory a 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 active. Happy, Figure 4: MEMS microphone sub-panel with projection to module shown. Figure 5: MEMS microphone PCB array with exposed planar resistors.