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32 The PCB Design Magazine • June 2017 by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 Freedom CAD has been designing and fab- ricating boards with embedded technology for years, and doing some innovative work along the way. I asked Scott McCurdy, Freedom CAD's director of sales and marketing, to share some details about their embedded processes, as well as the challenges and opportunities that em- bedded technology offers. Andy Shaughnessy: Scott, I know that Freedom CAD has some experience with embedded tech- nology. Tell us a little about that. Do you do a lot of embedded work? Scott McCurdy: We see increasing use of buried capacitance cores in the designs we do for our customers. This technology has been around for many years, but there are thinner materi- als available today that use thin film dielectrics instead of woven fabrics. There are many ben- efits for integrating embedded capacitance lay- ers into board designs for improving the power delivery network. Our signal integrity engineer believes strongly that embedded capacitors defi- nitely have a place in today's designs where, at frequencies between 10 and 100MHz, a low- inductance energy storage strategy can actually reduce the number of low-value caps needed on a board. Shaughnessy: That's interesting. And I under- stand you've done some embedded capacitance designs with FaradFlex material. McCurdy: Yes, we have several customers who spec this Oak-Mitsui Technologies FaradFlex material especially in high-speed telecom appli- cations. DuPont and 3M make materials for em- bedded capacitance applications, as well. These thin film type materials have thinner dielectrics than woven fabric which provides additional benefits. Shaughnessy: Does Freedom CAD do any buried resistor designs? FEATURE INTERVIEW