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20 The PCB Design Magazine • June 2017 A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY Matties: So the physical parameters have forced them into this model, not the cost. Brandler: Partly physical parameters and partly really high-speed, eliminating parasitics. There are no inductive reactants like you have with a surface mount device. The technology is what's driving this and the cost is sort of following it. Nobody wants to add costs, I agree. There's no designer in the world that wants to come up with a new design that adds cost to the sub- strate; that's the worst place to add cost. But the reality is, when they see the alternatives that they have to do to accomplish the design, then it looks more attractive. That's basically the is- sue, but I think mostly that's a 20-year old is- sue. Now we're well beyond the realm of surface mount versus resistor tradeoff. Holden: I agree with all that. Miniaturizations and various kinds of modules that become BGAs that get attached is an area, but that is not a pre- dominantly North American circuit area. That's limited to those things that demand that min- iaturization, like mobile phones but most of the industry doesn't demand that much miniatur- ization. And I haven't really seen an article that I can recall that talks about the performance and the miniaturization aspects of embedded components. There just haven't been any ar- ticles that talk about this. Brandler: We can send you some. We're go- ing to these trade shows and exhibitions and publishing these things all the time. But the one thing I also want to say is on the whole issue of North American versus Far East. The North American market for us is primarily aerospace defense. Our competitors are in the same market too, it's not just us, and what is driving that are things like power dividers and other similar RF electronics designs that allow them to make all these networks and such. Re - ally, you could do it with strip resistors and things like that, but this has been around for a long time and the new microwave horns and things that are using absorbers to improve the signal integrity by absorbing all the stray sig- nals and shielding and these are applications where normally you want to get heat out of the chip, but if you talk about space some- times you want to put it in. Figure 3: Showing the effects of embedding resistors on the board price for a 5.1 x 15.24 cm board with 500 discrete resistors of type 1 and 400 discrete resistors of type 2. The optimal board price is realized at ~52% of embedded resistors.