Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/836472
June 2017 • The PCB Design Magazine 25 seeing in the MEMS microphone market—the concept of making it a module. You have tens of thousands of these little PCBs on a panel and each one of those PCBs has two resistors; you're basically using 30% of the resistive material now. I'm just throwing those numbers out but as an example you're using a lot more of resis- tive material in that kind of design, a modular design. But you have these smaller PCBs and es- sentially you use more material and that's what you want to do. Holden: And that's clearly what Sandborn's software showed. The more you shrink things down and use the embedded capacitor resis- tive devices in the sensor or module, the more cost effective it is unless you're using an addi- tive process. But since most of the materials are subtracted and not additive, the software allows you to choose both additive and subtractive or allow both to be plotted to see the difference. But I agree, the challenge is to take the applica- tions that you've all talked about and step back and show the partitioning or the change in thinking that allows performance to go up and cost to go down by doing things differently than we've always done it. I haven't seen any articles that talk about the way we did it 20 or 30 years ago, where it's going to be like this, but if we partition it like you said and put the interposer in there, not only do we save costs but maybe now we don't have to buy fine pitch devices because the inter- poser can be 0.5 mm pitch, but the top of the interposer can be 1 mm. Now you're no longer forced to use very exotic HDI technologies on a whole board when the HDI is only used on the interposers—a big advantage in performance and cost. Nobody's written an article that says this doesn't just apply to mobile phones or to earphones, but let's step back and see how min- iaturization can improve things in general or take away problems that are plaguing you now. Matties: You mentioned the North American market is not really tied to the mobile phone; what impact or advantage or opportunity ex- ists for North Americans with this technology? Are we missing something, or is there a story to tell here as well? Figure 7: BioMed heater application—soft tissue expansion. A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY