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26 The PCB Design Magazine • June 2017 Herrera: I think a lot of the designs are created in America. Now the actual fabrication and such may be going overseas, but most of the designs are still happening here. The designers here for Qualcomm and that stuff, a lot of the design work is happening here and then it's being sent out to be mass produced and so forth. 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 millimeter 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 signal to propagate through. And when you're going out to these 66 gigahertz, 70 gigahertz frequen- cies, a small improvement can make a big dif- ference. 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 passives, but there are resistors, capacitors and induc- tors. Inductors are basically little spiral designs, fine-lined things. There may be other chip-type things embedded in the cavities and so forth, but basically when you're talking embedded 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. The big challenge with active components is getting reliable interconnects, and they're do- ing it. I think that's the next big thing to get devices off the surface of the board. I would also like to add that, while we're talking embedded, sometimes we use the word buried meaning within a multilayer structure, an HDI. For these cellphone MEMs modules, a lot of them use sur- face resistors where the only thing over them is solder mask. Basically, it's like solder mask on bare copper except they're over the resistor ele- ment. One of the challenges for the board shops that also drives up the cost is when you're do- ing a surface resistor or an embedded resistor A DEEP LOOK INTO EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY Figure 8: BioMed heater application—fluid delivery.