Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/871322
24 The PCB Magazine • September 2017 The Lost Connection It was a sad day when the big OEMs started outsourcing and were no longer making their own circuit boards in their internal circuit board facilities, like I was doing at Hewlett- Packard. One of our main missions was to build the prototypes, the production of the innova - tions the company needed to be successful and dominate the field. The fact that it couldn't be done was only the first sentence of the negoti- ation. Sitting down with the team to figure out how best can we accomplish this. A lot of im- portant developments came out of that, which then later—as they moved on with other new innovations—trickled down to the merchant market. Some adventurous PCB shops were the recipients of one of our first headaches where the IC guys developed their first 32-bit com- puter on a chip and we found out the chip wouldn't work on conventional circuit boards. We eventually ended up with six-layered Tef- lon® multilayers with metal core and laser- drilled micro-vias (Figure 8). This was 1982. Ah, the old days! PCB PROCESS ENGINEERING: DETAILS FROM ONE OF THE ORIGINALS Figure 7: The first-pass yield (FPY) on fabrication of complex HDI and multilayers can be characterized from design characteristics, realizing improved yields if the design can be simplified (2 to 2') or the pro- cess improved (1 to 2) resulting in lower cost (1 to 3). Figure 8: The HP Finstrate technology of laser- drilled microvias, metal-core and PTFE dielectrics permitted the use of HP's first 32-bit single-chip microprocessor. [5]