Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/898297
November 2017 • The PCB Magazine 19 versus the smallest size versus the ease of manu- facture? With the numbers in front of you, you only had to activate that design and the job was finished. Many calibration runs (55 boards) were then done on already existing HP PC boards. In all cases, the computer needed only a few hours (this was a 1995 computer) to complete its de- sign optimization. In all cases, it had designed superior PC boards. Not only that, but signal in- tegrity was better and the manufacturing costs of the boards and assembly were 15% to 60% lower. HP Labs had finished its work—it had proved the feasibility of an automatic PCB design sys- tem. Now the tragedy sets in; no HP Division wanted to make it into a supported product, as HP had sold its EDA tools to Zuken. Manu- facturing did not have software resources to re- write the LISP code into C++ and, when dem- onstrated to two of the large CAD companies, they were not interested in marketing a soft- ware system that would eliminate the need for thousands of CAD seats and the support reve- nues that they generated. After all, who wants a car that could run on tap water! So, the soft- ware collects dust on the shelves of HP Labs. The only trace of its existence, the design, are the six PhDs that created it published a paper on the expert system in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence [5] . The irony: When I read the article, no mention was made of the fact that its job was to design PC boards! The trage- dy: For 22 years I have seen the "bridge" but it is still unattainable. Figure 5: Laser hole drilling quality and check sheet. 35 YEARS OF HDI FABRICATION PROCESSES AND OBSTACLES FOR IMPLEMENTATION