Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
18 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2018 programs that were worked on in my career, the lantern project for Marietta. Those people came from Florida and literally lived at ASI, which was the company I worked with years ago. Because nobody could build those boards, their engineers and our people worked side by side on the board. Even going back further than that, Rockwell and Motorola worked on the Viking project with the same thing. I mean, I can go back so far that I was a kid when I watched them measure impedance for the first time. We were doing the 16-layer board and I would deliver them to these two guys. One was from Bur- roughs in Pennsylvania, the other was at Maine Electronics. And they would look at the boards, they'd check the boards and they'd say, "Nope, throw these away. They're no good." I didn't even know what they were doing. And it was the first time I heard of impedance and that was like early in the '80s. But all these stories go back to one thing, and that's where the customer was in the shop with the people building the boards and had a complete understanding. And keep in mind, years ago our customers all had board shops. All the OEMs had their own board shops. So the people we dealt with knew something about boards. They built their own. And the people who were used in the support groups for buy- ing boards were people who had built boards. Those are all gone. How long has it been since there's been a captive board shop? The newer generation had never been in a board shop. They've never worked with a company that had a board shop, and that's what causes a disconnect. Our technology stabilized for a long time, but in the last few years, it started taking off again and really taking off to the point where we can't get away with this gap any longer. The customer has to come to the shop. The engineer has to come to the shop, and I'm see- ing a time when those customers are going to have to invest in the shop. I see that happen- ing, where a lot of the companies, the smaller shops, just do not have the bandwidth finan- cially to be buying the equipment that they're going to need to build the boards for these companies building products of the future. So, I see right now a crossroads, a time where we're going to have to break through this thing. We're going to have to teach design- ers and we're going to have to invite design- ers into the board shops to give plant tours. Also, that's a two-sided thing. It's not all about that direction. There's also the direction of the board guys are going to have to open up their minds and listen to the designers and find out what they're trying to do. What the end prod- uct is and what they're trying to accomplish. We're going to have to do that as well. So that there's real give and take between the two. A true partnership that'll help the whole elec- tronics industry move forward. Johnson: Dan, I agree with you. I see that there are increasingly two communities emerg- ing. There are the customers that are, just as you're speaking about, needing to get closer to the board shops and figure out how to do the designs they're doing. There is a definite sta- tistical increase we're seeing in our customers for wanting to do HDI technologies, and at that point there's a lot more interactive discussion with the board shop to make that happen. There is still though, a very large community of people who will back off that cutting edge who are doing very conservative work with basic SMT, or even still through-hole technol- ogy. Those customers tend to also be the ones