Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/969348
APRIL 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 13 tric cars is jumping up and again if you live in California, we're paying close to four bucks a gallon for gas. Matties: In China there's a very expensive licensing fee to buy your license plate for a car—up to $10,000 to $15,000, and they're waiving that fee for electric cars. They want it for the environmental aspect, the noise factor, and I don't know what that does to their econ- omy in terms of jobs, but it certainly brings in a lot more electronics. Feinberg: We're seeing some of that here too. The electric hybrids and electric cars get free access to the toll roads in some cases, and free access to the high-occupancy lanes. Matties: I think that's really it. You're starting to see incentives, and their capability is expo- nentially greater than the first Honda hybrid. Feinberg: Circling back to nano-crystal power transmission via airwaves, there is a lot more going on than most people realize. Goldman: How does this affect designers and PCB manufacturers? What do you see us need- ing to prepare for? Feinberg: 5G is going to be a part of it because of the very rapid and significant rate of data transmission, but the rate of autono- mous driving—the intro- duction—is going to do nothing but go up. We cov- ered it at CES. The van comes by your house and there's nobody in it, but it just opens the door and you pick out the stuff you want, and it automatically bills you and it drives off to the next person. That's very doable right now. That's going to make the whole thing of auton- omous driving more acceptable to people. Holden: Patty, I'm in a special committee with Michael Carano. We're seeing massive failures on military warheads from stacked microvias, and none of it is being reported, and there are no IPC tests for it. It appears all the IPC scan- ning criteria are ineffective at picking these things out, and the automotive guys are begin- ning to see the same failure modes. You should see the military stuff that's 3+8+3. I was flabbergasted that the military uses such sophisticated microvia structures and that so many of them failed. I didn't think they'd allow them that complex, but appar- ently, they have been, and they've just been living with massive failures. Especially for the Navy because some of these are MIRVS in bal- listic submarines, sailing under the polar ice caps, so they could never be launched. They're dead in their tubes. Matties: They'll talk about it when there's a disaster, won't they? Feinberg: You know, that's a good question for me to raise with a couple of the guys at NVIDIA. They don't really talk about reliabil- ity very much. They talk as if the reliability is there, but I wonder. Matties: Another thing regarding reliability is that the types of boards being produced for automotive transport in general are chang- ing. I'm hearing that we're going to see more HDI boards entering the auto- motive stage. We've never really seen that in the past that I'm aware of. Also, there is a need for boards that can handle the high voltage and high amps of the cars that are coming out. What impact do you think that's going to have in the automo- tive marketplace? Feinberg: If reliability becomes a public topic and lack of reliability becomes an accepted issue, I think it's going to have a big effect on the marketplace. Goldman: In the past, if it didn't work perfectly and your car didn't start, it was an issue, but