Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/992528
18 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2018 or the graphite or the conductive polymer from sticking to the copper in the first place, so it's always just a plated copper in intimate con- tact with foil or other plated copper. It's a cop- per-to-copper interface. That's one thing. The simplicity of the direct metallization avoids the complexity of electroless copper systems. And it's only when electroless copper is operated incorrectly that failures occur. The other thing is the expansion in Asia. They took advantage of all the new modern designed equipment that has been installed over the last 10 years. In North America, we still see a lot of attention to retrofitting equip- ment that's been around for decades. That is a problem for sure. It's like my telephone service stinks because it was built in 1940, but if you go to Southeast Asia, their telephone equip- ment was built 15 years ago, and it's awesome. It's a bit of that challenge working with first- generation technology. Holden: It is. Have you had a chance to see Alex Stepinski's information on zero discharge and recycling? One of the things he does is el- evate the temperature of a lot of critical baths, and then he uses a stagnant dragout followed by a high flowing cascade rinse. He hermeti- cally sealed machines full of negative pressure. Then, he uses that to evaporate a lot of water so that his dragout can replenish the water loss as a way of minimizing his effluent as part of his zero-discharge design. The other big thing is automating the line; he has eliminated cleaners and acids be- cause the panels are never touched by hu- mans. They have no time to build up an ox- ide. That's taken away almost 60% of the pro- cess steps in making a multilayer. I wonder if with increasing auto- mation we can't simplify a lot of our process- es if the human is no longer going to be han- dling the panel. Antonellis: I would think that would help, right? You always see fingerprints all over cores as they're being handled, or after a process step you see the outline of a fingerprint that may- be didn't get cleaned by the cleaner that was in place. If you take the human contact out, you should be able to eliminate some of these steps. Cullen: That would be terrific, and we do have some of that technology in place. I have for- mulated some of our chemistries at higher temperatures specifically to minimize the so- lution growth. We do that. We do sometimes get pushback from our customers who want to run lower temperatures to reduce power con- sumption, so we kind of fight that battle. That is a good story; I think maybe a subset of the chemical supply industry needs to really push some of those environmental benefits of smart design of factories. Holden: Now, it helps that Whelen started out as a greenfield type, but there's a lot to be learned there. One of the most unusual things was the use of this copper ammonium sulfate as a final etchant. That's a big thing, because they use the ammonium sulfate to produce copper sulfate and then turn it to copper oxide and add it back into their pulse plater. They're running a profitable operation there since they etch more copper than they plate. Cullen: Right, we've done some of the same things. In fact, I have a patent on a process that we had for oxide alternatives, where we would take it back from our fabricators as a service. This was in Taiwan. We had a lot of fabrica- tors in a small area, so we could economically bring the spent material back in, and we would precipitate and purify and then turn it into raw materials for an electroless copper bath. We had other processes even here in Waterbury dating back 30 years, employing some of the same recycling concepts. We would bring the spent baths back in and generate the copper oxide and turn it into other goods. There is still a lot of that going on, but I'm sure there could be more. I mean, even if you look at the recy- Ted Antonellis