CircuiTree - July 2008 - (Page 30)

[ CircuiTree 20-Year Retrospective ] By Dieter Bergman What’s Happening—2010: Part 3 – The Impact of Technology Roadmaps in the Last Decade y 1997, the IPC roadmap was achieving greater importance in the industry. Each OEM that participated in the IPC effort felt that its product needed to be identiﬁed as an emulator or product example. Somehow each roadmap needed to identify the needs for a particular product. The eight emulators shown in the 1995 roadmap would become 20 different products identiﬁed in the 1997 roadmap. Copies of these roadmaps were given to individuals who attended Capital Hill day to show to their legislators. The roadmaps also changed the vision of the future. In the coordination activity it became important that the roadmaps be published in the same year. The roadmap coordination committee also agreed on the two-year cycle for roadmap publishing. The emulator descriptions provided the basis for the future needs for the industry. It became an important characteristic to compare emulators based on their technology drivers so that there was a consistency in the concepts. Figure 1 shows an example of the 1997 emulator for laptop computers. The emulator shows three time zones with each representing the improvements that were needed to meet OEM expectations. A two-tiered concept was developed for the IPC roadmaps. The ﬁrst number in a particular time zone represented conventional or threshold technology. This was an average industry capability that is generally available from most manufacturing facilities at a global commodity price. Products in this category represent approximately 95 percent of the industry’s products (60 percent conventional, 35 percent threshold). A second category was added to this concept. Identiﬁed as leading edge, this product complexity is available in high volume production from some of the world’s most advanced leadingedge manufacturers, usually at a premium price. Products in this category represent approximately 15 percent of the world’s production and can carry a premium price of 60 to 80 percent above conventional products. The combination of these two characteristics represented the revenue center of gravity for what the OEM would need in its product. It was the characteristics where the products made most of their revenue. Another number was also estimated in the next set of roadmaps. This condition represented state of the art. This product is available from only a handful of manufacturers and usually at a signiﬁcant price premium (up to 10 times that of a conventional product), which reﬂects yield loss from running processes at extremes of the process window and a signiﬁcant amount of technical handholding in production. Products in this category represent less than 5 percent of the world’s production. It didn’t take too long for changes to take place in the industry. The ﬁrst to change was the semiconductor industry’s perception of the world. The SIA found that it was more advantageous to work together with Asian manufacturers and semiconductor producers; thus, its roadmap changed focus. NEMI also realized that the focus of its activity needed to go beyond the shores of the U.S. The ﬁrst move away from a national initiative was when some of the OEMs that were part of the NEMI culture insisted that companies from outside the U.S. be permitted to join NEMI consortia and project teams. A major decision was needed at a time when most companies already had a relationship or a stake in Asian manufacturing, especially in China. NEMI changed its name to iNEMI and became the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative, recognizing that its members needed to ﬁnd the best global solution to their manufacturing requirements. The iNEMI Technology Roadmap focuses on the business and technology areas associated with the electronics industries’ global supply chain. The IPC International Technology Roadmap is focused exclusively on the interconnection industry. The roadmap centers on PCB manufacturing of substrates and assemblies. The IPC roadmap is an operational level roadmap. Operational level is meant to describe the detail of incremental operational level information pertaining to the manufacturer of PCBs and PCB assemblies. Other organizations around the world had their own roadmap activities. Japan was a leader in roadmap development, publishing several versions of its vision of the future. These roadmaps were sponsored by organizations such as the Japanese Printed Circuit Association (JPCA) and the Electronic Industry Association of Japan (EIAJ). The ﬁrst group represented the printed board interconnection systems; the second group was dedicated to following the semiconductor inﬂuence. The JPCA became the Japan Packaging and Circuitry Association, while the EIAJ became the Japan Electronic and Information Technology Association (JEITA). Each group had Figure 1 Laptop Computer Emulator Analysis for 1997 Roadmap 30 July 2008 • circuitree.com http://circuitree.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CircuiTree - July 2008

CircuiTree - July 2008 Contents My Line Industry Review Tech Talk Flexible Thinking Toward a PCB Production Floor Metric for Go/No Go Testing of Lossy High-Speed Transmission Lines Intelligent Design 20-Year Retrospective Ask the Flexperts Environmentally Speaking BPA Growth Curves Considering Design Variants to Maximize Process Efficiency Market Outlook Technical Product Spotlights Classified Ads Upcoming Events Ad Index

CircuiTree - July 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.