Better Together: How HDP User Group Showcases the Industry’s Best Side

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Morgan: It would be a big number, I'm sure.

Matties: Yeah, because you have 51 members currently. It looks like you're maintaining, but are you growing?

Morgan: It goes up and it goes down. We'll probably end this year with a few more than that. There's two or three in the pipeline right now. Some members join the group and then they may come for a single project. We do lose some members by attrition from companies merging, for example.

Matties: When they become a member, what's the expectation of a member? My thought is, can I come in, pay my dues and just collect the reward?

Morgan: You could come and do what you like. As all of the organizations, the more you put in the more you get out. There's no doubt about that.

Matties: But all the results are shared with members.

Morgan: They're all shared, yes, but then the discussions are very important as well. You can get the reports as a member of course, but if you want to really learn what's going on, you need to join the meeting and hear the analysis of those results. Again, the members who we find get the most benefit are the ones who participate the most; they join the most projects.

Matties: I'm thinking there would be companies out there that may want to be a part of this, but they don't have the time or the resource, but they still want to contribute at least financially and share in some of the research.

Morgan: We don't have many like that to be honest. No, very few. Most people who join, join with the intention of being active on at least some projects. We're very broad. We cover a huge range of technologies. For sure, you wouldn't be involved in every single project, nobody would. It wouldn't fit. But mostly you'll find members have two or three projects that they'll really hit. We have a couple of CAF projects that we just started in the last few weeks. We've got a lot of interest in that, of course. So they're two similar projects, but not the same. One is a CAF test vehicle for materials, specifically trying to take away the process design variables. That's had a lot of interest from the material suppliers as you can imagine. And also, OEMs for screening so they can quickly screen materials, and the intention is to reduce the testing cycle.

The other one is actually developing a better equation for the CAF acceleration. In automotive, we have some issues around high voltage testing. We're testing now, instead of 100 volts, we're testing at over 1 kilovolt. That's difficult. It's very difficult to do the testing at those voltages. No one really knows what the relationship is between the high voltages and the low voltages. If we can actually develop a better equation, we could hopefully demonstrate that we could test at low voltages and still simulate behavior or extrapolate behavior at high voltages. That has traction. We have three automotive non-members actually already on that project involved. At the first stages, non-members can join in. At the idea and definition phase. Then when we go to implementation, they can decide whether to join us or not, because at that point the data becomes private. We'll see where that goes, but we're delighted to involve those guys. This is a real issue facing the industry. This testing is expensive. It's difficult and takes a long time. It's slowing up production and development cycles as well. If we can make that quicker in some way, that would be a huge advantage to the industry.

Matties: Absolutely. Do you cover from design to assembly?

Morgan: Everything, even environmental disposal analysis. We cover that as well. We cover the whole thing from cradle to grave, from design right through to disposal. End of life, the whole story.

Matties: Where is the majority of the work done?

Morgan: It's hard to say really. We have a lot on assembly. Projects on the use of new alloys also in harsh environments. A lot on materials; there was a lot on packaging in the early days. There are still a lot of projects running in that area. I wouldn't like to say where it is, and actually, it moves.

Matties: I'm just curious where it is today.

Morgan: Yeah. I am biased again. I've worked in the materials projects. I have five projects there.

Matties: I see so much, as we just saw in the conference today, around direct imaging, solder mask imaging, the inkjets, all these kinds of issues and choices that the industry has to make.

Morgan: Huge choices. For example, chemistry is a big area for us. I should say that. Certainly we've been looking at signal integrity; that's a big topic that covers a lot of things from design. We of course do give inputs to design authorities and standards bodies as well, and many of our projects have a goal to actually publish industry guidelines. I'm doing a project now which is on component rework reliability. So large BGAs, if those fail, they have to be reworked. What's the inference on the rest of the board and the life of that? You take the big BGA off, what does it do to the board? Does it make the board less reliable? How many times can you do that? No one has really quantified it, so we plan to quantify that and we plan to issue design guidelines that say, "OK, this kind of device, this many rework cycles, this temperature are reliable. Beyond that, there's an issue." And try to show that with real data. So that's the kind of thing that we do.

That way we think that we help the whole industry, because we help with design guidance and also with standards. Many of our projects do write straight into standards, at IPC for example.

Matties: So when the fees come in, how is the money managed? Where is that being utilized?

Morgan: Basically we have a small staff. There's a general manager. There's an executive director, administrator, and then project facilitators. It's lean, and the cash goes to running the organization—for the admin basically. And for costs for projects, because we have to sometimes buy materials and components. We also have to organize events, so we have to hire rooms and that kind of thing. It's a pretty low-cost organization—pretty lean. Most of the money that we generate is used for the members’ benefit. Let's put it that way.

Matties: Because a lot of these tests would require some substantial investment, I would think.

Morgan: Many of them are donated by the members, so we're very grateful to the membership for offering their facilities. Occasionally, we have to buy services, but usually members will offer them, because they'll learn from these projects. Sometimes test houses want to show their wares. They want to show what they can do. They want to participate in the project to show the members that they're in the game, that they can do this stuff. Then they will get additional business.

Matties: Well, are there any thoughts that we haven't talked about that you want to share with the industry?

Morgan: Let me say, go to the website HDPUG.org and have a look. See what's on there and look at projects that you're interested in. You'll see which ones are public. You can access them. Get on the call and see what's interesting for you. The more inputs the better for us. You don't have to be a member at this early stage of the projects. Later, who knows, maybe people will join or not join. It's entirely up to them, but I think the more people who share what we're doing the better.

Matties: It seems to me, the more people that talk, the better we are as an industry. To get back to a word you used earlier: showcases. It showcases all the different aspects of these things. Well, Alun, thank you so much.

Morgan: My pleasure Barry.

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