From DesignCon: Victory Giant Pushing the Technology Envelope

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Victory Giant’s Executive Vice President and CTO George Dudnikov let me in on the growth happening within his company, which includes a much larger Industry 4.0 facility and the capability to do pulse plating up to a 25:1 aspect ratio.

Nolan Johnson: George, we haven’t talked to you in about 18 months. What’s new at Victory Giant?

George Dudnikov: We have seen a lot of growth, so we’ve added another division to support 5G. Our specialty is our smart factory, highly automated industry 4.0. The 5G factory has been set up with much higher tech capabilities—pulse plating up to the 25:1 aspect ratio, everything’s LDI, fully automated. So really, it’s just a continuous progression of our technology evolution. The other recent news is we broke ground on a new company campus in Nantong, near the new Shanghai airport. That will be a larger campus to almost triple our capacity. Our current capacity is about seven million square feet a month. By end of 2022 we’ll be somewhere around 15 million to 21 million square feet of production a month.

Johnson: That’s pretty large.

Dudnikov: Yes. We just made the top 25 in the world, which is a big milestone for us. Our revenue from 2019 to 2020 was about 44% year-over-year growth. We have a great team, and we’re growing fast, bringing on a lot of people, a lot of new equipment, a lot of new technology. In a nutshell, that’s where we’ve been in the last 18 months.

Johnson: Tell me about the work to put together the Industry 4.0 in your facilities. How is that going?

Dudnikov: It’s up and down. Victory Giant was actually a pioneer in this space. Ten years before I joined them, they were starting to put certain processes together, trying to reduce queue times and WIP. They had a steady growth in automation and Industry 4.0 type of integration. The new smart factory—which is now three years old—really is where they hired internal software guys to do the machine-to-machine communication, and do the real-time metrology, real-time quality data collection, and so forth. But as you get closer to different levels of Industry 4.0, it gets tougher and tougher. It’s not something you can buy off the shelf, you’ve got to develop it in-house. I know IPC is trying to come up with a global thing, but it doesn’t help you if you’re already in production trying to grow your business; you can’t wait.

Johnson: You’re a bit more on the bleeding edge.

Dudnikov: A little bit. We’ve got some gaps in some of the automation on the system level, but I think if you benchmark us against the industry, I think we’re still on that leading edge. I think you guys ran an article on us a few years ago, where we were kind of the pioneers. There are other guys doing the same thing, catching up, but I think we’ve got a bit of a head start, and we’re doing great. It’s really paying off.

Johnson: Great. Anything else that’s new, George?

Dudnikov: Another new addition in the last 18 months is scaling our new HDI smart factory. When you guys ran the last report, we were just doing the plated through-holes and very limited HDI. We had some capacity. We now have built a complete division, almost 800,000 square feet a month of output. We’re building everything up to N+4, buried vias with N+4 stacks, any layer up to 14 layers, and really looking at the next generation PCB, which is looking more and more like a substrate, or a chip package.

Now we’re starting to do preliminary work in a modified SAP, mSAP, and other technologies. Right now, our current line width capability’s down to a 40 micron line and space, but shortly we’ll be at 25 micron. And then our new campus will go into sub-25 micron. There is a lot of new technology coming on board.

Johnson: No resting on your capability laurels; you just keep pushing that forward.

Dudnikov: Just keep moving.

Johnson: All right. Thank you. Thanks for the time.

Dudnikov: Of course.