SMTA UHDI Symposium 2025, Part 2: State of the Art

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

The technical sessions concluded with the panel pictured above, “Bridging the Gap: Accelerating Ultra HDI Adoption Through Collaboration,” which featured (L-R) Gayle Towell of AIM Solder, Gerry Partida of Summit Interconnect, Stephen Chavez of Siemens, John Johnson of American Standard Circuits, and Paul Cooke of AGC Multi Material America. I loved the energy of a panel discussion, and this one was more animated than most.

Paul took the first question, “How will PCB design impact fabrication?” Since Paul was about to conduct a course “Boot Camp — How PCB Design Affects Fabrication” at DesignCon 2025, he said that he planned to use that opportunity to underscore the importance of talking to your fabricator so you don’t design something that will have lots of problems.

John chimed in, saying that we are in a time where we have a lot of young designers who need to be educated and get exposure to fabrication processes. Gerry pointed out that the failure of via structures has to do with thermal expansion, which designers don’t necessarily think about, and with the new materials that are so thin, there isn’t any thermal expansion, thus making that problem go away. He also noted that, especially with military work, you won’t always know exactly what you are building, so it’s important to ask specifically about their reliability requirements.

Boards used for aerospace products or in the air, which is an atmosphere where there will be moisture, will have much different reliability requirements than a bench product. Steph turned the question around and said he looks at it this way: “How does PCB fabrication impact my design?” Agreeing with a comment made by Paul about making sure you have more than a single source to fabricate your boards, Steph, speaking about supply chain sustainability, offered some advice he received from his mentors early in his career: “Make sure you design a board that can be built anywhere at any time.”

Gayle, whose first career was in education, took a different perspective. She raised the importance of changing the way we educate young designers and the need for our education system to collaborate actively with industry to help make this happen. To her point, an audience member asked, “When will we abandon the traditional way we educate about this?” He noted that we are in two different worlds at the symposium, talking about both PCB fabrication and PCB assembly. Why aren’t we bringing those worlds closer together and teaching them together as well?

More to a core problem we have with workforce development, Chrys pointed out that we aren’t teaching PCB fabrication and assembly at all. What ensued was one of the most animated discussions of the day, which gives me hope that PCB fabrication and assembly will find ways to become more engaged and involved with education programs that already exist but are more focused on semiconductors.

The day would not have been complete without some discussion on Moore’s Law, a topic I hear a lot about. While no one would say that Moore’s Law is dead, John Johson said that when it comes to UHDI, at least say that it is slowing way down.

The award for “word of the day” goes to Steph Chavez for his term “collabication,” with Gerry adding that with UHDI, collaboration is a must if you want to be successful in your design, and before you lay down your first trace.

It was an educational day; all of the presentations were well received, and we finishied up with a happy hour networking session. For the folks who had traveled to attend, dinner plans guaranteed a continuation of much important discourse.

Unfortunately, there were no OEMs in attendance this year, which is the group that needs to hear this information at least as much as the rest of us. But the discussion is far from over. I’m at DesignCon this week, and I look forward to IPC APEX EXPO in March for the immediate continuance of UHDI discourse. Stay tuned.

For more information on the SMTA UHDI symposium and the continuing dialogue around UHDI, I encourage you to reach out to Tara Dunn of SMTA for more information. We are also quickly approaching IPC APEX EXPO in March, which will spend a lot of time on UHDI and advanced packaging throughout their technical conference and special sessions. Be sure to check them out!

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