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Technology Roadmaps: Thoughts and Observations

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of The PCB Magazine.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don't much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

—From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The above exchange is recognizably the creation of the genius of Lewis Carroll, the multifaceted author and logician whose works have tickled and titillated the minds and imaginations of countless millions of people around the world. The opening exchange also serves well in any discussion that touches on technology roadmapping, for if one is without a sense of the direction their technology is headed, then the odds are that they will sooner find themselves on the road to ruin than the road to success.

Technology roadmapping is at its core a form of strategic business planning, but with a focus on the processes and equipment that will be required to deliver products that will meet future business needs in the face of constantly changing competition and consumer demand. Thus, the technology roadmap is a critical tool in helping a company make informed decisions relative to how they will invest their time and capital dollars to ready themselves for anticipated changes.

There is need to emphasize the word anticipated from the last sentence, because the future can never be known with perfect certainty. In fact, it is common in technical roadmaps to provide a section dealing with potential paradigm shifts. Such events are not always that easy to foresee, however their obviousness is generally acknowledged in retrospect. In fact, a book worthy of the consideration of anyone involved in technology roadmapping would be The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb suggests that we occasionally get blindsided by unforeseen technology change because we tend to focus more on specifics than generalities, concentrating on things that are known to us based on our personal or collective history and failing to give consideration to the things that are unknown to us…unknown at the present moment that is.

In the world of electronic interconnection roadmapping, we have tended, like our semiconductor roadmapping brethren, to focus on circuit features, construction and materials. In general, both roadmapping activities have predicted, almost from their inception, a reduction in circuit features sizes and an increase in the number of layers of circuitry. There are clear differences in the technological needs of the two different camps, but at their centers, the stories have been predictably consistent.

The world of electronic interconnection roadmapping includes board assembly technology, under the umbrella of which are found the various processes and equipments required to solder components to printed circuits. In like fashion, the world of semiconductor roadmapping encompasses integrated circuit packaging technology which is typically produced by a subset of electronic interconnection manufacturing companies in the form of high-density circuits from high-end printed circuit manufacturers.

One of the ironic aspects of technical roadmaps, which are posited as instruments of change, is that they are also at the same time instruments of the status quo. The reason being is that technology roadmaps tend to be both conservative and incremental. They can project, suggest and even request change, but they cannot make it happen. The conservativism of technology roadmaps appears to stem from the fact that they are consensus documents prepared by numbers of different people within an industry, each with their own predispositions and prejudices relative to the rate and direction of change. This, however, does not diminish the importance of technology roadmaps, for such roadmaps will continue to serve the important role of providing consensus direction to an industry that might otherwise find itself in a situation similar to that of Alice.

There is another exchange between Alice and a different Wonderland denizen, the White Queen, which seems particularly well-suited to closing out this brief discussion, and to highlight again the importance of including some measure of out-of-the-box thinking in the technology roadmap reporting process.

“I can't believe that!' said Alice.

“Can't you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said. “One can't believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

—From Through the Looking Glass 

Here's to hoping that future technology roadmaps will always leave room to consider at least a few “impossible” things…

Verdant Electronics Founder and President Joseph (Joe) Fjelstad is a four-decade veteran of the electronics industry and an international authority and innovator in the field of electronic interconnection and packaging technologies. Fjelstad has more than 250 U.S. and international patents issued or pending and is the author of Flexible Circuit Technology.