DuPont, Taconic and PFC Team Up For High-Speed Flex

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Kelly: The flex circuit side is pretty strong. We are a North American fabricator, and we’ve almost doubled in the last five years.

Matties: That's great. How many employees do you have?

Kelly: We have 110. We’ve just seen more and more business. Eventually, the high-volume stuff will go offshore, it always does, but the specialty stuff, the high-volume, low-mix, it's always going to be here. The new stuff is going to be here and then it migrates. Packaging is everything. They need everything smaller and smaller, lighter and lighter. If you look inside the Apple watch, there are 10 flex circuits. There are no rigid boards.

Matties: There's not even room for 10 circuits in there!

Oliver: We want them big!

Matties: So much easier to deal with our aging eyesight!

Kelly: It costs me more to count them than it does to build one. The iPhone6 has, I think, six or seven, for example. And 10 GHz is becoming very over the hill and now everybody is moving into 18, 28, 100 GHz. We've even had phone calls asking, "How do I build a 100 GHz flex?" I say, “Well, I might be able to build it but how are you going to test it?”

Oliver: There's a lot of flex in test equipment. That's a very important market for Steve. It's a testament that you can use high-frequency in flex because a lot of test equipment uses flex in the probes and then in various other aspects of testing.

Kelly: This stuff starts up there at the test guys and eventually migrates down, just like anything else in this world. Then it becomes mainstream and this is on the cusp of that, and it will start developing.

Matties: This is great. It's nice to see that the edge is being pushed out further and further. Good for you guys. Congratulations on your paper, too.

Oliver: Thank you for the interview. We appreciate it.

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