The Story Behind the News: Ventec’s IMS Manufacturing Capabilities in China Doubled

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Goodwin: In terms of competition, there is and there isn’t…There are definitely many competitors in the glass-reinforced market. Anybody can buy aluminium, prepreg and copper foil and bond them up—there are good guys and there are less-good guys! But we play at the high end of that market with our VT-4A1 and VT-4A2 materials and the customer knows that he’s getting a quality-assured product, with thermal conductivity that corresponds accurately with what we state on our data sheet. With some others there may be a bit of poetic licence—and this is not a new story.

On the other hand, in the un-reinforced high-performance market, there is less competition because it’s a much more difficult technology to manufacture. It requires significantly more investment in engineering capability, plant and equipment, and you’ve really got to go and talk to the end-users—the OEMs—and discuss in detail with them what their requirements are. We really got into this business because, of the limited number of competitors, one in particular was putting a gun to the head of a very large OEM, saying that it was not going to sell its material to anyone but its own captive board shop. So the OEM came to us and asked if we could develop a material with an equivalent level of performance. They didn’t tell us how to achieve it, they just defined their performance requirements and we went away and engineered a product that gave them what they had asked for.

That was really the big turning point for us in the automotive lighting business. They were our first big automotive lighting OEM, and they are one of our biggest global customers today via a number of MPCB companies who are converting our material into their products. Name any European automotive lighting OEM and, if we are not already qualified and approved and in production with our B3 or B5, you can be assured that we are on the road to that qualification.  

It is also starting to happen for us in the USA, where within the last 12 months there has been a legislative change in automotive lighting regulations. You could previously have LEDs in rear lighting modules in America, but not high-powered LED lighting at the front. Since the change, there’s been a big push to catch up and we are working closely with the American OEMs. And Didier Mauve, our IMS OEM technology specialist, is heavily involved with the Japanese and Chinese manufacturers as well. So we really have a rapidly developing global business in this space. Our high-performance IMS materials are predominantly used in automotive lighting but, as I mentioned earlier, the automotive guys are already starting to talk to us about E-motor applications. And we’ve been in conversation with some non-automotive guys about DC power conversion, again where there are heat issues to resolve.

And the other big development that’s coming, in addition to improved thermal performance of the dielectric, which is our IP, is that an increasing number of people are starting to ask for copper heat-sink substrates as an alternative to aluminium. We have had the capability for some time, and now we are getting pushed further in that direction for high-end, high-performance applications.

Starkey: What’s the benefit of copper over aluminium?

Goodwin: It has significantly better thermal conductivity than aluminium, which in certain applications can more than compensate for weight and cost disadvantages and give better performance as an overall package.

Starkey: Mark, it’s clear that your IMS business will continue to grow, but at what sort of rate? Will it be linear or exponential?

Goodwin: Just in automotive lighting applications, I see it continuing to grow exponentially over the next few years. It started with high-end cars having LED lighting. Now it’s moved into volume production in mid-range cars, and will continue until it becomes standard practice throughout the industry. And there are people designing retro-fit units for existing vehicles on the road now. So there is a lot of growth in this market for us yet.

Starkey: And if you look at the rest of your high-performance laminate business, how is that growing, in what particular technologies and in what geographical areas?

Goodwin: The other big growth area for us is in high-performance polyimide materials, where we offer a full range of thin laminates, rigids, low-flow and no-flow prepregs and hole-filling prepregs. This business continues to grow rapidly because the traditional suppliers of polyimide have some issues in terms of their ability to supply globally and to supply consistent quality—you recall all the ESA discussions we had about inclusions and their consequences. We have good new equipment, we have AOI on our equipment, and we work under strictly controlled conditions all the way along our supply chain. VT-901 has recently passed HATS testing in complex high layer count multi-layer and flex-rigid build-ups at one of our key Israeli customers, so we are in good shape with all that and this market continues to grow very nicely for us.

The other key focus for us is in the tec-speed™ branding of our high-speed low-loss materials, and indeed we have a similar pyramid graphic to illustrate the performance of our IMS materials against competitive materials.

But watch this space—at DesignCon next year, we will be launching a new product—tec-speed 10.0™—and I will give you no hints at all about what we’re doing there! I will leave that to our R&D and OEM team who are going to come along with something of real interest to the market and that will be a real jump into this space.

Starkey: Thanks Mark, we’ll wait for the announcement. I’ll come back and you can give me another ‘story behind the news.’

Goodwin: I look forward to it. Thanks, Pete.

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