The next 25 years – Part III
10 September 2007
In the final part of the series, Sue Knight, Technical Chairman of SMART Group/STI Ltd, gives a personal view of what is come in the next 25 years
Looking back at the changes in the electronics industry over the last 25 years it amazes me how far we have come in some areas and how much remains the same, so when asked to take a look at what technologies and challenges we will be asked to manage in the next 25 years I will make the following prediction: what ever we think is going to happen – statistically there is one certainty, that we will be wrong. But where would be the fun if we didn’t try to speculate a little, so here are my own musings on where we will go next; if I miss one of your personal favourites, then I apologise, talk to me about it when you next see me at a SMART group event.
The circuit boards and assemblies I work on today have a number of things in common with those from the start of my career, they are predominantly FR4 based, they are mainly held together with a solder alloy, they have a high percentage of R&C’s, the designers are always pushing to us to let them make the boards smaller, finer and to tighter tolerances and the production managers want us to make them faster, cheaper and at higher yields.
The first three points I think will change, the others I believe are constants. That interconnections between components and boards will be metallic I think will stay the same, in the physical world we have yet to discover materials that conduct current robustly over a wide temperature range better that metals. That in 25 years we will be using solder alloys in the form we have today, I’m not so sure.
As the demands on feature size increase the more I see FR4 and the PCB fabrication processes associated with it struggling to cope, the same is surely true of any woven material. With the rise in the use of MCM’s (Multi chip modules) ceramics may come more and more into main stream electronics albeit with some major hurdles to overcome in terms of size, internal conductivity and price. The smaller feature size will probably lead to further thermal management problems in both the design and in the processing – again ceramics may help the designer but will challenge our current process capabilities and possibly solder materials.
The natural consequence of further shrinkage in electronic assemblies will be to make us revisit the factors involved; the human, the process, the materials, the controls and the machine. The human by degrees is likely to be more remote from the product and process, you cannot measure, correct or inspect something which you cannot see, for some components we already need the aid of heavy magnification and an interface between the person and the product, this may expand into our own version of keyhole surgery. If the components and circuits are shrinking then the tolerances that the machines and processes are required to maintain will become smaller, which raises again the materials involved, how fine a powder can you put into paste, how small an aperture can you print it through before you have to take a step back and look at a different approach. Humans in electronics have always been useful, they are flexible, adaptable and capable of making judgements albeit often less easy to control than machines, but we are already finding that reworking small components is impossible even with a skilled operator and a soldering iron, so again it is easy to see a point where the operator or engineering interface to the boards will become more akin to the virtual worlds of the gaming station, the good news being that we have a couple of generations of people who will take to these new tools well.
Coming back to more practical developments, there are already companies working on developing what they see as the next step technologies – forget attaching components to boards, why not build the board onto the components. Or maybe the line will blur between what is a component and what is a board and the technology will go along the lines of the rapid prototyping / modelling we see for some mechanical structures and we will grown assemblies onto base structures or pinpoint form them in 3-D in a metal loaded curable medium or matrix. This level of speculation is not so far fetched when we consider what is already being achieved in the fields of MEMS (Micro electro-mechanical systems) and MOEMS (MEMS with Optical elements) development.
On the ‘green’ front – we are seeing more focus on energy consumption, not just of the product in service, but during the products lifetime. In service this should drive products to be designed with lower current requirements, and the consequential ability of the designers to use smaller packages and space them closer to reduce track lengths and losses. On the macro scale we in production will be asked to look at reducing the energy required to make (and then dispose of) a product, the target of this may be to eliminate or reducing the number and severity of the multiple heating processes it currently takes to fabricate and assemble a product. Whether we will be driven that way by the market or by legislation I’m not so sure.
Part of me hopes that a small section of the industry will still assemble 2-D boards using solder – but then that is my comfort zone. The other part of me knows that the job would become boring if we stagnated and is looking forward to the next implausible target.
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...