PCB Chat 162: HDP User Group Annual Update With Madan Jagernauth

Andy Shaughnessy (0:11)

Hi, I'm Andy Shaughnessy, Content Architect with PCEA.

Today with me on PCB Chat is Madan Jagernauth from the HDPUser group. How are you, Madan?

Madan Jagernauth (0:25)

Very well, thank you, Andy. I'm glad to be here.

Andy Shaughnessy (0:28)

Glad to be talking to you. I see that you all have just released your annual report, and so you got some things to talk about. Plus, your group is going to be presenting at PCB West coming up in September.

Give us a little background really quick on the group.

Madan Jagernauth (0:46)

Okay. Yeah. So, HEP User Group, thanks, Andy. HEP User Group has been around for more than 30 years, going on 35 years next year. Basically, it's focused on running projects in a collaborative way for our members, where for enabling technologies, it's easier for them to, where they have shared problems, come together and reduce costs by running common tests. Nothing competitive, it's all enabling technologies. We focus on reliability and performance. We've been doing that for 30 some years now. The focus is really on generating data that's our members can use in their companies.

We run the projects, then we retain the information in the final project reports, and the tests, and all of that, for them to have access to that knowledge base at will.

Basically, that's more than 100 projects completed over 30 years. We've completed close to 50 in the last six years, six, seven years, seven per year on average. We have what I think is the largest, I can't claim it's the largest, but I think it is the largest such knowledge base in the world. I dare anybody to show me a bigger one.

Andy Shaughnessy (2:11)

I'll take your word for it. There are a lot of members that I see out there, especially on social media.

What do we get into it? Tell us about the last year.

Madan Jagernauth (2:23)

Every year we put out a progress report. It's an annual progress report. It covers from July of one year to June of the next year. In it we report on the completed projects and the progress we've made on in active projects. Like I said, we've been averaging about seven per year completions over the last half a decade.

Currently we have 25 active projects. Usually we run between 20 and 25 active projects. They take a while. Some of them are very complex and take a while to complete. The focus has been the last bit on, and this is in the report, on PCB technology, materials technology, PCB assembly, and high frequency. Those are the four areas that seem to be meshing together for the current challenges that our members have. And really, it's about addressing their challenges because they defined the scope of what they're trying to do. So when you read the annual progress report, you'll see that the projects are intertwining and all lead to, how do you get higher density PCBs that can run at higher speed and can take larger packages, because that's what's driving AI, quantum computing and the next generation networks, right? Right. So as an example, one of the projects we completed last year was looking at over 20 final finishes, you know, like ePEG and ePEG and eNAG and all of that stuff, right? There's now that soup of finishes that include immersion tin, immersion gold, nickel, palladium in different combinations. We tested over 20 of those up to 110 gigahertz. Because the emerging optical networks at 1.6 terabit per second, and soon to be 3.2 terabit per second, need 112 gigabaud first for 1.6 terabit per second, and then we'll need double that for 3.2 terabit per second. Ray start talking about those speeds on an organic substrate.

There are lots of challenges, right? And these are some of the challenges that our members are trying to understand the behavior of materials fundamentally to say, what can we do here to meet the emerging needs driven by all of what's happening in industry?

SPEAKER_3 (5:16)

Right.

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