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In late September, Motorola hosted a workshop on miniaturization attended by more than 100 industry suppliers and manufacturers. One of the organizers, Motorola Labs director of microminiaturization technologies Dr. Aroon Tungare, asserts that optical interconnect is poised to be the "next big thing" driven by the rapid growth in data bandwidth over the air and within devices. He also broached the idea of nanovelcro as a replacement for solder in a November interview with Circuits Assembly's Mike Buetow.

AT: Motorola had participated in a similar meeting in 1999 organized by the IPC Supplier's Council. That meeting proved beneficial to Motorola and Intel – the two anchor OEMs at that meeting – as well as the entire supply chain. The vexing issues at that time were the advent of HDI and the growing significance of environmental considerations in material selection.

The vexing issue at present for Motorola – and surely many other OEMs – is miniaturization. We need game-changing innovations in hardware technologies to develop the next generation of sleek, feature-rich phones such as the highly popular RAZR. The goal of the symposium, therefore, was to bring together technologists and supply-chain professionals to discuss interconnect, assembly and packaging challenges that need to be addressed to build the next generations of iconic products. By helping IPC organize the symposium I was ensuring early engagement of the supply chain for emerging miniaturization technologies. Early supply-chain involvement is critical for companies such as Motorola to meet the product design challenges that lie ahead. In my opinion, and in the opinion of majority of the attendees, the symposium certainly met or exceeded that goal.

AT: Motorola noted that adoption of embedded passives has not been as pervasive as expected, even after Motorola's initial deployment. We have shipped the technology in over 50 million phones starting in 1999, but are only now seeing renewed interest in the technology among other OEMs. Lack of adequate design and simulation tools for board layout and circuit simulation using embedded passives was identified as one of the gaps.

While not exactly a technology gap, Amkor and Solectron presenters noted that many EMS companies and packaging houses are now scrambling to be RoHS and WEEE compliant.

Some of the technology gaps identified were rather mundane ones in terms of incremental improvements required in material performance, processing, reworking.

Significant challenges lie ahead in terms of IC packaging. Multiple stacked die packages are becoming quite common, and there have been excellent innovations in die thinning and die stacking. Most stacked die packages, however, comprise of stacked memory-only die. The gap here is to move from memory-only stacked packages to stacked packages that combine a processor with memory or those that combine a RF IC with a base band processor (RF+BB) or those that combine RF+BB+memory.

AT: Within Motorola we now have a new Integrated Supply Chain organization and our supply chain continues to evolve to match the needs of our businesses. The supply chain is becoming ever more important for execution excellence and OEM bottom lines. Deep supplier partnerships and even co-development of new, high-risk technologies is essential.

AT: Optical interconnect is poised to be the next big thing, after perhaps embedded passives – if that ever happens. The need for optical interconnect is driven by the growing data – not just over the air but also within the device. Basically, we are predicting that the multilayer air gap polyimide flex connectors, used for through-hinge connection in cell phones, for example, are reaching the limit of their usefulness in terms of data bandwidth, cost and reliability. An alternative solution is necessary. While optical solutions are typically associated with high end, high cost, high data-rate applications, we at Motorola "contrarily" believe that a low-cost optical solution for high volume, cellphone-type applications is feasible. Handheld communications devices will drive innovations in and adoption of optical interconnect technology, just as it did for the HDI technology in the past and is presently doing for power efficient chip technology.

AT: Here Motorola is challenging the industry to think about what an assembly line of the future – that is, "Next Gen Manufacturing" – would look like! Are there alternatives to solder and lead-free solder assemblies? We believe that some of the fundamental concepts that have been demonstrated by researchers in nanotechnology such as carbon nano-tube hooks, will eventually find their way in mainstream electronics manufacturing and change the assembly line as we know it today.

AT: HDI was not the main topic but one of many technologies discussed. Revolutionary improvements in HDI (in my opinion) are behind us and only evolutionary improvements are occurring today.

Having said that, Motorola was an early proponent and adopter of HDI and we love the technology even today. HDI is extensively used across a majority of Motorola products (from base stations to set-top boxes to cellphones) and exclusively used in our cellphone business. We continue to evaluate and incorporate in our products evolutionary improvements in HDI technology.