ROSHEIM, FRANCE – French electronics manufacturer Alliance Electronics has announced the acquisition of EMS Factory, a specialist in prototyping and low- to medium-volume assembly.

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Ultra-high-density interconnects are more smoke than fire right now, but they won’t be that way for long. Driven by high-density BGAs and RF products, UHDI is finding its way into the mainstream.

Given the number of conferences, webinars and the like, readers would be forgiven if they thought UHDI was already standard, however.

First, of course, means agreeing on what, exactly, UHDI is. The working definition of UHDI is product with line widths and spaces of fewer than 50 microns, dielectric thickness of less than 50 microns, and a microvia diameter of less than 75 microns. That’s not a standard definition – yet – and the lower lever parameters have yet to be defined. At some point, there stands to be overlap with semiconductor technology. Stay tuned as the definition evolves.

I am reminded – to a degree – of the chaos surrounding UHDI’s (slightly) larger cousin, high-density interconnects, which hit widespread production in the late 1990s (although the original concept dates much earlier). Then, the issues could be boiled down to two:

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