How do you get started in HDI?

How do you get started in HDI?

A lot of my time is spent helping customers implementing HDI. I also spend a good deal of time teaching seminars on how to get started in HDI. The most frequent questions I receive are:

1. How Do I get Started?
2. How can I deal with a fabricator that states he can not build it to your recommendations?
3. What do we have to do to convince management that this is worthwhile?

In response to these questions I give them the following information.

To successfully implement HDI Technologies in “A Printed Circuit Board Program”, here is a 4-Phase approach that I follow.

1. Education / Planning / Vendor Audits
   Do you really need HDI? I have a “White Paper” here at mentor.com/pcb called “How To Get Started In HDI With Microvias” that will help answer that question. But if you do, then the First Phase is Education, planning the HDI program and becoming involved in HDI vendors. Education meands learning IPC HDI Standards, understanding the quality issues with Microvias and the potential problems fabricators may have. Learning to use the IPC-9151Benchmarking artwork to qualify HDI Fabricator is a great way to pick your potential partners.
Preparing Recommendations
2. Test Vehicle Creation and Testing
   Phase TWO involves actually creating the Test Vehicles to learn more about HDI performance, your vendors performance, how new materials perform and gaining reliability data. Learning from others experiences in implementing HDI and test vehicles helps shorten this phase. Plus, their results and data is useful to compare to your results. The testing of signal integrity and power integrity of HDI structures is an important justification for management to demonstrate how electronic performance can be significantly improved while shringing the size of these assemblies.
3. Redesigning a Current Board to HDI
   Phase Three can be undertaken simultaneously. You need to understanding the new strategy of HDI BGA Fanout & Routing. This is a new strategy created by Charles Pfeil of Mentor and a reference to his new book can be found at www.mentor.com/go/bga. Understanding prior case studies and success stories on “How to save layers” and “Designing HDI with the fewest layers” helps in this activity. I have a White Paper on “The Essential Differences Between Through-Hole and HDI Design” available on this web site.
4. Putting It All Together- “Next Step”
   Phase Four: Once you have successfully navigated the first three phases and have HDI implemented, it’s time to look to the ‘future’. Back to learning, but this time learning about the Advanced HDI Structures (from Asia) and being introduction to Embedded Technologies. These technologies are the ‘next step’ in HDI!

More Blog Posts