About Author

Happy Holden

Happy Holden is retired from GENTEX Corporation (one of the U.S.'s largest automotive electronics OEM. He was the Chief Technical Officer for the world’s biggest PCB Fabricator-HonHai Precision Industries (Foxconn) in China. Prior to Foxconn, Mr. Holden was the Senior PCB Technologist for Mentor Graphics; he was the Advanced Technology Manager at NanYa/Westwood Associates and Merix Corporations. He retired from Hewlett-Packard after over 28 years. His prior assignments had been as director of PCB R&D and Manufacturing Engineering Manager. While at HP, he managed PCB design, PCB partnerships, and automation software in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Happy has been involved in advanced PCB technologies for over 47 years. He has published chapters on HDI technology in 4 books, as well as his own book, the HDI Handbook, available as a free e-Book at http://hdihandbook.com and de recently completed the 7th Edition of McGraw-Hill's PC Handbook with Clyde Coombs.

Recent Articles

Creating an HDI PCB Stackup

Advanced High Density PCB Layout and Design in Altium Designer HDI design and high density interconnect routing require implementing a specific process in the PCB stackup and design rules. Learn more in this chapter of Happy Holden's guidebook. Read Article

Figure of Merit: A Way to Score Your Opinions

Figure of Merit Formula: A Way to Score Your Opinions Metrics are data, and statistically backed measures. It is always expedient to base decisions on data and metrics. But what if a metric doesn’t exist? Then you can create the next best measure: the Figure of Merit. The problem with opinions is that they are difficult to defend, and when used in conjunction with producibility, they often they vary from person to person. That is why the Figure of Merit process is so popular. For a small amount of Read Article

Revisiting Vertical Connection Structures-VECS Part 2

Revisiting Vertical Connection Structures-VECS Part 2 It’s been about one year since I posted a BLOG about the new VeCS Technology (vertical connection structures) invented by Joan Tourné. Since then, Joan has written four papers detailing much more information about his invention. This is a quick update, in case you have not seen or read those papers. He has two more coming up in January 2020, and March 2020 in PCB007. Vertical Conductive Structures-Rethinking Sequential Lamination [1] NEXTGIN Read Article

The Importance of Having A Modern PCB Manufacturing Data Format

The Importance of Having A Modern PCB Manufacturing Data Format I recently posted a BLOG on Altium about the latest eSmart Factory in New Hampshire. Using the latest in State-of-the-Art machinery and processes, it can produce near-perfect complex multilayers and HDI substrates with extremely fine geometries in only a few days, and without ever being helped or touched by human hands, all while and emitting nothing to harm the environment—zero effluents. Digitization for the Smart Factory This technology will Read Article

The eSmart Factory Comes to PCB Fabrication

The eSmart Factory Comes to PCB Fabrication We all talk about the Industrial Revolution. The world has gone through a number of “Industrial Revolutions” since the creation of steam power in England. In fact, we talk about three such revolutions since that first one. In the early 2010s, the German Government proposed a fourth industrial revolution they called INDUSTRU 4.0. Today we also call it “The Smart Factory”! But, to date, there hasn’t been too much reported progress in this program Read Article

Introduction to High Density Interconnects

Introduction to High Density Interconnection This introduction to Happy Holden's HDI design guidebook gives a comprehensive introduction to high density interconnects. Read Article

Calculating your Fabrication Capability Coefficients

Calculating Your Fabrication Capability Coefficients People have long asked me, “How do you know if a fabricator is capable of manufacturing my boards?” First, I tell them to ask for an IPC PCQR2 Report. If that is not available and there is no time or money to go through the process, then calculating the Fabrication Capability Coefficient is a good ‘second-best’. Fabrication Yields The Fabrication Capability Coefficient (FCC) is computed from a fabricator’s electrical test data, their First Pass Read Article

Calculating your PCB Complexity & First Pass Yields

Calculating your PCB Complexity & First Pass Yields There are four things I know about PCB yields—mathematically! PCB yields are not normally distributed. They are what is called GAMMA Distributed. Defects that produce low yields may be systemic and repeatable, others may be just random—but you can test for this. You can predict yields if you take the time to collect the data. Yields are such wonderful things! I wonder why we don’t write about them more. They are the dividing phenomena that often Read Article

Design Report Card

PCB Design for Manufacturing Report Cards One of my earlier BLOGs talked about PWB Cost Drivers . What is required for the printed wiring board (PWB) Value Delivery Chain is a method of predicting the cost of fabrication for the printed circuit board (PCB) substrate, as well as the cost of PCB assembly and PCB assembly testing. With these tools and the wiring density metrics, tradeoffs can be performed early in the product's life. Many call this Design for Manufacturing and Assembly , I Read Article

Newer PCB Materials

Newer PCB Materials If you are hearing about the newer, higher density HDI-PCBs used by Apple called SLP, and their processes like SAP, or uSAP or mSAP (Semi-Additive Processes) recently, these are the printed circuits that are getting down to 30 micron and 25 micron (1 mil) traces and spaces. HDI is now estimated to be over 250 million square meters produced per year-and still growing! But SAP is not NEW! We used it early in the 60’s and 70’s when we were making Read Article

Learning Statistical Analysis

Learning Statistical Analysis and Statistical Tools I don’t have to tell anyone that times are tough! When they’re tough like this, you don’t like to waste what money you have earned—it came dearly! That’s when design choices come to mind. Any bad choices go to the bottom line; so what are some of the tools to help improve decision making? Statistical choices and probability come to mind. Design trade-offs have always been difficult to predict in printed circuits. Those uncontrolled factors can Read Article

Landless Vias

Landless Vias One persistent myth is that PCB vias MUST have annular rings. I thought this for many years until our Japanese partners introduced us to landless vias. We said, “You can’t do that, the vias have to have lands!” They replied, “Try it out and test it?” So, we created a test vehicle and tested thousands of vias with various diameters against numerous annular ring vias. Guess what? They were right!! As the annular ring got smaller, the failures Read Article

New Multilayer Architecture: Power Mesh

New Multilayer Architecture: Power Mesh It’s funny how we accept the status quo as the only reality because it’s the only existence we’ve been subject to. In printed circuit design, the multilayer architecture is one such status quo. But it is not the only architecture that will work for high-speed designs. At Hewlett-Packard, we experimented with and implemented a higher performance architecture based on RF Design characteristics. It was not by accident, as our PCB design organization Read Article

Printed Circuit Assembly and Design for Cost

Printed Circuit Assembly and Design for Cost The design process for an electronic system requires decisions that will influence the cost and performance of the printed circuit assembly (PCA). General Principles There is value in being able to quickly estimate the impact of design on cost. Because of the increasing pressure to shorten time to market, design engineers may not have the luxury of using trial and error and price quotes to fine-tune a new design. In addition, the further down the Read Article

Requirements Management and Quality Functional Deployment

Requirements Management and Quality Functional Deployment “Ending up in the wrong place is the result of bad directions, not bad driving. Product failure in the marketplace results from errors in requirements, not implementation.” - Thomas L. Musto, Chairman, IBM Corporation (Retired) A definition of QFD: Quality-Functional-Deployment (QFD) [literal translation of the Japanese characters] is an analytical method to help you transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering Read Article

Benchmarking Practices and Process for PCB Designers

Benchmarking Practices and Process for PCB Designers Benchmarking is a company-wide process for analyzing company performance against industry leaders. Companies use it to better understand how their top products perform and allows them to develop plans to improve or adapt specific technologies or practices. Benchmarking uses a set of metrics to measure performance, such as cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure Read Article

Project Management Tools

Project Management Tools My first opportunity to use a project management technique was the Gantt Chart as part of my Engineering Senior Project while in college. At that time, it was all manual. Today, numerous software packages offer it along with other project visibility techniques (Figure 1): Gantt Chart Pert Chart Critical Path Analysis Affinity Diagrams Gap Analysis TimeLine Figure 1. Some of the visualization tools used for project management [1]. No matter what Read Article