Organizing Materials Differently at Ventec

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At a recent industry conference, technical editor Pete Starkey caught some time with Ventec's Mark Goodwin and Didier Mauve. In this conversation, Mark and Didier discuss Ventec's work to curate their product offerings into functional categories based on function and target application. The pair also share their thinking on markets which they see as driving material development work. When material performance becomes an integral part of the PCB's performance specifications, the traditional way of categorizing materials may not do the job.

Today, we will have a conversation about some of the technical aspects of materials and some of the new materials that are available. Mark, could I ask you to give us a little bit of an introduction to Ventec?

Mark Goodwin: Yes, Ventec has been known as an FR-4, a polyimide supplier, a thermal management supplier, and we’ve had a few things in the high-speed digital area, tec-speed up to 7 now. We are really widening the scope and range of materials we supply and starting to shift the business toward supplying some of those higher technology materials.

Ventec is very well placed to do this because of the way our factories are built with many treaters, which means we can run many products. We also have a mixture of presses, everything from our big 20-opening double format presses for FR-4, to smaller format presses with six or eight openings to allow us to make smaller quantities and very quick delivery.

The key is about supply chain and availability, and that's why I invited Didier Mauve, head of our global OEM and technology, to be part of the conversation; there's a lot of technology in these products. I’m a supply chain guy, far from technical, and the strength of what we’re doing here is bringing both technology and supply chain together. We have the great manufacturing capability of Ventec, with product development skills led by Bill Wang, technical and quality director, but also with input from what we learn from the OEMs. Didier's team from around the globe is bringing that all together. The output from that is a series of products and product families which will be developed further, and which open a new direction for us. We’ll keep doing the things we do but with an additional avenue of materials and technology that we’ve not been present in before.

We believe the world needs more suppliers in that field. When you think about things like supply chain security and all the instability in the world, now is the time to strengthen your risk mitigation strategies. We’ve all learned a lot about these things over the past two or three years, and how important resiliency is as part of the mix. It's no good having technology at a price you can't afford, or with logistics that don't deliver it where and when you need it, at the right quality and price.

Finally, a key part of all this is curating our solutions into material sets that are relevant to market sectors and applications, because we don't want to create an extra load of work wading through our now extensive portfolio of materials to find what they’re looking for. We’re trying to make it easy.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the March 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.