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The Chemical Connection: When the Industry Moves Faster Than the Standards

As a supplier of wet processing equipment, we have rules and standards we must adhere to, including both regional and national electrical codes and safety and environmental regulations, as well as myriad other standards to make the equipment safe to use. Things are a little different when it comes to rules and standards for manufacturing PCBs, though, because technical advances and requirements change so quickly that standards can’t keep up.

Because I’ve worked on several IPC standards subcommittees in the past, I know it takes a while to get everyone to agree on what the standards should be and then actually set those standards. Nowadays, by the time this has been accomplished, the industry has moved on.

Because of this, most suppliers are forced to be reactive rather than proactive. We hear about new requirements and processes mostly from our customers that are trying to meet the demands of their customers. The typical sequence of events: A potential customer approaches a PCB manufacturer and says, “This is what we want to do. Can you do it?” The PCB manufacturer is understandably reluctant to give a potential customer a flat-out no if they are not sure, so they contact their suppliers and ask, “Can we do this with what we have from you?” Most suppliers are equally reluctant to tell an existing or potential customer no and are thus forced to determine what needs to be done to meet their customers’ requirements.

To cope with rapid development and change within the industry, it is invaluable to maintain a process development lab with a full-sized develop-etch-strip line (DES) that can also serve as a strip-etch-strip line (SES) or as a photochemical machining line (PCM) for etching steel, by just changing process chemistries. There are also a couple of smaller process lines that allow us to do development work with a much-reduced volume of chemistry.

Having an onsite process lab allows us to relatively quickly determine whether a new process can be run in existing equipment or if changes need to be made so that it can. This is immensely helpful when trying to cope with rapidly changing manufacturing requirements with no hard-set standards. It enables rapid response to customer demands, which, in turn, helps retain existing customers or attract new ones. In cases where there is no obvious solution or fix, it is possible to team with the customer to develop the equipment and chemistry needed to accomplish the required task at hand. The downside, of course, is that maintaining and staffing an R&D center is not inexpensive, and those costs must be added to the cost of the equipment. Still, the ability to team up with customers to quickly respond to new challenges has proven advantageous in the long run, even though it may have cost some short-term sales.

A Note About Partnerships
Forming partnerships with customers can be tricky, however. Partnerships imply exclusivity, and while that may be an advantage for a supplier of consumables (plating chemistries, etch resists, etc.) to a very large customer, it might not be for a supplier of capital equipment.

Many, many years ago (even before my time, if you can believe it), we had a development agreement with a very large computer company to develop equipment to etch printer bands for then state-of-the-art high-speed printers, which were unbelievably primitive by today’s standards. Careful reading of the agreement revealed that any equipment developed for this process would be exclusively for that computer company and could not be sold to anyone else. Our lawyer caught that and got the exclusivity clause removed. That was fortunate because that equipment line became our mainstay throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and is still a major component of our sales today.

Even though we prefer not to use the term “partnership,” so as to avoid the implied exclusivity, things can still get a little awkward, especially given the prevalence of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) today. Even a nondescript boilerplate NDA that prevents you from disclosing that you are working with that company and what they are working on to anyone can be somewhat problematic.

Keeping Things Close to the Vest
For instance, a few years ago, two start-up solar cell companies contacted us about a new process for solar cell manufacture that necessitated the cleaning of manufacturing residues off the back of the cell without anything touching the front side of the cell. The process was new to us as well, so we had no pre-existing wisdom to offer. Being start-ups, they had no access to equipment or chemistry needed to run tests. We offered to rent them both lab time and staff (me) to run tests under their supervision.

Our problem was that each company was only marginally aware of the other and only suspected that the other was working on the same process. The goal of both companies was to develop a process and sell it or the entire company to the highest bidder. NDAs were signed that allowed us to use any specialty equipment developed for this process for anything not related to this specific solar cell process, but the process developed during these tests belonged to the customer.

Company A came in first and, after a few visits and testing between them, we were able to develop a viable, patentable process. (It also didn’t require any extensive equipment redesign on our part). Company B came in a few months later, and we provided them with the same initial set-up as we had for Company A. It soon became very frustrating as we could see they were clearly going down the wrong path, and we couldn’t even give them hints that might point them in the right direction. Fortunately, a moral dilemma was avoided when company B decided the whole thing was a bad idea and disappeared from the scene, never to be heard from again.

So, even if forming customer/supplier teams to investigate new processes can be complicated, it is still a worthwhile endeavor and one way to cope with ever-changing process demands without any hard standards. Suppliers have probably seen more good, bad, and ugly ideas than any manufacturer can possibly imagine. Keeping good relations with your various suppliers can help you as standards change and also help the suppliers keep up with rapid changes in manufacturing PCBs.

This column originally appeared in the April 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine.