Hi everybody!

     We've got a series of boards that we build for a customer who's product
is a WEB/CATV sort of system. The main board is what they call their home-box,
or set-top board. It's got a little of everything on it...a digital section
around the CPU, some RF circuitry with the metal sheilding, and analog areas.
The system is working and they've got customers, so the next logical step in
the product life cycle is cost cutting, figuring out how to do the same thing
only cheaper.

      Yesterday my contact at our customer (the materials manager) asked me if
I have ever built a board that had two complete and distinct sections, one a
4-layer section, and the other a 2-layer section, that was joined by some sort
of "staple" (that was the best way he could describe it to me) and I would
process it as one single board. He said he wasn't sure if the "staple" was
pressed into the PCB somehow, or soldered in. But he said he was sure that it
was said the assemblers would put it together as if it was one board.

      I told him lordy no, I have never heard of such a thing. I've done
boards that are different layers connected by a flex circuit or a ribbon
cable, and that was a completely separate operation towards the end of the
process, but never processing two different layer boards at the same time as
one board...have any of you heard of such a thing? My customer said that this
was something that a fab house down in southern California had told to one of
their engineers in their efforts to reduce costs...says that they can save on
their PCB cost by doing something like that since the only section of the
board that needs to be 4-layer is a small area right around the CPU.

      My first reaction was holy-taco shell batman, how in the world is
something like that gonna stay flat? I can't visualize something like
that...is the materials manager just trying to mess with me or does something
like that really exist?

-Steve Gregory-

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