In the mid-1950's, 'printed circuit' manufacturing technology was in its infancy, so much so that even though the manufacturing techniques were evolving, the available materials were not up to snuff. It was nearly impossible to build working circuit boards in any volume, certainly not enough to make any money on it.

Ralph C. Robinson, a circuit board fab entrepreneur who began his lifelong affair with circuit board technology back then in northern California, recalls that "we knew what we wanted to do, we just didn't have the proper materials to do it with." Tantalizingly, he and others in the Bay Area saw that the demand for printed circuits was there and would continue to increase. There would be a fortune in printed circuit boards, if only they could build ones that worked! "We were scrapping a large percent of what we were making back then, and that was after we had found better materials and fabrication methods."

Ralph Robinson’s first exposure to the world of printed circuit boards was in 1956 at the North American Aviation Missile Development Division in Downey, California. In those days, he explains, circuit board technology was in its infancy, and the choice of materials available to fabricate these circuits was very limited. Ralph began designing artwork for photo-imaging, which was created by pen and ink, and was very simple compared to modern PCB’s. At the time, electronic technology was still dependent upon mechanical relays and vacuum tubes.

"We had a small shop to build boards, but to be honest, they had little success" Robinson recalls. "The materials that we had to work with were not very good. For example, I think that, at the time, the copper foil was attached to the board material using rubber cement, or something similar. Everything was experimental. Board materials were paper/phenolic. Later on, epoxies and better filler materials became available. We designed circuits in pen and ink, on letterhead! We would shoot a piece of artwork with a camera, image the circuit pattern, and then go etch a board. There was no real plating per se, although we did have a decent gold bath for contact plating. This bath had solid gold anodes in it. Every night we had to clean them off, wrap them up in tissue paper and put them in a safe!"

In those days, Robinson adds, boards were full of sockets, relays, and vacuum tubes. That’s how simple they were. "When semiconductors came on board in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s, why then things started changing. Boards became tighter, more detailed, and designers were trying to pack more and more circuitry into a board. Fortunately, great improvements were also being made concurrently in the laminates.”

In 1957, the Division’s Missile contract was canceled. A massive layoff followed, and the entire division was eliminated. Ralph subsequently moved north to the San Francisco area where he became employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers until late 1959, when he found an opportunity at an electronic company in what is now Silicon Valley. Although the company ultimately folded, it was, at the time he joined, equipped with a complete in-house etching facility for the fabrication of printed circuit boards. Why did Ralph decide to get involved in printed circuit boards in the first place? It had to do with that little Silicon Valley company that also had a printed circuit shop, Robinson relates, where he was doing design work. The shop could not produce workable circuit boards, and to Ralph’s surprise, the plant manager re-assigned him and two other persons from Engineering to the circuit board division and gave them a mandate to produce usable, working circuit boards. This was Ralph’s first opportunity to learn fabrication the hard way, by trial and error. In those days there was no pool of experience to draw from, as there was only one other small company fabricating boards in the entire Bay Area. The imminent failure of the company, however, for other reasons, prompted Ralph and his two colleagues to start up their own company dedicated only to printed circuit fabrication. At the time, there was virtually no viable local competition.

“We went down there and started working with it, but we were frustrated because there was no information available. It was all new. We persisted, however, and after awhile we began getting results, producing a product that worked and was reasonably reliable. These early boards were basically single-sided. They weren’t plated through, or even plated, they were all hand-drilled using electromechanical drills, hand-held by skilled operators. They were designed for use with sockets, but remember that once they left our shop, we didn’t know what the customer did with them. That has been historically true with most of the fabrication business. We would make boards custom-designed for each individual customer.”

“We were chemically etching boards, applying a resist, using the old techniques used by lithographers for years” he says. “Kodak had a product called KOR, or Kodak Ortho Resist. That worked fairly well; we used that in the early days, then they came out with a KPR, or Kodak Photo Resist, which became very popular. We would apply the resist, expose it, follow through with the developing process, and then it went into an etching bath which was in those days ferric chloride. Once they were etched, we hand-drilled tooling holes, pinned them together, two, three, or four deep, depending on the circuitry, then finish them off with a hot solder dip. We would dip them in a hot solder bath and squeegee off the excess.” “In those days, in many cases we used eyelets, especially where you needed extra support, for example, if you thought that you would have to pull a component out. The eyelets were used later as through-hole connections, especially when we started doing double-sided boards. This was in the early 1960’s.” In January 1960 Robinson’s new company “RKR Associates” was formed with borrowed money and was almost immediately successful. After a few years of growth, a new facility was needed. A dispute between the partners prompted Ralph to leave. He sold his interest in RKR and eventually founded his own company Exceltronics, in 1964. The company served the needs of a niche market, with the motto “Quality and Fast Turnaround”. This concept was novel in that era. The era before CAD (computer aided design) was a good time for a shop specializing in quick turn prototype manufacturing. Board designs were being mostly manually created, and would sometimes require up to 5 or 6 revisions before the part would work which meant that follow on orders were almost always available.

“We started building boards with plated through-holes in 1962, when we installed our first Shipley electroless copper bath. Shipley was a pioneer in the electroless process. The best thing about the advent of the process is that it eliminated the eyelets, first and foremost. Eyelets were costly and labor intensive; they were essentially like rivets, and had to be installed by a skilled operator. As boards became more densely packed, an operator could spend hours and hours on a single board installing eyelets of varying sizes, and this drove up the cost of each board. Additionally, eyelets needed larger holes, so they absorbed more board real estate and thus stood in the way of miniaturization. With plated through holes, we were able to condense the circuitry, especially since the science of creating the boards was developing, and materials were getting better. Once semiconductor materials came along, such as the little three-prong transistors that were very popular, well then everything began to rapidly progress smaller and smaller. Changes followed very rapidly thereafter. The first half of the ‘60’s decade was a time of extremely rapid change and advancement in everything from components to materials to fabricating technology. New plating techniques and plating baths were developed.”

Perhaps the biggest advancement was the development of better hole drilling technology, particularly with the advent of CNC machines to automate the drilling process, Robinson says. Until that time, drilling had been laborious, imprecise, and created a great deal of waste. Imprecision created a lot of scrap, and manual drilling was labor intensive and drove up costs as boards became more complex with a greater number of holes with ever-tighter tolerances. “We would lose sometimes thirty percent or more of our parts just due to hand drilling” Robinson recalls. With improvements in tooling, automated drilling technology, repeatability improved, and scrap and costs were reduced. High speed steel drills, Robinson says, had a short life, especially once fiberglass board materials came into use. “You’d get 150 holes and then your drill would turn into a nail” he remembers. When carbide drills became available, they were very expensive and brittle as well, and broke often. Automated drilling equipment and better carbide drill manufacturing, resulting in cheaper drills that were also more durable, greatly improved the process.

In Northern California, ‘Quick-turn’ became Exceltronics’ niche, he says. The demand for boards by design groups and R&D groups was such that they were demanding parts ‘tomorrow, not three weeks from tomorrow.’ While volume fabrication of boards became entrenched in southern California, many companies in the north focused on design and the technology. Robinson ordered the first multilayer press in the area and delivered the first multilayer boards locally fabricated at that time. He was among the first to use UV cured inks and masks on a regular basis. Eventually, in the industry, there would be problems between the designers and the producers, where designs were being specified that could not practicably be built. There would also be friction between assemblers and board fab people. The problem was partly the fault of both, Robinson says. Board fabrication people didn’t really know what happened to the board once it shipped; they weren’t involved in assembly. “Once the board left our shop, we really didn’t have anything to do with it” he says. Similarly, assembly folks weren’t always cognizant of the manufacturing issues faced by the board fab people, prompting the concept of focusing on ‘Design for Manufacturability’ or DFM. This allowed all three groups to interact with ideas to improve the finished reliability of the PCB.

In the late 1960’s – possibly 1967, Robinson says, he attended the NEPCON show in southern California where he was introduced to the DuPont Corporation’s new dry film photo-resist (Riston). “I thought to myself, this is the future” Robinson says. “Then I ordered a system right from the show there, and got the first one in the entire western part of the United States. It revolutionized imaging. It was easy to use and generated consistent, excellent results. It was so good, in fact, that we were now under pressure to generate better phototools. Now, we could do very good imaging, and although pen and ink were long gone, we needed to improve our methods. Spaces and traces became smaller, so ultimately the next step would be scanning and photoplotting, and when that came on board, we were making significant progress. This would have been in the early 1980’s.” All boards were still through-hole for leaded components however. “We didn’t start to see much in the way of surface mount boards until the mid-1980’s” Robinson recalls.

In 1970, Exceltronics was sold to a conglomerate. Management disputes followed, and once again, Ralph left to follow his own plan. The same year, Ralph founded Phase II, a company based on the same principles that had proven successful with Exceltronics. Phase II prospered. Ralph became involved in professional organizations and was elected an officer in the CCA (California Circuits Association) and for over six years served in various capacities and finally as President.

In his early years at Phase II, Ralph pioneered the use of computers to facilitate order entry, job tracking (real time) and inventory controls. Software had to be created, since none was available for many of these tasks. Ralph introduced foil construction along with vacuum lamination into the fabrication of his multilayer circuit boards while it was still considered a novel concept. Ralph Robinson retired as President and CEO of Phase II in 1987. He had served the company for 17 years, but eventually he was persuaded to return on a part-time basis to work in engineering and special projects until retiring fully in 1993. In 2002 he again came out of retirement and now consults and provides facilities support for Merix San Jose.