Tetsuro Nishimura, President, Nihon Superior Co. Ltd.

2014 was a great year for March, but we had to shift our priority from technology and product development to manufacturing. With the start of 2015, we are back on course, even if slightly behind schedule.

On the PCB side, flexible circuits, used in numerous small electronics, is still the strong driver of the market. However, we are already starting to see a comeback from the high density multi-layer boards that are used in the server market. This growth could be related to more and more mobile/portable devices using cloud-based storage and applications. Expectations from customers are more capacity and greater uniformity, around 85%.

Any engineer can tell you that a batch system reaching 85% is a difficult challenge, so March is working on new electrode designs and gas distributions to allow our batch plasma systems to have higher etch rates, while delivering uniformity above the customer's expectation.