Steve Feltham

Steve Feltham, VP, Chief Technology OfficerEmail : sfeltham@automata.com

"We have 200 corporate customers worldwide," says Dynamic's Vice President of Operations Steve Feltham.

In 1996, Feltham, then chief technology officer for Automata, was asked to run the whole division.A separate manufacturing location was added in Loudoun in 1986, said Feltham, and all operations were consolidated at the 110,000 square-foot Sterling premises in 1988.

The move to Loudoun was the result of the availability of space and a good location, according to Feltham."We employ a lot of labor and a lot of technical professionals," said Feltham, noting the increasing difficulty of finding technically qualified staff.The company's work force includes 29 different nationalities, and Feltham says Dynamic Details offers regular courses in English as a Second Language to aid in recruitment efforts.The Loudoun facility was responsible for $70 million in gross sales last year.

The division has 480 employees, 46% of whom live in Loudoun.

14) Telos CorporationThe Telos Corporation is located off Rt. 7 in Ashburn and specializes in what it calls "e-business solutions ... to meet the demands of the new economy," according to company publications.

In three decades of operation, Telos has grown into a worldwide operation of over 1,100 professionals delivering a variety of information technology solutions to government agencies and commercial enterprises.

In addition to Steve Feltham, the company's Chief Technology Officer, there are several new faces.
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Feltham is very involved with future technology, keeping the company aligned with both customers and suppliers technology roadmaps.

Their goal is to enable customers to add more interconnections on a board while allowing more routing space to escape packages like high-density BGAs while in some cases reduce layer count.Automata is currently implementing technology to further the densification of motherboards and active backplanes by moving toward very high-density subassemblies.This process radically changes the way circuit boards are manufactured.

Automata is currently investigating build-up technologies, including Matsushita's ALIVH process, as opposed to strictly focusing on laser microvia production.Feltham do not see hole formation as a major stumbling block ; rather it be the availability of the right material.The issue is finding materials that are flexible and strong, and can be processed to meet the needs of customers.

One important technology issue the company sees is the electrical characteristics of materials running out of steam, especially in their ability to propagate signals without loss.Much effort is spent on working with both mainstream and other nontraditional material suppliers to develop better methods and products to be utilized in their three years down the road mentality.

While Automata is currently one of the largest producers of boards with buried resistors, additional buried component technologies are being investigated to increase density and signal propagation over longer distances.