Optimize the Interconnect:
Why OTI Had to Exist
Every complex manufacturing challenge eventually exposes the same truth: the weakest point isn’t a machine, a chemistry, or a single process step—it’s the handoff between them. For Chris Ryder, Director of Business Development at MKS, that realization didn’t arrive suddenly. It took decades of experience spanning quality engineering, product management, and laser based manufacturing to see it clearly. But once it became obvious, it was impossible to ignore. That realization is what led to Optimize the Interconnect (OTI)—not as a product, not as a slogan, but as a mandate.
In the opening episode of On the Line with MKS, Chris introduces OTI by reframing what matters most in advanced PCB and substrate manufacturing. Not yield in isolation. Not throughput by itself. Not chemistry or laser performance alone. Instead, the single structure that determines whether all of those investments succeed or fail: the interconnect itself.
Episode 1 of the OTI Story
Author: Ryan Wagner
Released: August 17, 2026
The Interconnect Is the Product
In high density and ultra high density PCB architectures, everything converges at the via. That copper plated connection between layers determines electrical performance, thermal behavior, mechanical reliability, and ultimately field lifetime.
Yet historically, the interconnect has been optimized in fragments.
Laser drilling teams focused on creating a “clean via.” Plating teams focused on filling it. Chemistry suppliers refined individual steps. Quality teams were left reconciling failures after the fact—often stuck between departments pointing fingers at one another.
Chris knows this dynamic well. Earlier in his career, as a quality engineer inside PCB manufacturing, he lived at that intersection—investigating failures, tracing root causes, and discovering that improvements made in one process step often introduced unintended consequences in the next.
OTI comes directly from that lived experience.
From “Surround the Chamber” to “Optimize the Interconnect”
Chris places OTI within MKS’ longer trajectory as a company. Originally known for instrumentation for semiconductor vacuum chambers, MKS expanded over time into motion control, lasers, system-level tools, and eventually full-process technologies for electronics manufacturing.
As MKS integrated ESI (laser drilling systems) and Atotech (chemistry and wet processing equipment), the question became unavoidable:
What is our shared mission when we bring all of these capabilities together?
The answer wasn’t “make better lasers” or “develop better chemistry.” It was something more fundamental: improve the one structure every advanced PCB depends on—the interconnect.
That’s where OTI was born.
Not as a narrowing of focus, but as an expansion of responsibility.
Why Customers Immediately Recognized Its Value
When Chris and his colleagues began approaching customers together—not as separate laser and chemistry teams, but as a single process partner—the response was striking.
For customers, OTI wasn’t an abstract idea. It solved a very real operational problem: accountability.
Instead of coordinating roadmaps across multiple vendors, customers could now engage one partner that understood how drilling parameters affect copper topography, how surface conditions influence plating behavior, and how reliability emerges—or fails—at their intersection. As one customer put it during early OTI discussions: “Finally. This is going to be easier for us.”
That reaction wasn’t about convenience. It was about speed, clarity, and confidence in process decisions.
Collaboration as a Technical Advantage
One of the most important themes Chris introduces is that OTI is enabled by shared learning. When laser engineers and chemistry experts work inside the same organization, assumptions disappear quickly.
Laser specialists begin to understand smear, oxide treatments, and plating tolerances in ways they never needed to before. Chemists develop a far deeper appreciation for photonics, beam shaping, and drilling physics.
That cross pollination changes everything—from how R&D projects are scoped to how customer challenges are diagnosed.
OTI doesn’t dilute expertise. It compounds it.
A Holistic View of Reliability
Chris is careful to emphasize that Optimize the Interconnect is not about replacing customer process knowledge. The world’s leading PCB and substrate manufacturers already employ exceptional engineers.
Instead, OTI is about amplifying those teams—reducing the time, effort, and cost required to reach reliable solutions by aligning equipment, chemistry, and process thinking from the start. Reliability, in this framing, isn’t a test result at the end of the line. It’s an outcome designed deliberately into every step that touches the via.
Setting the Stage for What Comes Next
Episode 1 establishes OTI as a philosophy grounded in real manufacturing pain points—not theory. It explains why MKS believes the interconnect deserves focused, integrated optimization, and why customers are responding to that approach.
What it doesn’t do—by design—is dive into how that optimization actually happens.
That comes next. In the following episode, OTI moves from concept to discipline: exploring reliability, productivity, flexibility, and why optimizing the interconnect unlocks capabilities that isolated process improvements never can.
🎧Listen to the full conversation
Next in the series: Turning Optimization into a Discipline (Episode 2)