A circuit board is one on which a few integrated circuits and dozens and dozens of tiny discrete devices-capacitors, resistors and may be a few inductors are mounted. Now imagine what designers could do if the passives were so small and flat, that they could be inserted between layers of circuit board itself, rather than taking up space on the top of it. This can be done only by passive integration. The main advantage is putting passives “underground” leaves more room on the surface of the board for IC’s which means more design flexibility. Integrated passives are not exactly new, they have been used for decades in the ceramic substrate that underlie circuits in military, microwave and mainframe computer systems. But those represent a speciality within the electronics market. Passive integration may be the only way to handle the future generations of high frequency, high power microprocessors.