Next Month’s Focus
Test and
Measurement
See our 2017 Editorial and
Show Calendar on Page 96.
VOLUME 31 - NUMBER 10
Product Preview: electronica
THE GLOBAL HI-TECH ELECTRONICS PUBLICATION October, 2016
Carbon Nanotube Transistors May Replace Silicon
Seica offers a flying probe tester capable of frequency measurements up to 1.5 GHz as well as two compact test platforms. Product Preview begins on…
Page 62
WORLD Electronics Depends on Yamaha Service
Madison, WI — Will Moore’s Law continue to dominate semiconductor development, or will silicon finally reach its limits? Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, may have found just the answer that the semiconductor industry has been anticipating for many years. The an- swer may well be carbon nanotubes. For decades, scientists have
tried to harness the unique proper- ties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power, re- sulting in longer battery life, faster wireless communication and faster
processing speeds for devices like smartphones and laptops. A number of challenges have im-
peded the development of high-per- formance transistors made of carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders made of car- bon just one atom thick. Consequent- ly, their performance has lagged far behind semiconductors such as silicon and gallium arsenide used in comput- er chips and personal electronics. Now, for the first time, Universi-
ty of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have created carbon nan- otube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors.
Led by Michael Arnold and Padma Gopalan, UW-Madison professors of materials science and engineering, the team’s carbon nanotube transis- tors achieved current that is 1.9 times higher than silicon transistors. The researchers reported their advance in a paper published September 2 in the journal Science Advances. “This achievement has been a
dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years,” says Arnold. “Making car- bon nanotube transistors that are bet- ter than silicon transistors is a big milestone. This breakthrough in car- bon nanotube transistor performance is a critical advance toward exploiting carbon nanotubes in logic, high-speed
Continued on page 6
EMS provider WORLD Elec- tronics uses Yamaha YSM20 modular surface mounters for high-mix/low-volume runs; the company receives superior sup- port from Yamaha rep Trans- Tec America..
Page 20 This Month's Focus: Components and Distribution
Koh Young now offers its "To- tal 3D Inspection and Process Optimization Solution"; EAO creates HMI components and systems for high-volume mfg; Nicomatic explains the rigor- ous testing of metal domes for switches.
Digital Forensics Rescues Retro Video Games
Student Jerry Brady holds a nanotube substrate with Adam Malecek, original author of the article, in background. Carbon nanotubes may replace silicon as the preferred semiconductor medium.
New Way to Determine How Atoms Are Arranged
Page 50
Raleigh, NC — Researchers from North Carolina State University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have de- veloped a novel approach to materials characterization, using Bayesian sta- tistical methods to gain new insight into the structure of materials.
“We want to understand the
crystallographic structure of materi- als — such as where atoms are locat- ed in the matrix of a material — so that we have a basis for understand- ing how that structure affects a mate- rial’s performance,” says Jacob Jones, a professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-au- thor of a paper on the work. “This is a fundamentally new advance that will help us develop new materials that can be used in everything from elec- tronics and manufacturing to vehicles and nanotechnologies.” The first step in understanding
a material’s crystallographic struc- ture is bombarding a sample of the material with electrons, photons or other subatomic particles, using technology such as the Spallation
Continued on page 8
Palo Alto, CA — Some 25,000 soft- ware and video game titles, as well as the original box covers and other period artwork they shipped with have been rescued from oblivion. They represent a collection belonging to a young man named Stephen Cabrinety who filled his home with video games and software, starting in the mid-1980s. Unopened boxes were piled to the ceilings — every- thing from early word processing programs such as WordStar to vin- tage releases of Pong, Doom and SimCity. Though some might have thought he suffered a peculiar obses- sion, today the Cabrinety collection is considered a priceless snapshot of our culture — one captured just as the digital tsunami that would forev- er change civilization was hitting our shores. Cabrinety did not live to see
what would become of his efforts; he died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1995 at the age of 29, but his collection has achieved a sort of digital immortality. The Stanford University Libraries, which acquired the collection in 2009, and the National Institute of Stan- dards and Technology (NIST) have just completed a multi-year effort to rescue the collection’s digital content
Continued on page 8
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100