Next Month’s Focus electronica Plan your 2019


editorial; see our calendar on page 120


VOLUME 33 - NUMBER 9 Product Preview:


SMTAI, IMAPS, The ASSEMBLY Show, MD&M Minn.


THE GLOBAL HI-TECH ELECTRONICS PUBLICATION September, 2018


Robots Visually Inspect and Understand Objects


Cambridge, MA — Humans have long been masters of dexterity, a skill that can largely be credited to the


Nordson SONOSCAN launch- es Gen7™ acoustic micro-imag- ing system. Product previews begin on…


Page 82


Hanwha Raises the Bar for CAMtek


help of our eyes. Robots, meanwhile, are still catching up. Certainly there has been some progress: for decades,


robots in controlled environments, such as assembly lines, have been able to pick up the same object over and over again.


More recently, breakthroughs in computer vision have enabled ro- bots to make basic distinctions be- tween objects, but even then, they do not truly understand objects’ shapes, so there is little they can do after a quick pick-up.


Researchers from MIT’s Com- puter Science and Artificial Intelli- gence Laboratory (CSAIL) have made a key development in this area of work: a system that lets robots in- spect random objects, and visually understand them enough to accom- plish specific tasks without ever hav- ing seen them before.


CAMTek installs complete SMT line from Hanwha, sig- nificantly boosting through- put. EMS section begins on…


Page 18 This Month's Focus:


Test and Automation


Lucas Manuelli with a Kuka robot that uses an advanced computer vision system to pick up virtually any object.


Terahertz Clock Rates with Graphene


Dreseden, Germany — Graphene, an ultrathin material consisting of a sin- gle layer of interlinked carbon atoms, is a promising candidate for the nano- electronics of the future. In the- ory, the material could allow clock rates up to a thousand times faster than today’s sili- con-based electronics.


CyberOptics explores the shift to 3D optical inspection; CAMI verifies twisted pair cables with continuity test; Corelis applies boundary scan to PCBs with little space for con- ventional testing. Special fea- tures begin on…


Page 64


Scientists from the Helm- holtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossen- dorf (HZDR) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), in co- operation with the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), have shown for the first time that graphene can ac- tually convert electronic signals with frequencies in the giga- hertz (GHz) range into signals with several times higher fre- quency extremely efficiently. Today’s silicon-based electronic


components operate at clock rates of several hundredgigahertz, that is, they are switching several billion times per second. The electronics in-


The system, dubbed “Dense Ob- ject Nets” (DON), looks at objects as collections of points that serve as “vi- sual roadmaps” of sorts. This ap- proach lets robots better understand and manipulate items, and, most im- portantly, allows them to even pick


Continued on page 8


Trapping Light for Faster


Electronics


Graphene converts electronic signals in the gigahertz range to signals with several times higher frequency.


dustry is currently trying to access the terahertz (THz) range, i.e., up to thousand times faster clock rates. Graphene is a promising mate- rial, because it has high electrical conductivity and is compatible with all existing electronic technologies. Theory has long predicted that graphene could be a very efficient “nonlinear” electronic material, i.e., a material that can very efficiently convert an applied oscillating elec- tromagnetic field into fields with a


Continued on page 6


Karlsruhe, Germany — At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), physics professor Thomas Schimmel and his team have developed a sin- gle-atom transistor, the smallest transistor worldwide. This quantum electronics component switches elec- trical current by controlled reposi- tioning of a single atom, now also in the solid state in a gel electrolyte. The single-atom transistor works at room temperature and consumes very little energy, which opens up en- tirely new perspectives for informa- tion technology.


Digitization results in a high energy consumption. In industrial- ized countries, information technolo- gy presently has a share of more than 10 percent in total power con- sumption. The transistor is the cen- tral element of digital data process- ing in computing centers, PCs, smartphones, or in embedded sys- tems for many applications from


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  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124