Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1111672
34 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 Rogers Corporation and MEGATRON 6 materi- als, primarily. And we're manufacturing very high layer count boards. The platforms we're building on are anywhere from 18–40 layer PCB requirements with two-mil space and trace and lots of blind and buried vias and spe- cial processing techniques. Most of what we build is for the military, and our bare board fabricator supply base is all in the U.S., which has significantly dimin- ished over the past several decades. There are fewer than 200 domestic PCB players in total and around 30–32 of them are 31032 MIL-cer- tified right now, and probably half of those are owned by a single entity. Johnson: When high-speed, low-loss materials come into play, your clients are likely to want a material that is tried-and-true, not necessar- ily the latest product. Vaughan: That's absolutely right. Everything we do is not a new program. It doesn't really matter what the latest and greatest material is. In many instances, it's dialed in the way it needs to be on the drawing or the platform fly- ing in the air. If it works, we're not going to change anything—that's the attitude—so new materials are much more applicable on new product development. Johnson: Thank you, John. This has been very helpful. Vaughan: Yes, sir. It's my pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you soon. SMT007 A team of scientists at the Center for Nanoscale Mate- rials (CNM), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facil- ity at Argonne National Laboratory, have pioneered a micromechanical device that responds to external sig- nals in an entirely new way compared to conventional ones. Their work was recently published in Physical Review Letters. "For every device running at a specific frequency, you need a timing source," said CNM nanoscientist Dave Czaplewski, the paper's lead author. "Having multiple devices running at multiple frequencies makes the sys- tem much more complex." While a common approach to this problem involves multiple resonators, multiple sig- nals, or both, the researchers created a single, microsize resonator that can generate multiple frequencies from one signal. The research was conducted partly at the CNM, where researchers designed the resonator and used electrical characterization techniques to measure its responses. The silicon device anchors three beams that move together in two vibrations: a side-to-side swaying motion and a twisting motion. The researchers used this duality to generate a frequency comb that can be used to study a specific type of dynamic known as saddle-node on an invariant cir- cle (SNIC) bifurcation in mechanical, opti- cal, and biological systems. In a biological setting, for example, understanding this behavior could aid in the design of micro- mechanical elements that emulate the way neurons respond to stimuli. The next step in the research will be to reproduce the frequency comb phenom- enon in higher-frequency resonators and extend the number of frequencies that can be generated. (Source: Argonne National Laboratory) Argonne Researchers Create a Unique, Tiny Resonator