Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1401769
AUGUST 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 45 centage of field failures, this can prompt a mas- sive recall. All this could have been prevented if the supplier had stopped to ask for 3D mod- eling so the bend radius could be reviewed. An evaluation based on the types and thicknesses of materials could have been performed. With this information in hand, the supplier could have notified the engineering team on the pro- curement side and design changes could have been made up front. ese are only a few examples of things that can go wrong. My overarching message is to find a trusted supplier that will help "Tacoma- proof " your designs. Flex and rigid-flex fabri- cators know their processes and capabilities. It's in their best interest to help you engineer a product that is reliable and cost effective. PCB007 Chris Clark is a senior applications engineer for Flexible Circuit Technologies (FCT) with over 30 years of expertise in design and fabrication of flex and rigid-flex circuits. fication process will prevent them from chang- ing things on you midstream. A reputable flex and rigid-flex supplier should point out these types of things to you up front. Latent Failures is is the biggest one of them all. ink about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. What if you were an automotive EMS company working on circuitry used in the next generation of airbags. To save costs, you partner with a supplier that doesn't take the time to ask about end use, in- cluding the circuit forming and environmental conditions. e installation of the circuit into the housing is a manual process and there is an aggressive form that needs to take place. De- pending on the day of the week and which in- dividual is doing the forming, there is a signif- icant stress placed on a couple of conductors as they join up with a row of connector pads. Over time, the introduction of thermal stress- es, as well as vibration, contribute to cause some of these conductors to crack. e end- result is a failure to deploy or inadvertent de- ployment. Even though there is a very low per- An international team of physicists led by the University of Minnesota has discovered that a unique superconducting metal is more resilient when used as a very thin layer. The research is the first step toward a larger goal of understanding un- conventional superconducting states in materials, which could possibly be used in quantum comput- ing in the future. Niobium diselenide (NbSe2) is a superconduct- ing metal, meaning that it can conduct electricity, or transport electrons from one atom to another, with no resistance. It is not uncommon for materials to behave differently when they are at a very small size, but NbSe2 has potentially beneficial proper- ties. The researchers found that the material in 2D form (a very thin substrate only a few atomic layers thick) is a more resilient superconductor because it has a two-fold symmetry, which is very different from thicker samples of the same material. The researchers attributed the newly-discovered two-fold rotational symmetry of the superconduct- ing state in NbSe2 to the mixing between two close- ly competing types of superconductivity, namely the conventional s-wave type—typical of bulk NbSe2— and an unconventional d- or p-type mechanism that emerges in few-layer NbSe2. The two types of su- perconductivity have very similar energies in this system. Because of this, they interact and compete with each other. (Source: University of Minnesota) Researchers Uncover Unique Properties of a Promising New Superconductor Material could be used in future quantum computing applications