Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/786015
20 The PCB Design Magazine • February 2017 how a similar thermal profile can be generated of an entire board, including components, under load. Imagine how powerful this could be for a systems or package designer worrying about the thermal performance of an actual product in a difficult environment, such as the engine com- partment of a car, or the confines of a very small enclosure! As I said, this is exciting technology. PCBDESIGN You can learn more about TRM and its capabili- ties at www.adam-research.de/en/. References 1. Brooks and Adam, "PCB Trace and Via Temperatures; The Complete Analysis, 2 nd Edi- tion," 2017, available at Amazon.com. 2. IPC-2152, "Standard for Determining Current Carrying Capacity in Printed Board De- sign," August, 2009, www.ipc.org. 3. The examples in this paper are taken from Reference 1, Chapters 7, 8, 10, 13, and 14. For the last 20 years, Douglas G. Brooks has owned a small engineering service firm and written numerous technical articles on printed circuit board design and signal integrity issues, and published two books on these topics. He has given seminars several times a year across the U.S., as well as Russia, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Canada. His primary focus is on making complex technical issues easily under- stood by those without advanced degrees. His latest book, "PCB Trace and Via Currents and Tem- peratures: The Complete Analysis," was released in 2016. EXCITING NEW TECHNOLOGY: THERMAL RISK MANAGEMENT New research provides scientists looking at single molecules or into deep space a more accurate way to analyze imaging data captured by microscopes, telescopes and other de- vices. The improved method for determining the posi- tion of objects captured by imaging systems is the result of new research by scientists at the Univer- sity of Chicago. Many imaging systems and im- age-based detectors are constituted of pixels, such as with a mega-pixel cell phone. So-called particle tracking allows researchers to determine the posi- tion of an object down to a single pixel and even explore sub-pixel localization to better than one- tenth of a pixel accuracy. But such sub-pixel resolution depends on al- gorithms to estimate the position of objects and their trajectories. Using such algorithms often re- sults in errors of precision and accuracy due to fac- tors such as nearby or overlapping objects in the image and background noise. SPIFF can correct the errors with little add- ed computational costs, according to Scherer. Applicable to many disciplines "Analyzing an image to obtain a rough esti- mate of an object's posi- tion isn't too difficult, but making optimal use of all the information in an image to obtain the best possible tracking information can be really chal- lenging," said David Grier, professor of physics at New York University, who was not involved in the research. The research described in the paper applied SPIFF to experimental data on solids (i.e., colloidal spheres) suspended in a liquid, but the research- ers have now applied their method to many other datasets, including nanoscale features of cells (e.g. vesicles), metallic nanoparticles and even single molecules, Scherer said, adding that the SPIFF method is applicable to all tracking algorithms. New Method Improves Accuracy of Imaging Systems