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PCBD-May2017

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May 2017 • The PCB Design Magazine 33 shielding, via stitching, impedance matching, panelizing, and fiducials should also be adopted by the students by the end of the course. Stu- dents should be armed with the rules of thumb and guidelines that will help them to achieve high-density interconnect (HDI) and be able to design a board that is both manufacturable and electro-magnetically compatible (EMC). Stu- dents should learn to design a board that will be right the first time, easily passing any certi- fication test. Flex and rigid-flex printed circuit boards that ensure flexibility and ergonomics of many electrical devices should not be omitted. Finally, students should learn how to properly document their PCB design project for PCB fab- rication and assembling. Concerning PCB CAD tools, I was thinking of using either Altium Designer or Eagle. Both have been around for decades and are highly adopted by engineering firms worldwide. I my- self prefer Altium Designer. It is intuitive to use and has numerous useful options. Never- theless, there is no free version, and cost is an issue at the university level. But Altium offers special licenses for students and universities, re- newable on a yearly basis. On the other hand, CadSoft Eagle, which was recently acquired by Autodesk, has an ideal free educational edition that supports up to six signal layers and 160 x 100 mm routing area. That is why I'm inclined towards Eagle. I need you, readers of various profiles, to help me in this endeavor. You are invited to contact me and share your experience and sug- gestions with me. Proposals for the curriculum, useful books, handy CAD tools—literally any- thing and everything you might suggest is wel- come. It's time to galvanize the students' passion for printed circuit board design! PCBDESIGN Bojan Jovanovic received his B.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engi- neering from the University of Nis, Serbia in 2006 and 2013, respective- ly. For any suggestions about his PCB design course, feel free to contact him here. Jovanovic is also available for collabora- tion on any research or industrial projects. LAUNCHING A NEW PCB DESIGN CURRICULUM IN SERBIA Scientists at LMU Munich and FSU Jena have de- veloped organic semiconductor nanosheets, which can easily be removed from a growth substrate and placed on other substrates. Today's computer processors are composed of billions of transistors. These electronic components normally consist of semiconductor material, insu- lator, substrate, and electrode. A dream of many scientists is to have each of these elements available as transferable sheets, which would allow them to design new electronic devices simply by stacking. This has now become a reality for the organic semiconductor material pentacene: Dr. Bert Nickel, a physicist at LMU Munich, and Professor Andrey Tur- chanin (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), together with their teams, have, for the first time, managed to create mechanically stable pentacene nanosheets. The researchers describe their method in the jour- nal Advanced Materials. They first cover a small sili- con wafer with a thin layer of a water-soluble organic film and deposit pentacene molecules upon it until a layer roughly 50 nanometers thick has formed. The next step is crucial: by irradiation with low-energy electrons, the topmost three to four levels of pen- tacene molecular layers are crosslinked, forming a "skin" that is only about five nanometers thick. Apart from the ability to transfer them, the new semiconductor nanosheets have other advantages. In addition, after deposition, the nanosheet sticks firmly to the electrical con- tacts by van der Waals forces, resulting in a low contact resistance of the final elec- tronic devices. Last but not least, organic semiconduc- tor nanosheets can now be deposited onto significantly more technologically relevant substrates than hitherto. Semiconductors as Decal Stickers

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