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APRIL 2023 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 73 technologies which are certain to spawn yet a new range of products that the consumer does not yet know they need to make their lives better, more interesting, and enjoyable as we begin to explore in greater depth the relatively new category of electronics called "wearables." Inspiration's Role in Change Again, this commentary has been about change—inspiring, enabling, adapting to, and mastering change. Inspiration, insight, or whatever you might want to call it, is vital in the change process. We can now see with ever greater clarity how the formerly sharp lines between fundamental elements of electronics assembly are blurring. e components and substrates, especially flexible substrates and even assembly technologies, are being used in a more coherent and cooperative way than ever before, as evidenced by the new era of heterogeneous integration which is upon us. e relative strengths of oen very different technologies, especially flexible circuits, all adaptive and adaptable, are enabling us to get ever more value from our electronic products. Ironically and perhaps fittingly, the only thing that will never change is change. DESIGN007 Joe Fjelstad is founder and CEO of Verdant Electronics and an international authority and innovator in the field of electronic interconnection and packaging technologies with more than 185 patents issued or pending. To read past columns or contact Fjelstad, click here. Download your free copy of Fjelstad's book Flexible Circuit Technology, 4 th Edition, and watch his in-depth workshop series "Flexible Circuit Technology." Physicists were surprised by the 2022 discovery that electrons in magnetic iron- germanium crystals could spontaneously and collectively organize their charges into a pattern featuring a standing wave. Magnetism also arises from the collec- tive self-organization of electron spins into ordered patterns, and those pat- terns rarely coexist with the patterns that produce the standing wave of electrons physicists call a charge density wave. In a study published in Nature Physics, Rice University physicists Ming Yi and Pengcheng Dai, and many of their col- laborators from the 2022 study, present an array of experimental evidence that shows their charge density wave discov- ery was rarer still, a case where the mag- netic and electronic orders don't simply coexist but are directly linked. The iron-germanium materials are kagome lattice crystals, a much-studied family of materials featuring 2D arrange- ments of atoms reminiscent of the weave pattern in traditional Japanese kagome baskets, which features equilateral tri- angles that touch at the corners. "Kagome materials have taken the quantum materials world by storm recently," Yi said. Dai added, "When put onto kagome lattices, electrons can also appear in a state where they are stuck and cannot go anywhere due to quantum interfer- ence effects." Dai said the findings confirmed the team's hypothesis that charge order and magnetic order are linked in iron-germa- nium. "This is one of the very few, if not of the only, known example of a kagome material where magnetism forms first, preparing the way for charges to line up," he said. (Source: Rice University) Magnetism Fosters Unusual Electronic Order in Quantum Material