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16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 Charles Pfeil worked in the PCB industry for more than 50 years as a designer and owner of a service bureau. Now retired, he is the original product architect for Expedi- tion PCB and an inventor of XtremePCB and more recently enhanced the Altium routing technology Barry Olney is managing director of In-Circuit Design Pty Ltd (iCD), Australia, a PCB design service bureau that specializes in board-level simulation. The company developed the iCD Design Integrity software incorporating the iCD Stackup, PDN, and CPW Planner. The software can be downloaded at www.icd.com.au. To read past columns, click here. • Algorithms are the building blocks that make up machine learning and artificial intelligence. • A machine learning model is a model that has been trained to recognize certain types of patterns. • AI needs to absorb and learn from infor- mation in order to achieve the same (or better) results. • Finding the right algorithm is partly just trial and error but is also based on the recognition of patterns learned and experi- ence with similar designs. DESIGN007 Resources • 'Beyond Design: Artificial Intelligence in EDA Tools' by Barry Olney, May 2016, The PCB Design Magazine • "What is artificial intelligence," ibm.com • "What is Artificial Intelligence," by Alyssa Schroer, May 19, 2023, builtin.com • "EDA Vendors Widen Use of AI," by Ed Sperling, Sept. 29, 2021, semiengineering.com In a new landmark chemistry study, research- ers describe how they have achieved the highest level of energy storage in a supercapacitor ever recorded. Supercapacitors store electrical energy between two metal plates that are close together but sepa- rated by a surface that cannot conduct electricity. Supercapacitors are similar to batteries, except that batteries store and retrieve energy using chemical transformations, while capacitors store energy by using oppositely charged surfaces. "This is a big step forward and gets us closer to achieving supercapacitors with high energy density, which would radically change how we store and manage energy," said Dr. Luis Echegoyen, a longtime faculty member within the University of Texas at El Paso's Department of Chemistry and Bio- chemistry. Supercapacitors have high potential because they can charge much faster than batteries—within seconds to fractions of a second, according to Echegoyen. However, current supercapacitors can only store a low amount of energy, which limits their range of potential applications. If supercapacitors could be designed to store more energy, they would be physically lighter and charge much faster than batteries. The new supercapacitor designed by Echegoyen and Dr. Marta Plonska-Brzez- inska of the Medical University of Bialystok achieved a record level of storage, or capacitance, using a material with a carbon "nano-onion" core structure, which creates multiple pores that allow storage of a greater volume of energy. (Source: University of Texas at El Paso) Researchers Achieve Historic Milestone in Energy Capacity of Supercapacitors