Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1505694
76 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 target market? Now, you can still choose to sup- port other segments, but you really have to win in your target market segment. Matties: I think the other thing we have to do is look beyond our competitors when we're benchmarking. For example, if you want to look at how to get people to move through a line, look at what Disneyland does, as they are able to move people through a line quite well. Good point. Benchmarking has fallen out of favor; you don't hear people talking about it very much. But benchmarking is not the same as competitive analysis, right? Benchmarking is looking at some element of your business and trying to figure out how you can do that better. Looking at another industry or a company that may be outside your industry may help you to understand your own processes better. So how do we take the lessons from Disney on their queue management? Is there a way to apply that to how jobs are queued at a board shop? Is there something we can learn there about how to prioritize work into batches? It's the same problem. Your fabrication facility has a limited capacity. You know Disney has a limited capacity for guests. Is there something you can learn from Disney about how jobs are queued up? Work is queued up at a printed cir- cuit fabricator, right? One thing I like about Disney is that you never see the entire line. If you saw how long the line actually was, you probably wouldn't bother. But the line snakes around, goes into a building, and it goes into another building. You don't actually see the entire line. ere's a psychological aspect too. We taught Disney in some of my past classes. One of the things that Disney works on is the perception of waiting time. It's not just the actual waiting time; it's perceived waiting time. How do you keep your clients engaged during that period before they receive the product or service? Matties: This has been great, Tim. We really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. ank you all. PCB007 A proton-mediated approach that produces multi- ple phase transitions in ferroelectric materials could help develop high-performance memory devices, such as brain-inspired, or neuromorphic, computing chips, a KAUST-led international team has found. Ferroelectrics, such as indium selenide, are intrin- sically polarized materials that switch polarity when placed in an electric field. In addition to requiring low operating voltages, the resulting memory devices display excellent maximum read/write endurance and write speeds, but their storage capacity is low. This is because existing methods can only trigger a few ferroelectric phases, and capturing these phases is experimentally challenging, says Xin He, who co-led the study under the guidance of Fei Xue and Xixiang Zhang. Now, the method devised by the team relies on the protonation of indium selenide to generate a multitude of ferroelectric phases. The researchers incorporated the ferroelectric material in a transis- tor consisting of a silicon-supported stacked heter- ostructure for evaluation. They deposited a multilayered indium sele- nide film on the heterostructure, which comprised an aluminum oxide insulating sheet sandwiched between a platinum layer at the bottom and porous silica at the top. The researchers gradually injected or removed protons from the ferroelectric film by changing the applied voltage. (Source: KAUST) Protons Set to Power Next-gen Memory Devices