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SEPTEMBER 2023 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 51 Rigid-flex Resources IPC has a variety of great resources and spe- cific industry standards on its website. IPC- 6013 Qualification and Performance Specifica- tion for Flexible Printed Boards, features a trea- sure trove of information. IPC-4201 through IPC-4204 cover many of the base materials used for flex circuits. IPC-4562 covers copper foils and IPC-SM-840 defines the masks that can be used. Once you've defined what you need in your rigid-flex design, find a flex fabricator you can work with to get the job done. Most of the guidelines listed by fabricators online focus on the company's limitations. ey all have dif- ferent capabilities, so be sure to match your needs with their limits for the best cost return. Pay close attention to their "standard" feature sizes, not the "highest-end capability." If your electrical and mechanical constraints are criti- cal to your design, be sure to have a conversa- tion with the production engineer at the facil- ity. is will help you and the fabricator. Your EDA soware company should also have an online section titled "How to Layout a Flex Design." ese are great resources and worth looking at. If you don't like your so- ware's approach to rigid-flex, check out some of the videos from the other soware com- panies. You might find something you didn't think of before. DESIGN007 Cheri Litson is a PCB design and engineering consultant. Sandia has produced its first lot of a new world- class ion trap, a central component for certain quan- tum computers. The new device, dubbed the Enchi- lada Trap, enables scientists to build more power- ful machines to advance the experimental field of quantum computing. In addition to traps operated at Sandia, several traps will be used at Duke University for performing quantum algorithms. An ion trap is a type of micro- chip that holds electrically charged atoms, or ions. With more trapped ions, or qubits, a quantum com- puter can run more complex algorithms. With sufficient control hardware, the Enchilada Trap could store and transport up to 200 qubits using a network of five trapping zones inspired by its predecessor, the Roadrunner Trap. Accord- ing to Daniel Stick, a Sandia scientist and leading researcher with the Quantum Systems Accelera- tor, a quantum computer with up to 200 qubits and current error rates will not outperform a conven- tional computer for solving useful problems. How- ever, it will enable researchers to test an architec- ture with many qubits that in the future will support more sophisticated quantum algorithms for phys- ics, chemistry, data science, materials science and other areas. Sandia had experimented with similar junctions in previous traps. Daniel believes the branching architecture is currently the best solution for rear- ranging trapped ion qubits and anticipates that future, even larger versions of the trap will feature a similar design. (Source: Sandia) Bigger and Better Quantum Computers Possible With New Ion Trap, the Enchilada