Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1513227
40 PCB007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2023 What concerns you more in your growth plans: capabilities, capacity, or competition? Capabilities always come first and foremost. Capacity is the next challenge. In the current economic situation, finding good team mem- bers is a challenge. How does "going green" factor into your business plan? Is it a cost of doing business (CODB) or a selling point? ACE has always been concerned with being as green as possible. I consider it neither a CODB nor a selling point but more of a responsibil- ity. We all have families and I am sure I speak for all of us when I say that we want our grand- children's grandchildren to enjoy a walk in the park as much as we do—without a respirator. Which process technologies hold the most opportunity for growth in the industry in 2024? We are very interested in how AI will integrate into our processing. We are also very interested in watching the evolution of additive technol- ogies. PCB007 First, there was the Internet of Things (IoT) and now, at the interface of computer science and biology, the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) promises to rev- olutionize medicine and healthcare. The IoBNT refers to biosensors that collect and process data, nano- scale Labs-on-a-Chip that run medical tests inside the body, the use of bacteria to design biological nano-machines that can detect pathogens, and nano- robots that swim through the bloodstream to perform targeted drug delivery and treatment. "Overall, this is a very, very exciting research field," explained Assistant Professor Haitham Al Hassanieh, head of the Laboratory of Sensing and Networking Systems in EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). "With advances in bio-engineering, synthetic biology, and nano- technology, the idea is that nano-biosensors will revolutionize medicine because they can reach places and do things that current devices or larger implants can't," he continued. Yet no matter how exciting this cutting-edge research field is, there remains a huge, fundamental challenge – when you have a nano-robot in some- one's body, how will you communicate with it? Tra- ditional techniques, like wireless radios, work well for large implants such as pacemakers or defibrilla- tors but can't be scaled to micro and nano-dimen- sions, and wireless signals don't penetrate through body fluids. Enter what's being called biomolecular commu- nication, inspired by the body itself. It doesn't uti- lize electromagnetic waves but biological mole- cules both as carriers and as information, mimicking the existing communication mechanisms in biology. In its simplest form it encodes "1" and "0" bits by releasing or not releasing molecular particles into the bloodstream – similar to ON-OFF- Keying in wireless networks. "Biomolecular communication has emerged as the most suitable para- digm for networking nano-implants. It's an incredible idea that we can send data by encoding it into mol- ecules which then go through the bloodstream and we can commu- nicate with them, guiding them on where to go and when to release their treatments, just like hormones," Al Hassanieh said. (Source: EPFL) Wireless in the Blood