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36 PCB007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2024 and refinements in those methods. ere will come a time when technical requirements for PCB manufacturing will be beyond the capa- bilities of subtractive etching but that time is still some way off. PCB007 Don Ball is a process engineer at Chemcut. To read past col- umns or contact Ball, click here. ical challenges fairly smoothly without spend- ing a lot of time and expense on new processes and equipment. In closing, I'd like you to reflect on the fact that the basic process for manufactur- ing printed circuit boards has not changed all that much in 75 years. We still put a protec- tive coating on the parts of the metal we wish to save and spray an etchant onto the board to remove the metal we don't want to save. ere have been no major technical innovations in the production methods—just improvements Imagine a thin film, just nanometers thick, that could store gigabytes of data—enough for movies, video games, and videos. This is the exciting poten- tial of ferroelectric materials for memory storage. These materials have a unique arrangement of ions, resulting in two distinct polarization states analo- gous to 0 and 1 in binary code, which can be used for digital memory storage. These states are stable, meaning they can "remember" data without power, and can be switched efficiently by applying a small electric field. This property makes them extremely energy-efficient and capable of fast read and write speeds. However, some well-known ferroelectric materials, such as Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) and SrBi2Ta2O9, degrade and lose their polarization when exposed to heat treatment with hydrogen during fabrication. In a study published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (External site), a research team led by Assistant Professor Kazuki Okamoto and Hiroshi Funakubo at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), in collaboration with Canon ANELVA Corporation and Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI), has shown that aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) ferroelectric films remain stable and maintain their ferroelectric properties at temper- atures up to 600°C. "Our results attest to the high stability of the ferroelectricity of the films subjected to heat treat- ment in hydrogen-included atmo- sphere, regardless of the elec- trode material. This is a highly promising result for next-genera- tion ferroelectric memory devices and offers more processing options," says Funakubo. (Source: Tokyo Institute of Technology) Enabling Next-gen Ferroelectric Memory Devices