Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527952
58 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2024 "this is the way we always do things," which was tough coming into the industry. Many people don't like change, especially if you've spent 20 or 30 years refining a process, and then a tech- nology comes along and changes the entire process. But in the last few years, I've seen a tremendous shi in attitudes toward technol- ogy, and it's nice to see it back to an innovat- ing "let's try and see what happens" culture. I think the biggest beneficiaries are the end cus- tomers. PCB manufacturers are pushing new limits and innovating. ey are bringing their A-game. It is very exciting, and it's not just the U.S. It's a very competitive global market, as we know, and credit is due to all those push- ing the technology limits and creating incred- ible PCBs. Well said, Jesse. Thank you for your time, and congratulations again to DIS on developing these new solutions for customers and expanding your market beyond rigid PCBs. PCB007 Physicists from Würzburg present a nanometre- sized light antenna with electrically modulated sur- face properties—a breakthrough that could pave the way for faster computer chips. Today's computers reach their physical limits when it comes to speed. Semiconductor compo- nents usually operate at a maximum usable fre- quency of a few gigahertz, which corresponds to several billion computing operations per second. As a result, modern systems rely on several chips to divide up the computing tasks because the speed of the individual chips cannot be increased any further. However, if light (photons) were used instead of electricity (electrons) in computer chips, they could be up to 1000 times faster. Plasmonic resonators, also known as "antennas for light," are a promising way of achieving this leap in speed. These are nanometre-sized metal struc- tures in which light and electrons interact. Depend- ing on their geometry, they can interact with differ- ent light frequencies. "The challenge is that plasmonic resonators cannot yet be effectively modulated, as is the case with transistors in conventional electronics. This hinders the development of fast light-based switches," says Dr. Thorsten Feichtner, physicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. A JMU research team in collaboration with the Southern Denmark University (SDU) in Odense has now taken a significant step forward in the modula- tion of light antennas: It has succeeded in achiev- ing electrically controlled modulation that points the way to ultra-fast active plasmonics and thus to significantly faster computer chips. The experi- ments have been published in the journal Science Advances. Instead of trying to change the entire resonator, the team focused on chang- ing its surface properties. This breakthrough was achieved by electrically contacting a single resonator, a nanorod made of gold—an idea that is concep- tually simple, but could only be realised with the help of sophis- ticated nanofabrication based on helium ion beams and gold nanocrystals. (Source: Universität Würzburg) Electrically Modulated Light Antenna Points the Way to Faster Computer Chips