Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1536171
JUNE 2025 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 9 Autorouters did become popular—among IC designers. But IC designers really don't have a choice. Manually routing billions of transistors on an ARM processor would take years; a PCB designer can manually route even a complex board in a matter of hours or days. Today, the "Big ree" EDA companies all have PCB autorouting technology that can run rings around the ones of a few decades ago. ey all use some form of AI. ey allow users to deter- mine the level of automation they're comfort- able with, and they boast completion rates much closer to 100%. We are seeing baby steps in autorouter adop- tion. e flexibility of today's autorouters has ush- ered in a sort of hybrid style, with designers doing much of their manual routing within the auto- router environment. I have noticed that younger PCB designers seem more open to autorout- ing than their senior designer co-workers. With designs becoming more complex all the time, some designers may have to try autorouting just to stay on schedule. Are autorouters finally going to get their day in the sun? Is your best route through manual or autorouting, or a hybrid mixture of the two? is month, we asked our expert contributors to weigh in on manual routing and autorouting, and to share some of their best routing strategies for both. Our contributors include Zuken's Andy Buja, Cadence's Patrick Davis, Siemens' Stephen Chavez, and columnists John Watson, Barry Olney, and Kelly Dack. We also have a column by Matt Stevenson, and a paper by Maria Cuesta Mar- tin that was presented at the Pan-European Elec- tronics Design Conference in Austria this year. I'm done with work travel for a few months. I feel a vacation coming on. See you next month. DESIGN007 Andy Shaughnessy is managing editor of Design007 Magazine. He has been covering PCB design for 23 years. To read past columns, click here. Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emer- gent Matter Science and collaborators have discovered a groundbreaking way to control superconductivity by simply twisting atomi- cally thin layers within a layered device. By adjusting the twist angle, they were able to finely tune the "superconducting gap," which plays a key role in the behavior of these materials. The research was published in Nature Physics. The superconducting gap is the energy threshold required to break apart Cooper pairs—bound electron pairs that enable super- conductivity at low temperatures. To date, efforts to control the superconducting gap have largely focused on "real space," in the physical position of particles. However, achiev- ing control in momentum space has remained elusive. Fine-tuning the gap in momentum space is crucial for the next generation of superconductors and quantum devices. In an effort to achieve this, the group began working with ultrathin layers of niobium dis- elenide, a well-known superconductor, deposited on a graphene substrate. Using advanced imaging and fabrication tech- niques, such as spectroscopic-imaging scan- ning tunnelling microscopy and molecular beam epitaxy, they precisely adjust the twist angle of the layers. According to Masahiro Naritsuka of CEMS, the first author of the paper, "Our findings demonstrate that twisting provides a precise control mechanism for superconductivity by selectively suppressing the superconduct- ing gap in targeted momentum regions. One surprising discovery was the emergence of flower-like modulation patterns within the superconducting gap that do not align with the crystallographic axes of either material. This underscores the unique role of twisting in shaping superconducting properties." (Source: RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science) A Simple Way to Control Superconductivity