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August 2014 • SMT Magazine 73 Michael Ford is senior marketing development manager with valor division of Mentor graphics Corporation. To read past columns, or to contact the author, click here. it can be resolved with minimum overall cost. Having manufacturing close to the customer provides a rapid feedback loop on market qual- ity and a much tighter control on manufactur- ing execution. Having three months' worth of potentially faulty products in a container on a ship from China to the United States can be very frustrating. Delivery disruption and the cost of re-work and recall can quickly get out of control. The weather, natural disasters, and political issues can also place a serious risk to manufac- turing capability. If either the manufacturing of the finished product or any of the key compo- nents is dependent on a single location in an area that may be at risk, it can also significantly affect delivery of products. Keeping local con- trol provides a far better chance of manage- ment and recovery. Incentives are now in place for reshoring, driven by the knowledge that industry and technology has changed to make it viable. But how does one get started practically? As with the great race to go offshore, perhaps EMS com- panies will step up to promote on-shore servic- es, built on modern manufacturing technolo- gies to meet direct demand patterns. The load balancing that EMS companies can provide continues to be a benefit no matter where they are located. Off-shoring and out-sourcing are actually two completely different things. It's said that "You are what you eat." On an industrial level, I would say that you are what you make. Rather than fighting the trends in the way that products are sold and distributed, which have increasingly challenged manufac- turing for some years, it is time now to let these changes work for manufacturing. Machine and information technology solutions are with us. The advantages are becoming much clearer if we understand the onshore and offshore argu- ments in context with today's market patterns and manufacturing technology capabilities. If we don't take this opportunity seriously right now, we may forever end up ordering our cool stuff from a guy in an apartment in China; that is at least, until all the gasoline is used up. sMt The magnets cluttering the face of your refriger- ator may one day be used as cooling agents, accord- ing to a new theory formulated by MIT researchers. The theory describes the motion of magnons — quasi-particles in magnets that are collective rotations of magnetic mo- ments, or "spins." In addition to the magnetic moments, magnons also conduct heat. "You can pump heat from one side to the other, so you can essen- tially use a magnet as a refrigerator," says bolin liao, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Mechanical En- gineering. "You can envision wireless cooling where you apply a magnetic field to a magnet one or two meters away to, say, cool your laptop." liao and his colleagues recognized a similar "coupled" phenomenon in magnons, which move in response to two forces: a temperature gradient or a magnetic field. because magnons behave much like electrons in this aspect, the researchers developed a theory of magnon transport based on a widely established equation for electron transport in thermoelectrics, called the boltzmann transport equation. "There's still a long way to go for thermoelectrics to compete with traditional technologies," liao says. "Studying the magnetic degree of freedom could potentially help op- timize existing systems and improve the thermoelectric efficiency." Magnets May Act as Wireless Cooling Agents eSSenTiAl pioneer'S SurViVAl guiDe REshORINg MaDE sIMPLE continues