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106 SMT Magazine • February 2015 ease of use Most pick-and-place machines will handle a fairly wide variety of board sizes, with a work table designed to accommodate boards up to 16" x 24". There is also ease of control over the components, which aids in accuracy, along with a simple learning curve. In most cases, no training is required. Don't overlook electrical requirements. Make sure the machine you buy will plug-and- play in your environment without pulling in new wiring or else plan on an adapter/trans- former. Vendor Support When evaluating any type of SMT machine, consider factory support as one of the most im- portant assets of your purchase. The best way to learn how a company treats its customers is by word of mouth. Talk to several customers to find out how happy they are with the machine, the seller, and the support they provide. Where is the manufacturing plant? Can they help troubleshoot alignment issues over the phone? Do they offer field service? Do they have spare parts in stock for immediate shipment? While there isn't much of a used market for manual, machine-assisted or enhanced manual pick and place machines, it's still a good idea to ask your supplier about their older machines in the field, and if down the road, spare parts are available, and about their capability to customize a spare part if the machine becomes obsolete. Ask what the expected life-cycle of the product is. The in- dustry standard is seven years. Remember, there is a difference between a true manufacturer and an equipment supplier or distributor. I hope this primer on machine-assisted pick- and-place machines has been helpful. SMT robert Voigt is Vp of global sales at DDM novastar inc. He may be reached at rvoigt@ddmnovastar.com. narrow strips of graphene called nanoribbons ex- hibit extraordinary properties that make them impor- tant candidates for future nanoelectronic technolo- gies. a barrier to exploiting them, however, is the dif- ficulty of controlling their shape at the atomic scale, a prerequisite for many possible applications. now, researchers at the uS Department of energy's (DOe) lawrence berkeley national laboratory (berke- ley lab) and the university of California, berkeley, have developed a new precision approach for synthesizing graphene nanoribbons from pre-designed molecu- lar building blocks. using this process the researchers have built nanoribbons that have enhanced properties-such as position-dependent, tunable bandgaps-that are potentially very useful for next-generation electronic circuitry. The results appear in a paper titled "Molecular bandgap engineering of bottom-up synthesized gra- phene nanoribbon heterojunctions," published in na- ture nanotechnology. "This work represents progress towards the goal of controllably assembling molecules into whatever shapes we want," says Mike crommie, senior scien- tist at berkeley lab, professor at uc berkeley, affiliated with the Kavli energy nanoScience institute, and a leader of the study. "For the first time we have created a molecular nanoribbon where the width changes ex- actly how we designed it to." previously, scientists made nanoribbons that have a constant width throughout. "That makes for a nice wire or a simple switching element," says crom- mie, "but it does not provide a lot of functionality. We wanted to see if we could change the width within a single nanoribbon, controlling the structure inside the na- noribbon at the atomic scale to give it new behavior that is potentially useful." For more, click here. Researchers Manipulate Nanoribbons at Molecular Level HOW TO SeLeCT a PICK-aNd-PLaCe MaCHINe, ParT 1 continues smt quiCk-tips