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January 2016 • SMT Magazine 31 top 10 Factors to consider when selecting a medical ems company be on your side. He wants you to be success- ful. Visit the company. Talk to the people. Meet the person/team you'll be working with. Are the key personnel accessible? Does the culture of your company mesh with that of the EMS? Look at work that's been done. Make sure the company has a plan in place to clearly delineate the responsibilities of each party. number 10: cost Resist looking at costs alone. There is more than the initial cost. It may not be a bargain when issues come up and changes result in large cost increases, when items aren't delivered on time, or when you have to deal with after- sale issues from failures or poor quality. Making the wrong choice could damage or destroy your company's relationship with its customers, its reputation in the market, and even its standing in the financial community. conclusion Look at the track record and metrics of the EMS company, such as years in service, types of products being manufactured, business from re- peat customers and referrals, on-time delivery, capacity, the types, capabilities, and age of the equipment in use, results from outside testing agencies, and quality awards. It's important to use due diligence in choosing an EMS company, but the rewards can be great. A properly func- tioning EMS brings decades of experience and knowledge to embrace and enhance the prod- uct you want to build in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner. smt mo ohady is the general manager at Digicom Electronics. david estes is an engineer with Digicom Electronics. feature Researchers have demonstrated a new process for rapidly fabricating complex three-dimensional nanostructures from a variety of materials, includ- ing metals. The new technique uses nanoelec- trospray to provide a continuous supply of liquid precursor, which can include metal ions that are converted to high-purity metal by a focused elec- tron beam. The new process generates structures that would be impossible to make using gas-phase fo- cused electron beam-induced deposition (FEBID) techniques, and allows fabrication at rates up to five orders of magnitude faster than the gas-phase technique. And because it uses standard liquid solvents, the new process could take advantage of a broad range of precursor mate- rials. Multiple materials can also be deposited simultaneously. "By allowing us to grow structures much faster with a broad range of precursors, this technique really opens up a whole new direction for making a hierarchy of complex three-dimensional struc - tures with nanoscale resolution at the rate that is demanded for manufacturing scalability," said An- drei Fedorov, a professor in the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This could provide a fun- damental shift in the way this field will go." The research team includes graduate student and first author Jeffrey Fisher, postdoctoral fellow Songkil Kim and senior research engineer Peter Kottke. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and re- ported in the journal Nano Letters. Applications for the rapid electron beam writing of topologically complex 3D nanostructures could include new types of electrode topologies for batteries and fuel cells, vertically- stacked electronic memory, sub- strates for controlling cell differ- entiation and tiny electrochemi- cal conversion devices. 3D Nanobridges Formed Using Electron Beam Writing