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January 2016 • The PCB Design Magazine 9 the shaughnessy report Andy Shaughnessy is managing editor of The PCB Design Magazine. He has been covering PCB design for 16 years. He can be reached by clicking here. I'm glad I was able to do my part, however small, for the medical electronics market. And with humans living longer each year, medical is one segment that's destined to keep growing. This month, we focus on medical electronics, and those who design and manufacture PCBs for medical devices. In our cover story, Kenneth MacCallum of StarFish Medical explains what goes into de- signing PCBs for medical devices, and some of the regulatory hurdles associated with that market. Editor Dan Beaulieu and Anaya Vardya of American Standard Circuits discuss ASC's approach to fabricating medical PCBs and the technical challenges of creating these high-reli- ability boards. And Amir Davoud of Innovative Circuits explains how the company's focus on flex and rigid boards allows them to meet their medical customers' evolving requirements. For more coverage of medical PCB manufac- turing, check out our sister magazines, The PCB Magazine and SMT Magazine. As 2016 gets underway, we'll be bringing you coverage of trade shows, just in case you can't be there. Look for our coverage of the in- dustry's movers and shakers making news at CES, DesignCon, NAMM, IPC APEX EXPO, and CPCA, just to name a few. I hope to see you at an event soon. It's going to be quite a year! PCBDESIgN DoINg MY PART FoR MEDICAL ELECTRoNICS Some of the most interesting properties of nanoparticles emerge when they are brought close together—either in clusters of just a few particles or in crystals made up of millions of them. yet particles that are just millionths of an inch in size are too small to be manipulated by conventional lab tools, so a major challenge has been finding ways to assemble these bits of gold while controlling the three-dimensional shape of their arrangement. Since DnA strands are programmed to pair with other strands in cer- tain patterns, scientists have attached individual strands of DnA to gold particle surfaces to cre- ate a variety of assem- blies. But these hybrid gold-DnA nanostruc- tures are intricate and expensive to generate, limiting their potential for use in practical mate- rials. The process is similar, in a sense, to produc- ing books by hand. In results reported online in nature Chem- istry, researchers from Mcgill's Department of Chemistry outline a procedure for making a DnA structure with a specific pattern of strands com- ing out of it; at the end of each strand is a chemi- cal "sticky patch." When a gold nanoparticle is brought into contact to the DnA nanostructure, it sticks to the patches. The scientists then dis- solve the assembly in distilled water, separat- ing the DnA nanostructure into its component strands and leaving be- hind the DnA imprint on the gold nanoparticle. First author Thomas edwardson says the next step for the lab will be to investigate the proper- ties of structures made from these new build- ing blocks. These could be put to use in areas including optoelectronic nanodevices and bio- medical sciences, the re- searchers say. A "Printing Press" for Nanoparticles