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February 2016 • SMT Magazine 45 Due to cost, production numbers are usually much larger as the size of the specific equipment is reduced. But it takes tremendous efforts, and of course, time to create a smaller component with a similar performance at a lower cost. In alternative energy, the need for higher energy density without trading reliability is a battle which is continually being fought. Re- mote failures at an offshore windfarm, for ex- ample, are extremely costly. What we don't know and unforeseen circum- stances are another problem. Electric vehicles when involved in accidents might become "hot" and cause rescue service personnel or good sa- maritans from the general public to arrive on the scene and prevent serious injury. On a lighter side, recently in the UK companies have been testing driverless cars in city centers. For obvious safety reasons, the cars include systems to avoid collisions with pedestrians. But it has apparently become something of a game on Friday and Sat - urday nights to corner the vehicle with one per- son on each side forcing the car to stop moving. So, improvements in convenience, energy usage, and efficiency might have unintended or unexpected consequences which need to be ad- dressed for safe introduction into the marketplace. Las Marias: What can you say about the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0? How do you think they will impact electronics manufacturing? Hunter: It has only been recently that the IoT and Industry 4.0 have been more accurately defined and understood. It's clear that the po- tential to remotely and smartly monitor per- formance and resource usage can dramatically improve efficiency in terms of things like pro- duction and energy utilization. Being able to do accomplish improved decision-making over a greater percentage of the day can really have a positive impact on a global basis and reduce costs across the board. Las Marias: What is your outlook for the electron- ics manufacturing industry in terms of develop- ment over the next three to five years? Hunt er: Every week it seems like something new is released that makes things safer, more convenient, or faster to achieve, based on electronics. In addition, bandwidth and ac- cessibility of networks means we're also more connected. These two factors mean that elec- tronics will play an ever-increasing part in our lives. With the workplace starting to become connected, there will be very significant op- portunities for growth. Las Marias: Thank you, Craig. Hunter: Thank you. SMT A team of scientists at the u.S. De- partment of Energy's (DoE) Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern university and Stony brook university has, for the first time, created a two- dimensional sheet of boron – a mate- rial known as borophene. Borophene is an unusual material because it shows many metallic properties at the nanoscale even though three-dimensional, or bulk, boron is nonmetallic and semiconducting. Because borophene is both metallic and atomi- cally thin, it holds promise for possible applications ranging from electronics to photovoltaics, according to Argonne nanoscientist Nathan Guis- inger, who led the experiment. The discovery and synthesis of boro- phene was aided by computer simula- tion work led by Stony brook researchers Xiang-Feng Zhou and Artem Oganov, who is currently affiliated with the Mos- cow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Skolkovo institute of Science and Technology. The experimental work was funded by the DOE's office of Science and was performed at Argonne's center for Nanoscale Materials, a DoE office of Sci- ence user Facility, and at the Northwestern university Materials Research Center. Scientists Create Atomically Thin Metallic Boron eFFicieNcY, eNergY aNd coNVeNieNce: driViNg NeW solutioNs aNd markets