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86 The PCB Magazine • March 2016 this arena. The good news is we are ready for battle. What´s the point of following this column? Although Brazilian PCB manufacturers' rev- enue represents a small share of the country´s GDP, and consequently has no big influence worldwide, we deal with some of the biggest players in the international electronics industry. Quick-turn production, small- and medium- size batches, high-tech PCBs, severe environmen- tal laws, lack of a specialized labor force and lots of customer requirements, are just some of the issues we need to deal with in our everyday lives. My goals for this new column—Made in Brazil—are to present Brazil in a different way from the one I was introduced to when I was abroad, and to share the knowledge I have gained in the PCB industry during the last, al- most 10 years I have been part of the Circuibras team, working and leading people in different areas—electrical test, drilling, routing, lamina- tion, process engineering, dry film, AOI and vi- sual inspection. Going forward in this column, I will write about process and industrial engineering, as well as management and leadership, from a Bra- zilian worldview. In my next column, I will bring some news on process engineering: what custom- er demands we face and why you should care about it, and I will also discuss DMAIC, a powerful tool that may help you improve your processes. It is going to be a pleasure to offer my in- sights, and I hope to hear from you, learn your thoughts and talk about the thing that chal- lenges us every day: printed circuit boards. I hope you enjoy it! PCB Renato Peres is an industrial en- gineer and production coordinator with Circuibras Circuitos Impressos Profissionais. pCb shops in brazil: are you kidding me? Researchers from the Mos- cow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have for the first time experimentally demonstrated that copper nanophotonic components can operate successfully in photonic devices. Copper components are not only just as good as components based on noble metals, but, unlike them, they can easily be implemented in integrated circuits using industry-stan- dard fabrication processes. "This is a kind of revo- lution—using copper will solve one of the main problems in nanophotonics," say the authors of the paper. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nano Letters. The discovery, which is revolutionary for pho- tonics and the computers of the future, was made by researchers from the labo- ratory of nanooptics and Plas- monics at MIPT's Centre of nanoscale optoelectronics. They have succeeded, for the first time, in producing copper nanophotonic components, whose characteristics are just as good as that of gold com- ponents. The scientists fabri- cated the copper components using the process compatible with the industry-standard manufacturing technologies that are used today to produce modern integrated circuits. This means that in the very near future, copper nanophotonic components will form a ba- sis for the development of energy-efficient light sources, ultra-sensitive sensors, as well as high- performance optoelectronic processors with sev- eral thousand cores. Physicists Promise a Copper Revolution in Nanophotonics