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58 The PCB Design Magazine • May 2016 Clark: We do indeed. The competition is tough today, but this forces us to try and be better. It's just like when we gambled in 2002 and cre- ated DownStream with this vision that there's going to be a requirement for better tools for transition from the virtual space to the physi- cal space. Companies will have to verify their designs before they hand them off to manu- facturing. They will need better tools to create their documentation. That gamble has paid off as our business results have shown now, 15 years on. In addition, we're seeing other EDA vendors who are also offering tools like ours in their space. We have entered into a license and OEM agreement with Cadence, and they're packag- ing our tools into their offering to deal with the DFM and the documentation and the assembly panel design issues, because those are real issues that they're customers are demanding. Shaughnessy: It's easier for them to do that than have to develop something new. Clark: Absolutely. It's a very good relationship we have there, and we hope to have more rela- tionships like that. The point in all that is when you start to see that your competition and com- panies that you complemented in the past are looking at your technology and offering similar capabilities, you know you're on the right track. Shaughnessy: Joe, thanks so much for stopping by today. Clark: Thank you, Andy. PCBDESIGN DOWNSTREAM: WHAT A LONG EDA TRIP IT'S BEEN One of the most fascinating puzzles for the graphene and spintronics commu- nities is identifying the main microscop- ic process for spin relaxation in gra- phene. Conventional relaxation mecha- nisms have yielded contradictory results when applied to single-layer graphene. In an article published today in Nature Communications, researchers from the Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2) determine the spin lifetime anisotropy of spin- polarized carriers in graphene, which is expected to generate valuable information to overcome the above puzzle. The present work demonstrates spin-lifetime anisotropy measurements in graphene and dis- cusses them in light of current theoretical knowl- edge. The authors first determine the in-plane spin lifetime by conventional spin precession measure- ments with magnetic fields perpendicular to the graphene plane. Then, in order to evaluate the out-of-plane spin lifetime, they implement spin precession mea- surements under oblique magnetic fields that generate an out-of-plane spin population. The results show that the spin life- time anisotropy of graphene on silicon oxide is indepen- dent of carrier density and temperature down to 150°K, and much weaker than previously reported. Indeed, within the experimental uncertainty, the spin relaxation is isotropic. Together with the gate dependence of the spin lifetime, this indicates that the spin relaxation is driven by magnetic impuri- ties or random spin-orbit or gauge fields. The authors conclude that spin relaxation an- isotropy measurements on specific substrates and with a controlled number of deposited adatoms will be crucial to increase the spin lifetime towards the theoretical limit and to find ways of control- ling the spin lifetime. That is the path to ultimately develop unprecedented approaches for the emer- gence of spin-based information processing proto- cols relying on graphene. Spin Lifetime Anisotropy of Graphene