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84 SMT Magazine • June 2017 SHENZHEN AXXON DISCUSSES ACQUISITION AND DISPENSING MARKET TRENDS solutions. What other solutions are you adding to your dispensing equipment so that you pro- vide your customers with what they need? Li: We're providing the total solution through other functions beyond dispensing; for exam- ple, before dispensing we have a precise locat- ing or magazine load function. Post dispensing, there is a function that will check and inspect the effectiveness of the dispensing and the re- sults. After that, maybe queuing, and of course, conveyers that load. Those functions can be provided simultaneously with our dispensing machine and can connect with post processes like AOI/ SPI seamlessly. Las Marias: Do you work with other suppliers? Li: Yes, we have partners to help us to provide the total solution. But we design the whole so- lution and provide it to our customer. Las Marias: Ivan, do you have any final com- ments? Li: This APEX show is the first time Axxon has brought machines to the U.S. market, so we are still learning and listening to the feedback. During the three days, we've had communica- tion with customers and we have learned that the market here is really different from the Asia market. In Asia, the market is high volume, but here, it is low volume and high mix—so our ma- chines need to have a different focus and func- tion. Upon our return to China, we will bring the feedback and discuss internally, and we will try to provide the most suitable equipment for the specific market. Las Marias: Ivan, thank you very much for your time. Li: Thank you. SMT Roll-up computer screens and other flexible electron- ics are getting closer to re- ality as scientists improve upon a growing number of components that can bend and stretch. One team now reports in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Inter- faces another development that can contribute to this evolution: a low-cost con- ductive paper that would be easy to manufacture on a large scale. Current flexible electronic prototypes are com- monly built using polymer thin films. But the cost of these films becomes a factor when they are scaled up. To address this issue, scientists have turned to paper; but the downside is that it's not conductive, and efforts so far to infuse it with this property have been hindered by scalability and ex- pense. Bin Su, Junfei Tian and colleagues wanted to come up with a new approach. Using a conventional roller process that's easy to scale up, the researchers coated paper with soft ion- ic gels to make it conduc- tive. They sandwiched an emissive film between two layers of the ionic gel pa- per. When they applied a voltage, the device glowed blue, indicating that elec- tricity was being conduct- ed. It also showed electri- cal durability, withstand- ing more than 5,000 cycles of bending and un- bending with negligible changes in performance and lasting for more than two months. The re- searchers say their conductive paper, which costs about $1.30 per square meter and could be fabri- cated at a rate of 30 meters per minute, could be- come an integral part of future flexible electronics. The authors acknowledge funding from the State Key Laboratory of Pulp and Paper Engineer- ing (China), National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Australian Research Council's Dis- covery Early Career Researcher Award. Conductive Paper Could Enable Future Flexible Electronics Researchers make conductive paper by coating it with an ionic gel. (Credit: American Chemical Society)