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62 The PCB Magazine • November 2017 no traditional path from prototype to volume. The agile players in this industry will realise that by focusing two ways—outwards to their partner and inwards to each product and what is to its best interest—they are contributing to a successful supply chain. The traditional game of margins is a losing game. The new game is making your contribution count in an industry where products never move out of prototype. Technology changes everything and often exponentially. Both AI and standardisation proj- ects like CircuitData have amazing potential to contribute, but are not goals in themselves. The goal is to work smarter, have less impact on the environment and move in tune with demand. In my mind, this is Industry 4.0. PCB Andreas Lydersen is CTO at Elmatica, a printed circuit broker since 1971 that operates globally in all industries. INDUSTRY 4.0, AI AND CIRCUITDATA stay outwards: How am I contributing to a bet- ter supply chain? Are our products making life less complicated for whomever receives them? Self-centred companies will lose out in the long run. Technology Changes Everything So, what does Industry 4.0 have to do with all this? The fourth industrial revolution is about computers talking to computers. As they are simply better than us at keeping track of products through the flow of a supply chain, they can automate processes between partners. This allows orders to be made and rescheduled, needs to be analysed and reacted upon, whole production processes to speed up or slow down. In the PCB industry, this means that the goal is to be an interconnected part of the supply chain. Fabricators will have to adjust their shop floor setup automatically based on customer needs and focus on robotics beyond each sta- tion on the floor. Product owners must under- stand that the old approach of product life cycle management is a thing of the past; there will be Researchers have developed a new type of cool- ing system for high-performance radars and su- percomputers that circulates a liquid coolant di- rectly into electronic chips through an intricate se- ries of tiny microchannels. Conventional chip-cooling methods use finned metal plates called heat sinks, which are attached to computer chips to dissipate heat. Such attach- ment methods, however, do not remove heat ef- ficiently enough for an emerging class of high- performance electronics, said Suresh V. Garimel- la, principal investigator for the project and the Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue Uni- versity. New advanced cooling technologies will be needed for high-performance elec- tronics that contain three-di- mensional stacks of process- ing chips instead of a single, flat-profile chip. Too much heat hinders the performance of electron- ic chips or damages the tiny circuitry, especially in small "hot spots." "You can pack only so much computing pow- er into a single chip, so stacking chips on top of each other is one way of increasing performance," said Justin A. Weibel, a research associate profes- sor in Purdue's School of Mechanical Engineer- ing, and co-investigator on the project. "This pres- ents a cooling challenge because if you have layers of many chips, normally each one of these would have its own system attached on top of it to draw out heat. As soon as you have even two chips stacked on top of each other the bottom one has to operate with significantly less pow- er because it can't be cooled directly." 'Intrachip' Micro-Cooling System for High-Performance Radar, Supercomputers