Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
FEBRUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 9 Andy Shaughnessy is managing editor of Design007 Magazine. He has been covering PCB design for 18 years. He can be reached by clicking here. ers tell other people about their great interaction with your company? So, for this month's issue, we asked a variety of industry experts to weigh in on the venerable customer. For our experts interview, Sunstone Circuits' Nolan Johnson and our columnist Dan Beau - lieu had a rousing discussion about what it takes to satisfy a customer, and how far a company can—and should—go to please that customer. Next, we have an interview with Jay Gorajia of Mentor, who discusses the company's consult - ing services and the group's focus on the "digital twin." Then, we feature an inter- view with Ben Jordan of Altium, who explains how the latest tool upgrade was driven by customer demand, as well as the many methods Altium uses to acquire and measure customer satisfaction. And consultant Tim Haag, formerly in tech support for an EDA vendor, tells us what designers really want, along with a few horror stories. We also have columns from our con- tributors Barry Olney, Martyn Gaud- ion, and Phil Kinner, and we'd like to welcome our newest columnist, John Talbot of Tramonto Circuits, as well. Lastly, we have an article by Hemant Shah and Ed Acheson of Cadence Design Systems on the latest IPC-2581 updates, and an article on NPI by Dora Yang of PCB Cart. It's already February, and we're get- ting ready for IPC APEX EXPO in San Diego. If you're at the show, stop by our booth and say hi. And if you can't make it, don't worry. We'll have video coverage of the entire event from start to finish. See you on the road! DESIGN007 First 3D Imaging of Excited Quantum Dots Quantum dots are rapidly taking center stage in emerging applications and research developments, from enhanced LCD TVs and thin-film solar cells, to high-speed data transfer and fluorescent labeling in biomedical applications. Researchers are still studying how to precisely control the growth of these nanoscale particles and their underlying quantum behavior. For instance, defects form during produc- tion of semiconductor materials, so identical dots can differ in composition from one another. To learn more about these defects, a U.S. research team, from the University of Illinois and the University of Washing- ton, has, for the first time, demonstrated imaging of an elec- tronically excited quantum dot at multiple orientations. They report their findings this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics. While the research in this article was limited to lead sulfide and cadmium selenide/zinc sulfide quantum dots, the tech- nique can potentially be expanded to other compositions. Furthermore, SMA-STM can also be used to explore other nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes and photocata- lytic metal clusters. Researchers are now working to advance SMA-STM into a single-particle tomography technique. But, before SMA-STM becomes a "true single-particle tomography approach," they still have to ensure that the scanning and rolling does not damage the nanoparticle while it is being reoriented. Single-particle tomography would provide a clearer picture than conventional tomography by singling out defects in indi- vidual nanoparticles rather than re-creating an averaged 3-D image that combines the measurements of many particles.