Time to get in a spin
07 August 2007
Our lead news story this week is concerned with the development of ‘spintronics’ – a revolution in electronics (in every sense!) The conference where the world’s leading ‘spinners’ are discussing their craft is going on as this newsletter arrives in your inbox, so I have not been able to garner any further information, but I will endeavour to do so in the coming weeks and report back to you.
What sparked my interest in particular was the thought that something different might be about to happen. A few weeks ago in my column (Creative engineers found alive and well….click here online) I commented that SMT had become a mature process and, rather unfairly (as a number of people pointed out), said that as a consequence many of the more radical and intuitive engineering decisions were being made at other parts of the production sequence (i.e. in the test strategy). There was no intended criticism of the production engineer – it is not his fault that the process is reaching maturity. If you are implementing the best technology in your manufacturing environment then that is as good engineering practice as you can hope for.
And yet it would be nice to have a new set of issues to consider. Maybe spintronics (the latest upstart in the nanotechnology family) will provide those issues. If I understand it correctly, Spintronics uses the rotation of an electron as well as its charge to pass and process information. For all that this will have major consequences for the component designers, what is the effect for the board assemblers? Will ordinary copper tracks be suitable? Will components using spintronics be able to withstand the same soldering temperatures as existing components? Or will spintronics-enabled (the terminology is already getting out of hand) components simply be direct drop-in replacements for existing devices? Maybe we end up with super-dense components connected together by printed ink tracts and then… we are back to hybrid circuits and we have gone full circle.
Ultimately something has to change. If Moore’s Law is to continue into the future then the physical properties of silicon will be reached at some point, and other technologies will have to take up the mantle. Maybe spintronics is the answer.
On a separate note, a quick word of congratulations to our Asian correspondent Gordon Wong and his wife Claire who have just doubled the size of their family with twin girls. Good luck and best wishes to them all from all the team here at EMTww.
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