Posts Tagged ‘Electronics’
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June 1st, 2010
A touch of gold
This story on Discovery News intrigued me. It is reporting that…. “cheap, flexible touch screens made with silver and gold nanowires could soon be rolling off the presses and into cell phones, computers and more. The same technology could even be used in solar panels. Writing in the journal ACS Nano, scientists from Stanford University say the new technology could be immediately used in consumer electronics.”The story continues “….most touch screens and solar panels are glass-based. The hard, insulating glass helps protect and support the thin coating of electrically conductive metals. But glass is also brittle and heavy. When an object strikes a solar panel, or a person drops a cell phone, the glass can shatter. Touch screens made from thin plastic coated with silver and gold would weigh less, take up less volume, be more flexible and could be produced much more quickly than glass plates.”
What the story doesn’t mention is that one of the major problems with current touch screen technology concerns the use of indium tin oxide (ITO) for the conductive transparent layer. At current levels of mine production and consumption, some analysts predict that there is only 15 years supply of indium left.
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May 21st, 2010
Anyone for an iPad?
Regular readers of this blog know full well many of the electronic items we now take for granted contain gold – for example mobile phones and computers rely on small quantities of the metal for their operation. This, however, is something you don’t see everyday… -
April 28th, 2010
New Scientist shines the light
New Scientist has a nice article (apart from the ‘bling’ description!) on the use of precious metals and diamond in optical computing. It says:A team at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea, recently transferred data between computer chips using plasmons to channel a broadband light signal along gold wires. Some manufacturers, including Intel, are beginning to use connections of this type to replace conventional wiring in personal computers.
The ultimate aim, though, is to have light itself perform the processing in every microchip. Part of the trick here lies in the ability to generate pulses of light and switch them on and off at high speed, all in a tiny space. The smallest conventional lasers measure several hundred nanometres across and so are simply too big for the task. To compete with transistors, a laser would need to be less than 50 nanometres across, an impossibility with conventional designs.
Then last year teams of physicists in the US and China created the first examples of a device known as a spaser, which gets its name from the fact that it amplifies surface plasmons in a similar way to how a laser boosts light. The spaser has a gold core wrapped in silica and dye molecules. When it is switched on – using an external light source at present, though the goal is to use an electric current – the gold core ripples with plasmons. These excite the dye molecules, which emit light. This light in turn creates more plasmons. The result is a beam of light from a device tens of nanometres wide.
This concept was highlighted in the white paper WGC published a few months ago.
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March 24th, 2010
Seiko Instruments and gold-tin eutectic
Seiko Instruments has come up with a gold-tin eutectic bonding process that can take place at temperatures low enough to inhibit release of gases during bonding meaning that a higher level of vacuum sealing can be achieved. It is claimed that this method improves mechanical strength and also lowers fabrication costs for the intended application – a silicon based MEMS resonator.
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March 22nd, 2010
Best of the web
I couldn’t decide which story on the web was the mosty interesting this morning, so here they both are…..
Article on use of brazing alloys in aerospace (including gold alloys)
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March 10th, 2010
SEMICON China
World Gold Council, is helping to train engineers and chip designers in the technology of wire bonding. At next week’s SEMICON China 2010 we are sponsoring a seminar entitled ‘Materials Science of Wire Bonding & Wire Bond Reliability’ in conjunction with SEMI. This will include best practice in wire bonding technology and materials selection issues. To register for this seminar please click here.
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February 22nd, 2010
Gold Demand Trends
Last week saw the release of WGC’s Gold Demand Trends publication reporting on gold demand for Q4 2009. In the fourth quarter, gold demand for industrial and dental applications recorded its third consecutive quarter-onquarter improvement and its first annual gain in more than two years. Demand totalled 99.7 tonnes, 11% higher than the fourth quarter of 2008. Nevertheless, demand in 2009 was down 16% on 2008 levels. Electronics demand, which for most of the last 18 months has been a severe casualty of the global economic crisis, rebounded strongly in Q4, jumping 25% relative to year earlier levels in a very positive indication that restocking of inventory is taking place on the back of a more optimistic economic outlook. Read more here.
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February 3rd, 2010
Copper wire bonding – do the cost savings add up?
I’ve just received a copy of the new edition of George G. Harman’s book (or ‘bible’) Wire Bonding in Microelectronics. George is widely considered to be the world’s foremost authority on wire bonding. I’d like to quote a passage from the book which is relevant to the ‘gold versus copper’ bonding wire debate (which I blogged on last week).” There is no question copper is a cheaper material but also one that brings new challenges to the bonding engineer. It may be a cost effective process in the eyes of a product manager but when the extra care and attention is required , it is weighed against the existing gold process and then we should ask ourselves, are the net savings worthwhile?”
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January 4th, 2010
Materials science of wire bonding
Wire bonding remains the most important interconnection technology in semiconductor packaging. It also happens to be the single largest industrial use of gold. Whilst lots has been written about the wire bonding process itself, much less has been written about the materials science of the technology. This latest paper in Microelectronics Reliability by Chris Breach and Frank Wulff takes a look at this area, including how the reliability of the ball bonding process is affected by selection of gold or copper wire. -
December 7th, 2009
Paying for electronics recycling
Reading The Times on the way to work this morning, I was intrigued by a story (‘Redundant meters offer a harvest of precious metals’) about how Britian’s utility companies are starting to replace gas and electricity meters in people’s homes. This is so that new ‘smart meters’ can be installed.What’s interesting from a gold perspective, is that there are 26 million electricity meters and 21 million gas meters to be replaced and each one contains about 0.01g of gold. So that’s well over £10 million of gold that can be reclaimed from this obsolete eletrical equipment and used to cover the cost of recycling. This is a really important point – not just in this particular example, but in the wider recycling of waste electronics like computers and mobiles phones. The recycling of gold from waste electronic materials is a critical component of the economic driver for recycling. Gold represents 65% of the value of typical PC-circuit board waste and 67% of the value of end-of-life mobile phones (‘Improving metal returns and eco-efficiency in electronics recycling’ Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment). I hope the story in The Times, helps to highlight the unique role gold plays in the electronics recycling industry…..
Richard Holliday
Trevor Keel
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