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Mar/Apr 2012  

Materials

Top Features

CFRP gets ‘tough’ love from microtools

Carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) is a corrosion-resistant and lightweight material used in everything from paintball guns to Formula One racecars. The composite material has an “ultimate tensile strength” approximately four times that of steel and unrivaled strength-to-weight ratio, meaning it’s not only stronger than alternative materials, like aluminum, but you also need far less of it by weight to do the same job.

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Powerful Potential

When it comes to printed electronics, the word of the year—indeed of the decade—has been “potential.” The idea of cheap, abundant printed electronics has been around about as long as the idea of “ubiquitous computing” and the “Internet of Things”—the idea that every object around you will contain components that connect it to the vast electronic infrastructure of our work and personal lives. Yet, something happened along the way to realizing this dream. Or, perhaps, something didn’t happen.

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Worth Their Weight: Precious metals have ideal properties for medical devices

Precious metals such as platinum, gold and palladium are used to make critical medical parts. These materials work well in such applications for several reasons, including their biocompatibility and radiopacity, which allows them to be seen inside the body via a fluoroscope or an X-ray.

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Time to take the road less traveled?

Over the past several decades, new and powerful capabilities that allow manufacturing at the micro and nano scales have emerged. These developments have been driven largely by the microelectronics revolution and fueled by major scientific advances in materials science, solid-state physics, optics and computation—to name a few.

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UV light assembles transparent microwire networks

March 4, 2011—Materials that conduct electricity but are also transparent to light are important for electronic displays, cameras and solar cells, among ohter applications.

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Researchers succeed in search for silicon substitute

Dec. 1, 2010—Indium arsenide, a member of the III-V family of semiconductor materials, is about to take sibling rivalry to a whole new level now that researchers successfully integrated ultrathin layers of the material onto a silicon substrate to create a nanoscale transistor.

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Top Videos

Micromanufacturing lab tour at Northwestern Univ.

During the 7th International Conference on MicroManufacturing in March, conference co-chairs Jian Cao and Kornel Ehmann, along with a few of their students, provided an overview of their research and work stations at the university's micromanufacturing lab.

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Racecar sets world speed record

Small Car at Vienna thumbA 285µm-long racecar has been fabricated in record time via ultrahigh-precision 3-D printing at Vienna University of Technology.

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Australian researchers produce 'perfect' single-atom transistor

Feb. 20, 2012—The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, today announced that researchers at the university's ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology successfully created a working transistor the size of one atom.

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Blog simplifies 3-D chip technology

Recently posted to the Applied Materials Blog, this 5-minute video vignette simplifies the terms and concepts of 3-D semiconductor chips. The Applied Materials Blog is global discussion site that encourages those in the industry to share their ideas, actions and products.

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Spray-on nanotube aids skin-like sensor device

Stanford University researchers recently demonstrated a new stretchable, transparent skin-like sensor developed using carbon nanotubes that bend and act as springs, according to a university news release. The flexible sensor "can be stretched to more than twice its original length and bounce back perfectly to its original shape," the researchers reported.

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Top Products

Mass production with 3-D printer

MakerBot Industries LLC

Replicator thumbWith the stated aim of democratizing manufacturing, MakerBot Industries LLC, Brooklyn, N.Y., heralds its Replicator personal 3-D printer as just the machine for the job. And at less than $2,000, the printer certainly fits right in with the price range of personal computers.

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Micromolding co. serves medical, consumer electronics markets

Matrix Plastic Products

Matrix molding thumbMatrix Plastics Products, Wood Dale, Ill., micromolds plastic parts smaller than a pellet of resin with tolerances of 12.7µm or less for the consumer electronics industry, according to the company's Web site.

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Datron offers high-speed MC for plastic

Datron Dynamic Inc.’s recently introduced M8 PlasticMill is a high-speed CNC machining center designed specifically for plastic-machining applications that produce chips or dust that must be extracted and collected.

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Photostructurable material for fabbing microdevices

Life BioScience Inc.has developed a patent-pending, photostructurable glass-ceramic called APEX. The material is available for purchase and can be used by customers to fabricate 3-D glass and/or ceramic microdevices in high-volume batch processes.

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Fiber laser system optimized for micro-material processing

Together with six industrial partners, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V.(LZH; Hannover, Germany) has developed a picosecond fiber laser system said to be well suited for micro-machining brass and aluminum materials.

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