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Technology Stocks : SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY (SMT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Analog Kid who wrote (7)	2/17/1998 2:19:00 AM
From: Skeeter Bug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15

digiman, the phillips fcms give us about 70k+ placements per hour. one of their reps lives on site. it is nearly twice as fast as our panasonics. both place the parts - which after working with fuji is not something i take for granted ;-) the problem i have with the mpas - new and old - is that they have one table size. we build primarily smaller boards. one mpa is my gate where all the components are vision. therefore, the length of this very big table must be traversed to the camera and back to the board. this is a joke. it is also my gate machine by about 30%. i've worked with fuji gsps (what a joke w/ no downstop feedback - you'd go through a stencil every two weeks), cp 4s and 6s, and ip 2s and 3s. i've also used panasonic mshs and mv 2s as well as several versions of the mpas. in the case of phillips, i've used the old and newer version of the fcms, the topaz machine (much more productive than the mpas). there is also another machine but i can't think of the name now. it is similar to the topaz. phillips is great for long, very long production runs. changeovers are a bear. remember, we typically run smaller circuit boards. the phillips machines may not be as useful for larger pcb assembly. i also like the automatic mpm screen printers. the only issue i have is that the phillips machines are so fast the mpms have a hard time keeping up.

To: Analog Kid who wrote (7)	2/18/1998 11:43:00 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Respond to of 15

from the good dr... very interesting technology... By JUDY SIEGEL JERUSALEM (February 19) - Israeli scientists have become the first to "coax" individual biological molecules into forming an electric circuit. This marriage of biotechnology and electronics will eventually make possible the production of a transistor sized 1/100,000th of the width of a human hair, 100th or less of the space required today. The breakthrough was accomplished by Prof. Uri Sivan, Dr. Erez Braun and Dr. Yoav Eichen of the Technion. "In conventional micro-electronics, you start trying to reduce size as much as possible, from the top down. In a biological system, you begin with information in the DNA and build from bottom to top," Sivan explained yesterday on the eve of publication of their discovery in Nature. "No one can manually arrange molecules of this size - which can be viewed only via an atomic force microscope - so we had to use molecules in which all chemical information is coded, allowing self-assembly into structures based on chemical selectivity." He added that the basic problem that had to be overcome is that "if you look for a system that builds itself, the molecules are insulated and don't transfer electricity; metals, which do pass electrons, don't self-assemble. We therefore decided to integrate biological and electronic materials to take advantage of both properties." The Technion team produced a preliminary demonstration of an enabling technology that uses processes of molecular recognition unique to biological molecules and place miniature electronic components in molecular sites to form a complete electronic circuit. They placed conducting electrodes on an insulating substrate while connecting the outer parts of the electrodes externally to a computer, for example, while the internal part was coated with short DNA molecules. Each of the DNA molecules had a defined and different "genetic" code for each electrode. Then long-stranded DNA molecules with complementary sequences were stretched between the electrodes, based on molecular recognition, so a complete DNA network was created. This network didn't conduct electrons, but it served as an "intelligent" template for the assembly of the electronic circuit by coating it with a conducting metal. In a series of experiments, the scientists demonstrated their concept by producing a conducting metal wire connecting two gold electrodes 12 microns apart. The diameter of the wire was 100 nanometers (each of these is 1/100,000th of the width of a human hair). "The applications could take 20 years, but they are virtually infinite," explained Sivan. "Using transistors of this size, you could store all knowledge printed in every book in the world inside a cube 1/5 of a millimeter in each direction. Our work was basic science, and applications in nanoelectronics are still far off, but this alternative technology to micro-electronics will allow the production of devices that are 100-300 times smaller, with higher complexity, at a lower cost. Beyond the miniaturization, the innovation will make possible entirely new logic based on extensive connectivity."