A new and intriguing technology could slash the development time for electronic circuit boards to a fraction of what it takes today — potentially solving one of the electronics industry's most significant bottlenecks.
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In a standard process, circuit boards go through meticulous design in CAD software, computer simulation to test how the board is expected to behave under various real-world conditions, prototype fabrication at a factory, prototype testing, revisions, and so on — repeated until the finished product is achieved.
Despite the computer simulation that precedes manufacturing, electronic components can behave differently in reality when exposed to electromagnetic noise, unexpected electrical induction, extreme temperatures, or humidity. For these reasons, multiple rounds of testing are sometimes required before full-scale production can begin.
If the manufacturing facility is located in another country — China, for example — shipping the prototype is a time-consuming challenge, on top of the time needed to set up the machines for each new prototype run.
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A startup called Itera is trying to solve this problem using boards based on liquid metal instead of conventional copper conductors.
The board surface itself is made of glass and a grid of electrodes. The liquid metal adheres to the glass and forms the conductive traces on the board.
The metal can be controlled and repositioned using electrical voltage applied to the electrodes, which pulls the liquid metal into the correct position. Once the traces are properly placed, the various electronic components can be mounted on the board and tested. If anything in the layout is wrong, a new design file can be sent to the machine and it will reconfigure the traces on the board in under a minute.
Beyond the high efficiency, there is also an intellectual property advantage: the company designing the board no longer needs to ship it around the world repeatedly, since it can produce the prototype entirely in-house.
The drawback of this approach is that liquid metal is not identical to copper. Tests that pass successfully using this method may still fail in real-world conditions on boards with copper conductors.
If the technology does prove itself, it could be a breakthrough with a profound impact on the electronics industry worldwide.
Video credit: Itera
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss, and my posts are not written by artificial intelligence.
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