Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - New Products

New Products

MELVILLE, NY – Park Electrochemical Corp. announced the introduction of its new Nelco N8000Q quartz fabric reinforced cyanate ester substrate.

N8000Q is designed to provide Park’s customers with exceptional electrical and mechanical properties for demanding RF/microwave applications, such as radomes. N8000Q reportedly enables customers to combine structural radome components with printed circuit components by providing a material with the properties of the Nelcote V-376 composite prepreg and the fabrication methods of Park’s N8000 cyanate-ester PCB laminate material.

ELKTON, MD - W.L. Gore introduced a new thermal interface material. The Gore Polarchip is a SF3000 silicone-free thermal interface material for use as a thermal gap pad. According to the company, the absence of silicone eliminates the problems of silicone outgassing and silicone oil migration.

The compressible, thermally conductive material is used for filling the undesirable air gaps between heat generating devices on the PCB and the heatsinks, heat spreaders and metal chassis that are used to dissipate the heat. The Polarchip thermal interface material is a fluoropolymer composite that consists of an expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) matrix filled with boron nitride (BN) particles. The low elastic modulus of the ePTFE matrix imparts softness, conformability and compressibility to the composite, while the high thermal conductivity of the BN particles gives the composite its good thermal transport characteristics.

Polarchip thermal interface materials are produced in continuous rolls with a pressure sensitive adhesive on one side. It can be supplied in sheets or rolls of precision die-cut parts suitable for high volume assembly.

GARDENA, CA – Intusoft released its ICAP/4 8.x.11 Build 2817 SPICE-simulation tool suite for analog, mixed-signal and mixed-system design. According to Tim Ghazaleh, director of marketing for Intusoft, several product enhancements were installed across the SpiceNet design entry system, IsSpice4 simulation output file, automated electrical measurements readout and waveform viewing.

8.x.11 Build 2817 also reportedly has enhanced SpiceNet’s display of DC operating points, component properties, user-specified custom part bins and waveform graphs displayed on the schematic. Following a simulation run, the display of automatically charted electrical measurements has also been enhanced. Management functions for Monte Carlo statistical analysis are said to run much faster.

With component sweeps, multiple components can be assigned the same sweep variable and swept as a group through a prescribed range of values. Since many designers are interested in key data collected from a SPICE simulation output file, ICAP/4 has added operability enhancements for the IsSpice4 simulator’s output file. Other features with Build 2817 include waveform management and importing of data in IntuScope more powerful.

TAIPEI - Small hole drilling is big at TPCA this week. A number of domestic machine-tool manufacturers, including Tong-Tai Machine & Tool Co., Taiwan Takisawa Technology Co., and Ta Liang Technology Co. will showcase their newly developed high-performance PCB drilling machines at the show.

Tong-Tai noted it will display an automatic-sensoring PCB drilling machine. The company indicated that the machine features high revolves per minute (rpm) compared to previous machines. Tong-Tai will introduce a new model of high-speed PCB drilling machine featuring spindle speed reaching 250,000 rpm.

Taiwan Takisawa will introduce a new model of a PCB drilling machine with drilling speed 30 percent higher than their old models. This new-generation PCB drilling machine has a 200,000 rpm spindle speed.

Ta Liang will showcase a five-spindle PCB drilling machine equipped with a CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor. Chang Ming-yi, marketing manager of Ta Liang, noted his company will begin marketing the five-spindle PCB drilling machine in the middle of 2007. The company estimated the machine will compete with similar models developed by the Japan-based Hitachi. The new drilling machine targets PCB makers in the domestic BGA market.

MUNICH, Germany and WESTFORD, MA – Zuken will launch its revision 9.0 of CR-5000 at Z-DAC 06, the European Annual Customer to Customer Technology conference on October 24-26^th in Ulm, Germany. This release includes the latest version of the integrated high-speed design and analysis environment, CR-5000 Lightning.

Advances in the core CR-5000 environment are said to include system to board level design, analysis and verification. The core CR-5000 tools also reportedly feature enhanced high-speed capability with deeper harmonization of constraints. One example of this is the unification of topology constraints between CR-5000 Board Designer and CR-5000 Lightning.

Via modeling within CR-5000 Lightning now features the option of complex modeling, including resistance, capacitance and inductance, with both automatic extraction from PCB layout and pre-layout what-if analysis. More intelligence has been added for Trunk routing of busses and differential pairs, including multi-layer editing functionality with action preview, obstacle avoidance with reroute and advanced via pattern support.

According to Zuken, increasing harmonization of the CR-5000 design environment to reduce cost of product design and thus to enhance productivity and quality continues to be at the top of the agenda for the future, as does the ability to adopt new technologies and manufacturing processes as easily as possible.

NORCROSS, GA – T-Tech Inc. has introduced its Quick Vac Table, a vacuum table system for quick circuit prototyping systems. The Quick Vac Table is designed to meet the demanding needs of the RF and Microwave industry, allowing users to create prototypes on more flexible materials with a greater precision.

The technology allows the quick circuit to hold material down flatter by creating an even plane of suction and eliminating the need for backing material, thus providing an even and accurate depth of cut. The Quick Vac Table also decreases setup time, thus increasing the speed to which users can test their designs.

The Quick Vac Table is designed to work with all models of quick circuit prototyping systems and is said to be simple to operate. According to the company, the likelihood of damaged traces on small and fragile prototypes is reduced.