Textile-based touch sensing offers a novel solution towards creating flexible and robust tactile interfaces that fit within an existing manufacturing ecosystem.  Current fabric-based touch sensors can measure distributed and nuanced touch while maintaining textile qualities such as stretching and folding.  Recent work as described the development of a single-wire capacitive touch sensing system that consists of a textile interface and external sensing hardware that transmit recorded data to a trained neural network.  The sensing method localizes touch along a continuous conductor using a current differential measured at either endpoint.  The requisite touch sensing circuit is fully compatible with digital weft knitting, and its layout can be configured in a a variety of pathways to create complete planar textile interfaces. Each interface requires only two connections to external sensing hardware, which allows both the hardware to be reused between interfaces and the data transmitted to the network to have a similar dimension.  

Previous work focused on identifying touch location at defined points on a fabric interface through training a recognition system using labeled data.  We extend this work towards gesture recognition by using a generated intermediate model to decouple the estimated linear touch location and capacitance from the measured data.  The intermediate model forms a manifold of the normalized linear touch location and capacitance within the space of measured data points.  A measured data point, acting as a particle, is tracked through the manifold and decoupled to a unique touch location and capacitance. The decoupled linear touch location is mapped to a planar model of the textile interface, which is generated from a user-defined image of the interface.  the use of digital modeling tools creates a closed-loop interface design process which allows designers to construct a visual representation of the fabric circuit and predict its sensing performance. 

Keywords: Functional Fabrics, e-Textiles, Capacitive Sensing, Signal Processing

The research presented in this slide show utilizes E-Textiles. 

The applications include:

• Physiological Status Monitoring
• Cognitive Status Monitoring
• Performance/State Optimization (Intervention)

The fabrics contain sensors capable of monitoring human conditions.  This is specifically for military use.  

The DoD conducted a survey of PCB companies and the effects of COVID19.  The survey results showed that:

• Some U.S PrCB manufacturing facilities were significantly impacted by the pandemic
• Revenues from U.S Military work and healthcare industry were generally higher than last year so firms that serve thee sectors were more likely to have stable revenues during the pandemic. 
• U.S. PrCB manufacturing facilities have a need for assistance, in the form of grants and capacity building, to meet DOD;s CMMC requirements.
• DoD and industry could collaborate more closely to better understand and resolve ongoing supply chain disruptions, which were exacerbated by the pandemic
• It is important to explore economic incentives for encouraging investments in advanced technology, business reconfigurations, and other capital investments. 

Indiana Integrated Circuits has developed "Quilted" modular PCBs.  They consist of multiple small "boardlets" with traces or pads on rough edges of the boards.  These rough edges fit together with other boards like a jigsaw puzzle.  This type of in board encoding ensures high security from tampering.  It also allows for the continued miniaturization and standardization of common circuit types. Components can also have shorter traces between their leads/ solder ball.  Modularization of PCB technology also follows RECORD (Randomized Encoding of COmbinational Logic for Resistance to Data leakage) to increase HW (Hardware) security.

The Dod Executive Agent For Printed Circuit Board and Interconnect Technology (PrCB EA) has a vested interest in the state of the electronics industrial base and its ability to sustain and improve national defense systems.  By using a two-year cycle, the PrCB EA creates both a report and a supplementary roadmap to illuminate the state of the electronics industrial base and consider its future. 

The PrCB EA Report considers the following: 1) What are the current supply chain risks within the domestic and global printed circuit board (PrCB) industrial base? 2) Are the suppliers, manufacturers, and resources within the supply chains of the PrCB industrial base trustworthy? 3) Does the United States have access to the capability and capacity for manufacturing PrCBs, interconnect technology, and PrCB assemblies (PrCBAs) Needed to sustain the technological superiority over its adversaries?

The supplementary PrCB EA roadmap takes the greatest concerns from the PrCB EA Report and explores how, if neglected, these risks, and issues might devolve in the coming two, five and ten years. After outlining these potentials, The PrCB EA Roadmap considers how the DoD might address these concerns in order to protect domestic capability and capacity and sustain national defense systems.  

In the 2019 PrCB EA Report and upcoming 2020 PrCB EA Roadmap, the PRCB EA Explores the status of trust and qualification for manufacturers, the state of the art for PrCB And PrCBA manufacturing, the US PrCB supply chain diversity, the continued evolution of solder compositions, the U.S. reliance on foreign sources for materials, potential environmental restrictions on hazardous substances, and advances in PrCBA manufacturing technology.  

The PrCB EA believes the 2019 PrCB EA Report and upcoming 2020 PrCB EA Roadmap provide valuable information on domestic capability and capacity to the Dod acquisition and sustainment communities. This presentation will highlight the recommendations within these joint documents and how they will help ensure that the United States continues to have a viable and secure PrCB supply chain, the means to manufacture reliable PrCBs, interconnect technology, and PrCBAs, and the ability to sustain technological superiority over its adversaries for decades to come. 

This paper describes a new design approach to improve the cost efficiency of the “Flexible Printed Circuit” board (FPC also known as FPCB, “FPC” hereafter) by analyzing the impact of the board outline shape to the FPC manufacturing panel utilization during the early design phase. Based on the 4 different types of FPC samples, the approach was experimented and compared against the real production panels. Even though some room for improvement was observed, this study concluded that the new approach could be effective to predict the board layout efficiency on the FPC panel and allow for optimization of the board outline in an early phase of the design process and hence it could improve the panel production overall cost and efficiency dramatically.

To magnify data transmission efficiency, high electrical performance of PCB boards is required for 112Gbps. The required operation frequency tends to increase, and target loss tends to decrease. As a result, to achieve a stable and accurate signal integrity (SI) verification system is more challenging. It is necessary to develop technology to reduce measurement error. In this study, optimized SI coupon design for accurate and stable measurement is proposed. Design parameters were optimized to achieve durable design against fabrication tolerance. The input differential insertion loss (SDD21) characteristic of the proposed design is -0.0664 dB (92.6% smaller than unoptimized designs) and fabrication tolerance characteristic is improved by more than 90% than unoptimized coupon design.

This slide show discusses the different categories of SMT components including, BTCs, dual and quad leaded packages, and passives.  The component use cases and typical challenges are exemplified with charts and images.

 • Component packaging dimensions and lead pitches are getting smaller

• Datasheet accuracy and recommended land patterns should always be verified for accuracy and producibility (PCB fabrication/assembly)

• Tolerances (Component, PCB Fabrication, Assembly) are becoming a greater percentage of features, PCB fabrication and assembly process

• Not all “BGA” component packages are the same (ball grid array versus bump grid array) • Standard design practices that were acceptable in the past may create assembly and/or reliability defects with today’s component packaging technologies

• Component materials or metallization may not be compatible with standard solder process chemistries and temperatures

The lack of material provenance in today’s supply-chain allows the undetected ingress of counterfeit materials to increase at alarming levels. Chemicals, components, including critical ICs, as well as simple passive components, assemblies and finished goods are all subjected to this threat. But finding these fakes—as they make their way through a complex global supply-chain of fabrication facilities, assembly plants and parts distributors—can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. The US military estimated in 2017 that up to 15% of all spare and replacement parts for its weapons, vehicles and other equipment are counterfeit, making them vulnerable to dangerous malfunctions [ref. 1]

Integrated Circuits stand out, not only by representing 87% of the total counterfeited electronics components on the market, but also by being the “brains” of almost all electronics-based systems, embedded in so many critical areas and activities that affect our daily lives, including our safety. For example, autonomous transport, airplanes, defence systems [ref. 2]. Between November 2007 and May 2010 alone, U. S. Customs officials seized 5. 6 million counterfeit microchips destined for military contractors and the commercial aviation industry, and the problem has only grown since then [ref. 3].

The importance of semiconductor components in today’s products is becoming increasingly evident in the light of recent events. The so called “Chipageddon”, or the chronic lack of supply of those critical components, threatens to impose costly delays of up to 40 weeks for products ranging from consumer electronics to automobiles [ref. 4]. As problems manifest themselves with the magnitude we are currently experiencing, rippling across many industries [ref. 5], counterfeit materials are threatening to make their way in many more products.

Given the importance and criticality of those components and the fact that the failure of even one of those components can cause serious issues, many supply-chain logistics systems that are in operation today, have the ability to track the movement of goods, and record transactions. Traceability is designed to be a complete record of the manufacture of a product, including hierarchical associations with materials such as semiconductors and sub-assemblies. The authentication of semiconductors is closely related to the accumulation of traceability data, however, applications related to authentication are broader in terms of their reach throughout the supply-chain, more narrowly focused in terms of technologies, and is a new innovation, meaning that existing MES systems that support traceability may not be easily capable of adapting to the new requirements in a timely way if authentication were made part of traceability itself.