Many components used in modern products are getting smaller. Over the last three decades, features in integrated-circuit technology have been reduced in size by approximately two orders of magnitude, and micromotors as small as a human hair have been fabricated using photolithography. A similar phenomenon is occurring in the medical device industry: Implantable devices are shrinking to ever smaller dimensions; catheters arc becoming more complex, filled with miniature wires, fibers, probes, and sensors.
As feature sizes fall below one-thousandth of an inch, cutting, drilling, and shaping are no longer possible with mechanical approaches. New materials such as chemical vapor-deposited diamond, exotic ceramics, and some organic polymers are difficult or impossible to process using traditional techniques. The increased demand for micromechanical structures has created the need for new manufacturing tools and techniques. In many instances, lasers are being used to bring original and useful fabrication capabilities to advanced materials processing.
Animal testing has long been an established protocol in drug discovery programs. But there are systemic issues with the far from reliable methodology. In fact, only 10% of the drugs that move from animal testing to human clinical trials succeeds. Such low yields increase the time and expense required to get pharmaceuticals to market, fueling…
In the field of microfluidics, where precision is key to innovation and application success, our expertise at Potomac Photonics sets a standard. We specialize in the art of laser drilling precise small holes in glass slides and coverslips, a critical capability for the fabrication of microfluidic devices. These devices play a pivotal role in various…
The world today seems consumed with fears about Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as AI. Writers, journalists, ad copywriters, teachers, and artists are fearful their jobs will be lost to computers but in manufacturing we have been applying a subset of AI to manufacturing for decades with positive results. Like other forms of AI, Machine Learning…
