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Nistec assembles the world’s thinnest electronic circuit at just 0.05 mm

The Nistec Central plant in Petah Tikva has announced that it has succeeded in assembling the world’s thinnest electronic circuit, with a thickness of just 0.05 mm. For the sake of comparison, a standard electronic circuit is 32 times thicker, at 1.6 mm. The fully flexible circuit is used in a miniature wireless medical implant, which is inserted into the patient’s heart by catheterization to operate as a tiny computer to continuously monitor heart function. The product helps heart patients obtain reliable and accurate cardiac data daily and provide them with optimal treatments in real time. The implant should help patients with chronic arrythmia, one of the commonest causes of mortality in the West.

The miniature electronic circuit has a length of 25 mm and a width of 2.5 mm. It includes 21 passive and active electronic components assembled on both its sides.

The customer contacted Nistec during the circuit’s design stage. At the recommendation of the plant technologist, a number of changes were made to the design to adapt the circuit board to the production line. The circuit was assembled at the Nistec plant in Petah Tikva following testing at every production stage. A special standard was established for this project at Nistec’s order to serves as the basis for the circuit on the production line. The standard includes a number of tensioners to tighten the flexible circuit to enable, among other things, precisely apply solider paste on the circuit’s surface.

“We advised on this challenging project from the circuit’s design stage,” said Michael Schneider, Chief Technologies at the Nistec plant in Petah Tikva. “We built an orderly plan for a multistage assembly process and measured the results of each stage separately. Applying uniform solider paste on the circuit was an extremely complex challenge for us, because of the high flexibility and instability of the circuit on the production line.”

“Although we have handled more complex technological challenges before, this project was unique,” said Nissan Arbel, Nistec VP Sales and Marketing. “We needed to provide the customer a very fast technological response in view of the considerable interest that the product generated in the market and strong demand for samples from end-customers. I am pleased that, ultimately, we were able to achieve an optimal solution for the customer for the supply of hundreds of prototypes for this critical innovative product in a very short time.”