The Tech Blog

Recently, while working on a project involving LCD screens, I came across Anisotropic Conductive Films (ACF). Though they’ve been around for decades, with patents dating back to the 80s and 90s, many aren’t aware of how vital they are in miniaturized devices. Some of you may have wondered how you bond, say, metallic flex cables to glass. In LED displays, the row and column wires are extremely thin. The challenge arises when you need to connect these delicate wires to larger driver boards, especially when the connections are on glass. You can’t solder on glass, and alignment at such small scales can be a nightmare.

Enter ACF. It’s a thin adhesive strip filled with tiny conductive particles (typically metal-coated polymer balls). These films allow you to make electrical connections between two layers, like a flex cable and a glass substrate, while ensuring the electrical flow happens only in one direction. This selective conductivity is what makes ACF “anisotropic” – it conducts electricity vertically (through the thickness of the material) but not laterally (across the surface), preventing shorts between adjacent wires.

So how does it do it? Those tiny balls in the adhesive become sandwiched between the 2 layers that you want to electrically connect(Check Images). Now the balls since they are relatively sparse, don’t form a bridge(by balls lining up) between consecutive wires shorting them. Now to bond it, usually, it’s heated/pressed together the conductive particles become trapped between the surfaces, creating electrical pathways only where they’re needed, typically on pads or traces. This allows ACF to be used in applications with very tight spacing, where conventional soldering or connectors would be impractical.

These are useful in display tech like LCDs, OLEDs, Flex PCBs, and Chip on Glass Assemblies where ICs are mounted on glass substrates(These are the small black rectangles you see on flex cables on OLED modules). ACF may not get as much attention as other electronic materials, but they’ve quietly revolutionized how we connect components. Worth learning about!

Last week a student asked me about the scope of AI in the domain of Electrical Engineering so that he can “focus” on those for the future. A vast majority of people (even in tech!) are still not grasping the vastness of what is happening in the world of AI. Here’s my take on how AI might shape our industry, though I may look back at this post in 10 years and laugh at how far off I was!

Schematic Design: AI is going to dramatically change this. Manual schematic creation will die off. Think of tools like TI Webench but supercharged—where you type in your circuit functionality, and set parameters like cost or size, and AI will provide several optimized designs. Even BOM (Bill of Materials) selection will be automated, factoring in component availability during the design process itsel

PCB Layout: Auto routers have been bad but it was bad only because folks never put enough resources to truly build a good router. AI will integrate simulation and produce designs that already meet stringent EMI/EMC certifications. RF and High-speed designs are not black boxes anymore. It will be codified and automated by AI no matter what the complexity.

Chip Design: This area is already seeing AI deployment. AI can generate chip designs in ways that would take human teams years to discover. AI-designed chips will soon be creating the next generation of AI chips—it’s a self-accelerating process.

Firmware development: Code generators, with built-in testing, will interpret datasheets and produce solid firmware with test cases. What used to take hours or days to code could be handled by AI in minutes.

These are just some of the areas where I see AI revolutionizing embedded systems and EEE. Please understand AI won’t come for your job in the future not because it can’t do it, it will be because you can do it cheaper. My only advice to young engineers: Keep learning and evolve with the times. No field is a guaranteed safe zone with AI. Use it as a tool to grow to stay relevant! If there is interest, I can do a deeper dive into how AI might affect other EEE domains in a long-format blog post.

AI is going to reshape the future whether you like it or not. If you disagree, you’re either not paying attention or you’re simply in denial. Would love to hear your take, but it’s hard to argue against what’s already happening.