Thank you for the kind words guys!
Actually, I want to correct something I said. Three of the four companies in the US are located in the Philadelphia, PA area. I incorrectly said the world. We had a couple of competitors in Japan and in Europe. And, one of the reasons I left the field was I saw things on the horizon in China, with us not taking agressive steps to thwart the barbarians at the gates (I am a software engineer now, and despite it not being nearly as fun, it is a much more stable, well paying career). Still, the actual number of sources for this stuff worldwide can be counted on one hand.
Again, I wish I could show everyone how dramatic the differences in resistivity were with the same resistor in terms of each conductor with an ohmeter. What I was trying to say about the ohmic contact is that the contact resistance of the meter's probes was INCREDIBLY influenced by the termination of the resistor we used. With no termination, a resistor would often read open. With gold, it could read several ohms. And, with the silver based materials, it got down to fractions of an ohm.
Not to turn this too technical, but resistivity is measured in ohms/square. So if you silk screen printed a thick film resistor, such as we would sell to Holco, Sfernice, or Vishay in a 1 mm wide by 4 mm long trace and measured 4 ohms, you would divide by 4 to obtain the resistivity - 1 ohm/square. Each of our test patterns would have a lot of redundant prints, so that we could average things to get a better insight. Of course, printed/dried/cured/fired thickness played a crucial role.
So, in total, I have no doubt that Lloyd's product has the potential to make tremendous improvements. Science is definitely on his side. The contacts of our audio equipment are pretty bad, just take a look at them. My only regret is that I am not still in the lab so that I could actually maximize the performance of this type of material. Various shapes (spheres, platelets, flake) and particle sizes (via surface area) of the silver powders used in these formulations result in very different characteristics. It would be fun to see which sounded the best.
Actually, I want to correct something I said. Three of the four companies in the US are located in the Philadelphia, PA area. I incorrectly said the world. We had a couple of competitors in Japan and in Europe. And, one of the reasons I left the field was I saw things on the horizon in China, with us not taking agressive steps to thwart the barbarians at the gates (I am a software engineer now, and despite it not being nearly as fun, it is a much more stable, well paying career). Still, the actual number of sources for this stuff worldwide can be counted on one hand.
Again, I wish I could show everyone how dramatic the differences in resistivity were with the same resistor in terms of each conductor with an ohmeter. What I was trying to say about the ohmic contact is that the contact resistance of the meter's probes was INCREDIBLY influenced by the termination of the resistor we used. With no termination, a resistor would often read open. With gold, it could read several ohms. And, with the silver based materials, it got down to fractions of an ohm.
Not to turn this too technical, but resistivity is measured in ohms/square. So if you silk screen printed a thick film resistor, such as we would sell to Holco, Sfernice, or Vishay in a 1 mm wide by 4 mm long trace and measured 4 ohms, you would divide by 4 to obtain the resistivity - 1 ohm/square. Each of our test patterns would have a lot of redundant prints, so that we could average things to get a better insight. Of course, printed/dried/cured/fired thickness played a crucial role.
So, in total, I have no doubt that Lloyd's product has the potential to make tremendous improvements. Science is definitely on his side. The contacts of our audio equipment are pretty bad, just take a look at them. My only regret is that I am not still in the lab so that I could actually maximize the performance of this type of material. Various shapes (spheres, platelets, flake) and particle sizes (via surface area) of the silver powders used in these formulations result in very different characteristics. It would be fun to see which sounded the best.