As a human, I'm appalled at their environmental track record but as an engineer, wow they really do so many things so well.
The relevant question isn't whether they make great products, but whether their stock is undervalued.
We in the tech world are used to "great products" -> "stock price always goes up", but in the "real world" there's no reason for that to be true. "Stock price goes up" should, from an efficient-markets PoV, reflect new information.
Full disclosure: I am the proud owner of one share of MMM.
What's the calculus there, and why proud — if you don't mind me asking?
3M's consumer products (Scotch, etc.) are also excellent. Anytime you use 3M products, you don't need to worry. I like that consistency and it brings peace to the mind. I'll pay more for it.
Japanese equivalent is Nitto: https://www.nitto.com/us/en/products/
Most companies with such a huge array of subtly different products are nowhere near so clear.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/bonding-and-assembly-us/resource...
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/toxic-s...
I have no idea what kind of black magic makes it possible but I’m so glad I gave them a try.
My anecdotal experience is that every time I run into some amazing 3M product, it costs $300/liter.
Nile Red recently posted this cool video of extinguishing a book with this fancy 3M liquid. Looked, yup, that's about the price.
If you wanted to experiment with fancy computer cooling, Fluorinert is also an arm and a leg in the quantities that'd be needed. It was apparently used in the Cray waterfall, but it seems after more than 30 years the stuff is still bloody expensive.
And so on.
Fluorinert is a super niche product. The price reflects that. I imagine the cost to produce it has dropped dramatically in 3 decades. 3M just make more profit from it now.
As products mature there's no reason to believe the production process and efficiency savings will always be passed on to the consumer.
My personal favorite is the 3M V-Flex N95. Super comfortable, great seal, and relatively large interior volume (great breathability). It's pretty close to a perfect mask. I also gave some of these away, and they were similarly popular.
In general, Aura seemed to be liked more for smaller faces, and V-Flex for larger faces. So, nowadays, my go-to recommendations are V-Flexes and Auras.
Some of the comfort may also be the breathability, Auras have a pretty low pressure diff between the inside and outside when in use. If you want that low pressure difference in a traditional N95 style, Indiana Face Mask makes some top notch high-filtration high-breathability N95s that are similar. Both they and the Auras usually test above 99.5% filtration, the Auras usually have a little bit of a petroleum smell but if it's bad enough that it makes the mask deeply unpleasant to wear, you probably have a fake (sometimes factory rejects get resold etc.).
(I am one of those btw, I've sold what I had left early in the year and made a nice profit. Didn't get rich because you need to have money to make money, but it was a nice extra).
Suppose you have a glass LCD panel, like the kind used in clocks and watches. The traces are indium-tin-oxide (ITO), on the glass. This is fiendishly difficult to connect to, it doesn't take solder well, etc. And you want to connect it to some flexible ribbon cable which will carry the signals to the control board. But how to do that?
With Z-tape! By laying a strip of the tape over the ITO traces on the glass, and then smushing the flexible cable to it, the conductive spots in the tape now connect the cable traces to the ITO traces, without shorting them to each other.
(The UART provided a root shell and enough power to “boot” the ATtiny which simply waited a few seconds and then ran some commands to initiate a reverse shell to a server under our control every time the device was powered on. Thanks to this tape and the device’s tool-less case (and convenient unpopulated header with space around it), it was enlightening how trivially easy it’d be to develop and deploy such an implant to an operating device (with the caveat that I wouldn’t consider the connection robust enough to survive transport).
It’s also useful to connect SMD EEPROMs to unpopulated/desoldered pads for testing without installing a socket.
https://tomverbeure.github.io/2019/11/21/Z-tape.html
(A bit off topic but that Bloomberg story is still such a mystery to me. It went into quite a bit of details and claimed it had tons of sources, so even if it was a completely false story whoever fabricated it must have put insane amounts of efforts/identity fraud into the set up)
Hold them on with one hand while you type a few commands over the serial connection with the other.
If you have more in depth debugging to do, get a 'helping hand' to hold it in place.
Insulation resistance: 3.4 x 1014 ohms/square
Contact resistance: < 0.3 ohms
Minimum gap: 0.4mm
Minimum overlay area: 3.2mm^2
Why is so much ACF used? Because it is the most cost effective and compact way to connect dissimilar high density connections from one substrate to another. Displays typically require thousands of connections so you're looking at linear densities of 1 contact per mil (~25um) with resistances measured in ohms (for less than 0.01mmsq). The reason that IC packages (internally wire bonded or electroplated CSP) don't use ACF is a combination of cost, self alignment (solder pulls it into place), and much lower resistance.
The way that almost all of these ACFs are made is embedding conductive beads (often spherical of controlled diameter) which can compress when the adhesive is pressed/bonded to the two substrates. If the aerial density of the beads is right, you'll only get a few beads in contact and none will short any neighboring contacts. For displays the ACF material is typically a ~25um thick B-stage epoxy, which is tacked down and then "snaps" when heated and compressed permanently pulling together the two contact regions and compressing ~10um gold coated polystyrene balls between gold "fingers" on each glass/PCB/COF/COP side after the epoxy flows.
3M tried to get into these higher end ACFs, but now it's mostly Japanese and Korean suppliers.
Every human on earth has Dupont chemicals in their blood that will never go away, but accumulate over the course of our lives. These are "forever chemicals" that never break down. When you die you pass them on. They are in the animals you eat, in the beverages and water you drink, they are in the vegetables you eat. Your descendants a millennium from now will be eating them still, plus all the new ones produced between now and then.
This is the result of American capitalism and the worlds most corrupt banana republic legislature where bribery is so bad they made it legal.
Those absolutely evil bottom dwellers at Dupont you admire so much produce hundreds of toxic chemicals, and your bribed government allows them to produce and market these chemicals and spread them around the world without consequence.
Fuck Dupont and Fuck 3M. They are poisoning the planet.
Please don't conflate admiration for the fascinating engineering work with endorsement of an entire company's impact on the world!
India's craven political dispensation accepted the pittance of damages paid by UC, but it barely covered anything. Such disgrace.
> This is the result of American capitalism and the worlds most corrupt banana republic legislature where bribery is so bad they made it legal.
And things like that just sound silly and trying to string a bunch of buzz words together.
I expected a flex cable connecting the lcd to the PCB but couldn't find one. I 'knew' rubber was an insulator, so no matter what that rubbery thing was (I guessed it was simply a spacer) it wasn't the connection between the two.
Didn't learn about the existence of z-tape for another decade or so and immediately the light bulb in my brain flashed, solving a childhood mystery.
Zebra-strip is incredibly distinct once you're viewing it up close, and I bet its function would've immediately clicked upon seeing the structure.
*for free too; It was my favorite Saturday hangout spot - watching lab demonstrations, animal dissections etc, playing with the ever-changing interactive science demos).
For instance, many old Playstation 3 systems go faulty because of the poor quality solder on the CPU/GPU that tends to crack over time. Being a normie, it's really hard to fix something like that at home. But this tape seems like it could save the day.
The datasheet[1] says the minimum gap between conductors is 0.4mm, so based on that it should work for 0.5/0.65mm BGA.
Also would clearly affect the speed you can run things at due to introducing parasitics. But would certainly be fun to try.
[1]: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/66235O/3m-electrically-c...
I have never tried it but it seems implausible.
Polarized is not the right word.
I can see uses for all, but how you'd apply it would certainly differ if depending on which one is Z....
Unfortunately it didn't make reliable contact for the chip pins unless you were constantly pushing down on it. As I recall the datasheet states as much. That seems like a solvable material science problem, but alas perhaps not valuable enough.
All kinds of stuff like this can be explored with a pretty decent UI.
We use specialized thermally conductive tapes in a range >= 1 W/mK. I am always looking for interesting developments in this domain.
If the link doesn't work (lots of tokens in there) try searching for "9703 3M tape conductive" as a starting point.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/3m/9703-4-X36YD/6...