Composites offer major improvements in key properties over monolithic materials, including high stiffness, strength and thermal conductivity and low density and coefficient of thermal expansion. They are now baseline in a large and increasing number of dimensionally stable structures, optomechanical systems components and in electronic packaging and thermal management. They also are under development in a number of data storage component, including disks and actuators. In this paper, we present an overview of key materials, including polymer matrix composites, metal matrix composites and carbon/carbon composites.
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