Designers of consumer electronics gear, it seems, are constantly developing ways to shrink a product's size without sacrificing features or capabilities found in the bigger model it is meant to replace.
Balzers Inc. is a coating company, plain and simple. To paraphrase a commercial, they don't make the cutting tools that bore through hard metal; they make them cut longer.
Efficient process control often depends on the ability to rapidly access data from a large number of sources in the production environment, and with optimum accuracy.