Saving Energy In The Fab


It’s not an exaggeration to say that integrated circuits are a critical component of any effort to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions. The most efficient engines depend on microcontrollers to optimize fuel consumption. Global shipping uses sophisticated simulators for load balancing and route planning. Computing power that once needed room-sized cooling units now fits in a battery-powered... » read more

OLEDs Shine In Phones, TVs, Lights


OLEDs are coming—everywhere. While the new iPhone 7 models do not have organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, those handsets are likely to be the last Apple will offer before it makes the smartphone transition to OLED displays next year. The Apple Watch, however, does have a flexible OLED display with a sapphire crystal cover or an Ion-X glass cover, and the Apple Watch Series 2 ... » read more

Fab Investment Increases In China


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Fab construction in China is heating up, driven by real and projected demand for IoT devices and the government's push for internally manufactured chips. [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], UMC and [getentity id="22586" comment="TSMC"] are all actively building up fab capacity inside of China, usually in conjunction with other local governme... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: August 25


South Pole neutrinos A group of researchers using an instrument buried deep in the ice at the South Pole have announced a new observation of high-energy neutrinos from beyond our solar system and the galaxy. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer-sized detector sunk into the ice sheet at the South Pole, allows researchers to see the byproducts of neutrino interactions with the ... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 30


3D printing merges plastics, active electronics Princeton researchers have embedded tiny light-emitting diodes into a standard contact lens, allowing the device to project beams of colored light as part of a project demonstrating 3-D printing techniques. And while the lens is not designed for actual use — it requires an external power supply — the device was created to demonstrate the a... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 18


Street light EV charging stations Looking for a place to re-charge an electric car on the road? BMW has developed one possible solution, at least in Europe. The automotive giant has demonstrated a street lighting system that doubles as a charging station for electric vehicles. Part of a pilot project called Light and Charge, the first two prototype systems have moved into operation at BMW W... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 11


Plastic smartwatch displays LG Display has begun production of what the company claims is the world’s first circular plastic OLED (P-OLED) display. The P-OLED is the display for the company’s new smartwatch, the LG G Watch R. Based on the Android Wear operating system, the smartwatch is powered by Qualcomm’s 1.2-GHz Snapdragon 400 processor. It also has 4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM... » read more

Who Really Invented The Blue LED?


A dispute is simmering in the materials science community over the just-announced award of Nobel Prize in physics to three Japanese scientists, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura. Two materials science Ph.D. students from Stanford claim they got there first—two decades earlier, in fact. There's even a U.S. patent filed by Stanford University to prove it. Akasaki and Amano wor... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 30


A “perfect” solar absorber According to researchers at MIT, the key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth’s surface from the sun — but not much of the rest of the spectrum, since that would increase the energy that i... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 22


Skateboarding on 2D materials Two-dimensional materials are gaining steam in the R&D labs. The 2D materials include graphene, boron nitride (BN) and the transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). These materials are attractive candidates for futuristic field-effect transistors (FETs). But researchers must gain more insight into these materials in order to understand their properties. For ... » read more

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