Power/Performance Bits: June 29


Persistent photoconductivity Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), University of Wisconsin Madison, and the University of Toledo, discovered a unique effect in metal-halide perovskite semiconductors that could be used in neuromorphic computing systems. Perovskites are currently being investigated as highly efficient solar cells. In fact,... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 20


Six-angstrom waveguide Engineers at the University of California San Diego, City University of New York, and Johns Hopkins University created the thinnest optical waveguide yet. At only three atoms thick, the team says the waveguide serves as a proof of concept for scaling down optical devices. The waveguide consists of a tungsten disulfide monolayer (made up of one layer of tungsten atoms ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 23


Image-recognizing glass Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MIT, and Columbia University developed a way to create 'smart' glass capable of performing image recognition tasks without the need for electronics or power. "We're using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass," said Zongfu Yu, electrical and ... » read more

System Bits: June 10


SlothBot swings through the trees, slowly A robot that doesn’t often move, spending its days, weeks, months, in the forest canopy, monitoring the local environment – that’s SlothBot, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The robot has two photovoltaic solar panels for its power source. It is designed to stay in the trees for months at a time. It’s gone through trials on the Geor... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 23


Tiny spectrometer Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sandia National Laboratories, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology developed a miniature spectrometer small enough to integrate with the camera on a typical cellphone without sacrificing accuracy. This miniature sensor is CMOS compatible. "This is a compact, single-shot spectrometer that offers high resolution ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 29


Neural nets struggle with shape Cognitive psychologists at the University of California Los Angeles investigated how deep convolutional neural networks identify objects and found a big difference between the way these networks and humans perceive objects. In the first of a series of experiments, the researchers showed color images of animals and objects that had been altered to have a diffe... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 23


Integrated solar battery Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) built a unified solar cell-liquid battery device capable of returning more than 14% of the incoming solar energy as electricity. The device is capable of both converting solar energy to electricity for immediate use or storing it as chemical energy in ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 25


Energy-harvesting floor Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a flooring material which can be used as a triboelectric nanogenerator to convert footsteps into electricity. The method uses wood pulp, a common waste material already often used in flooring. The pulp is partly make of cellulose nanofibers, which when chemically treated produce an electrical charge when th... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 4


Solar battery Chemists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia integrated solar cells with a large-capacity battery in a single device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity and, instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery's electrolyte. The team used a redox flow battery, or R... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 6


Carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform silicon transistors, improving the current 1.9 times. The new transistors are particularly promising for wireless communications technologies that require a lot of current flowing across a relatively small area. "This achievement has been a... » read more

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