Power/Performance Bits: July 30


100GHz transceiver Engineers at the University of California Irvine built a new wireless transceiver that works above 100 gigahertz. The 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip, called an "end-to-end transmitter-receiver," uses a digital-analog architecture that modulates the digital bits in the analog and radio-frequency domains to process digital signals quickly and energy-efficiently. "We cal... » 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

Power/Performance Bits: July 15


Liquefied gas electrolyte Researchers at UC San Diego, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and South 8 Technologies developed an electrolyte that could enable the replacement of the graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with lithium-metal. Such a change would increase energy density 50% at the cell level, making for lighter batteries with more capacity. However, lithium-metal anodes are not compa... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 10


Wearable heart monitoring Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed a lightweight, stretchy heart monitoring patch that can be worn externally. Along with being easy to wear, the graphene-based 'e-tattoo' is more accurate than existing electrocardiograph machines, according to the team. The e-tattoo measures cardiac health using both electrocardiograph and seismocardiograph... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 3


2D straintronics Researchers at the University of Rochester and Xi’an Jiaotong University dug into how 2D materials behave when stretched to push the boundaries of what they can do. "We're opening up a new direction of study," says Stephen Wu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Rochester. "There's a huge number of 2D materials with different properti... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 25


Improving IGBTs Researchers at the University of Tokyo developed a power switching device that surpasses previous performance limits, showing that there may still be gains ahead for the silicon-based devices, which have been thought to be approaching their limits. The team's improved insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) used a scaling approach, and simulations showed that downscaling pa... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 18


Multi-value logic transistor Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, Hanyang University, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Yonsei University, Kookmin University, and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology developed and fabricated a transistor capable of storing intermediate values between 0 and 1. Such a multi-value logic transistor would allow more operations ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 10


Quantum dots plus perovskites Researchers at the University of Toronto and KAUST created a hybrid material for solar cells that utilizes both perovskites and quantum dots. Both quantum dots and perovskites suffer from instability: perovskites degrade quickly and certain types become incapable of fully absorbing solar radiation at room temperature, while quantum dots must be covered with a p... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 4


Flexible high-temp dielectric Researchers at Rice University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Cornell University developed a new high-temperature dielectric nanocomposite for flexible electronics, energy storage, and electric devices that combines one-dimensional polymer nanofibers and two-dimensional boron nitride nanosheets. The polymer nanofibers act as a structural reinforcement, w... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 28


Archival storage Researchers at Harvard University and Northwestern University propose a method of long-lived archival data storage using low-weight molecules. DNA has been explored as a method of archival storage, but the researchers argue that it is inadequate, as the DNA macromolecule is large and requires skilled, repetitive labor to encode and read. Instead, the researchers turned... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →