System Bits: March 14


Neuromorphic computing While for five decades, Moore’s law held up pretty well, today, transistors and other electronic components are so small they’re beginning to bump up against fundamental physical limits on their size, and because Moore’s law has reached its end, it’s going to take something different to meet the need for computing that is ever faster, cheaper and more efficient. ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 14


Magnetic storage on one atom Scientists at IBM Research created a single-atom magnet and were able to store one bit of data on it, making it the world's smallest magnetic storage device. Using electrical current, the researchers showed that two magnetic atoms could be written and read independently even when they were separated by just one nanometer. This tight spacing could, the team hop... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 7


Materials database Electronic materials and nanocrystals are used in a variety of applications. To integrate materials and crystals in devices, researchers must search in multiple places to discover new technologies and their various properties. On top of that, researchers may require long hours in the lab, and large computational resources, to enable new materials. Seeking to help res... » read more

System Bits: March 7


Math picture language Harvard University researchers reminded that Galileo called mathematics the “language with which God wrote the universe,” as he described a picture-language. Now that language has a new dimension. [caption id="attachment_35501" align="alignright" width="300"] Arthur Jaffe (left) and Zhengwei Liu are the creators of a new, 3D pictorial language for mathematics. They b... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 7


Supercapacitor plants Scientists at Linköping University in Sweden developed a method for transforming roses into supercapacitors that can be charged and discharged hundreds of times. The team created a solution that, when fed through the cut end of the stem, polymerizes inside the rose's vascular system with the plant's own biochemical response mechanism acting as catalyst, creating lon... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 28


‘Big G’ gravitation measurements The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has unveiled a new coordinate measuring machine (CMM). The CMM, dubbed Xenos, makes measurements that involve “big G” or the universal constant of gravitation. Basically, there are two meanings for the constant of gravity. The first is Newton’s universal law of gravitation. For this, the spe... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 28


Software robots have fights lasting years According to University of Oxford and Alan Turing Institute researchers, editing bots on Wikipedia undo vandalism, enforce bans, check spelling, create links and import content automatically, whereas other non-editing bots mine data, identify data or identify copyright infringements — sometimes with unpredictable consequences. The team looked at h... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 28


Power converter for IoT At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, researchers from MIT presented a new power converter that is efficient at a wide range of currents, which could be a boon for IoT sensors that have variable power requirements. The device maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 200,000-fold increase in... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 21


AFM-on-a-chip An atomic force microscope (AFM) is a metrology tool that can measure and characterize structures in three dimensions. It uses a tiny probe to enable measurements in chip structures, but the instrument itself is often a large and bulky system. In response, the University of Texas at Dallas has devised an AFM-on-a-chip technology. The AFM is roughly the size of a dime. Based on... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 21


Recreating the brain Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories researchers have created an organic, high-performance, low-energy artificial synapse for neural network computing that aims to better recreate the way the human brain processes information, and could also lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies. Alberto Salleo, associate professor of materials science and e... » read more

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