Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 18


Solar storage Engineers at MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory designed a system to store renewable energy in vast amounts and deliver it back to the grid when power generation is low. The system stores excess electricity from solar or wind installations as heat using tanks of white-hot molten silicon, and then converts the light from the glowi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 11


Internet of Ears for smart buildings Scientists at Case Western Reserve University proposed a new way for smart homes to determine building occupancy: sensors that 'listen' to vibration, sound, and changes in the existing ambient electrical field. "We are trying to make a building that is able to 'listen' to the humans inside," said Ming-Chun Huang, an assistant professor in electrical engi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 4


Bio-hybrid fungi Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology combined a white button mushroom, electricity-producing cyanobacteria, and graphene nanoribbons into a power-generating symbiotic system. "In this case, our system - this bionic mushroom - produces electricity," said Manu Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens. "By integrating cyanobacteria that ca... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 27


Hybrid solar for hydrogen and electricity Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed an artificial photosynthesis solar cell capable of both storing the sun's energy as hydrogen through water splitting and outputting electricity directly. The hybrid photoelectrochemical and voltaic (HPEV) cell gets around a limitation of other water splitting devices that shortchange... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 20


In-memory compute accelerator Engineers at Princeton University built a programmable chip that features an in-memory computing accelerator. Targeted at deep learning inferencing, the chip aims to reduce the bottleneck between memory and compute in traditional architectures. The team's key to performing compute in memory was using capacitors rather than transistors. The capacitors were paire... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 13


ML identifies LED material Researchers at the University of Houston created a machine learning algorithm that can predict a material's properties to help find better host material candidates for LED lighting. One recommendation was synthesized and tested. The technique, a support vector machine regression model, was efficient enough to run on a personal computer. It scanned a list of 118,28... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 6


Camera for object recognition Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a new camera that could improve object detection in vehicles. Inspired by the visual system of mantis shrimp, the camera detects the polarization of light and has a dynamic range about 10,000 times higher than today's commercial cameras. "In a recent crash involving a self-driving car, th... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 30


Long-term solar energy storage Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and Universidad de La Rioja created a system capable of storing solar energy for extended periods of time. The system, called Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage (MOST), hinges on a molecular photoswitch made from carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. When the molecule is hit by sunlight, it turns into an energy-rich... » 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. 16


On-chip modulator Researchers at Harvard SEAS and Nokia Bell Labs boosted shrunk down an important component of optoelectronics with an on-chip modulator that is 100 times smaller and 20 times more efficient than current lithium niobite (LN) modulators. Lithium niobate modulators form the basis of modern telecommunications, converting electronic data to optical information in fiber optic ca... » read more

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