Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 28


Neutron scattering The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has reached what the agency says is the world’s highest power level for a neutron source. Oak Ridge has several facilities, including the so-called Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). The SNS is used in a metrology field called neutron scattering. Used in physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science, neutron ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 21


World’s smallest transistor The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed what researchers say is the world’s smallest transistor. Researchers have devised a single-atom transistor. The transistor switches an electrical current via a single atom, which resides in a gel electrolyte. The device also works at room temperature. While others have developed single-atom transist... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 14


Strange metals The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) has unraveled the behavior in a new class of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) materials called cuprates. Cuprates are sometimes referred as a "strange" or "bad" metal. They don't conduct electricity well despite being a superconducting material. Superconductors are devices that have zero electrical resistance,... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 7


DNA ROMs The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) are investing $12 million to develop a new class of memories and other technologies, such as DNA-based read-only memory (ROM), nucleic acid memory (NAM) and neural networks based on yeast cells. The effort is called the Semiconductor Synthetic Biology for Information Processing and Storage Technologies... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 31


Florida R&D fab A new microelectronics R&D initiative in Florida is expanding its operations and readying its new 200mm fab facility. The initiative, called BRIDG, describes itself as a non-profit, public-private partnership. BRIDG is basically an R&D microelectronics facility, which is focusing on the development of select technologies, such as photonics, sensors, imagers and 2.5D/3D pac... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 24


Fast rotors Purdue University and others have developed what researchers claim is the world’s fastest man-made rotor. Researchers devised a tiny dumbbell from silica. Then, the object was levitated in a vacuum using a laser, thereby creating a spinning effect. This, in turn, enabled more than 60 billion revolutions per minute or more than 100,000 times faster than a dental drill. The t... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 16


Levitating metrology The Instituto de Ciencias Físicas UNAM has developed a new contaminant detection technique. It uses sound waves to levitate droplets of water for sampling purposes. Researchers use a technique called laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). The technique analyzes heavy metals in levitating drops of water, according to The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letter... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 10


Ruthenium interconnects Imec has developed a process to enable ruthenium (Ru) interconnects in chips at 5nm and beyond. Ru is one of several candidates to replace traditional copper as the interconnect material in chips. The interconnects, which reside on the top of the transistor, consist of tiny copper wiring schemes that transfer electrical signals from one transistor to another. The int... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 3


X-ray holography Using a technique called X-ray holography, a group of researchers have uncovered the phase transitions of vanadium dioxide. X-ray holography is a promising high-resolution metrology technique. Vanadium dioxide is one of many materials that can exhibit metal or insulator properties depending on the temperature. Vanadium dioxide can switch from an insulating to a metallic pha... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 26


Gummy bear chips The Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Forschungszentrum Jülich have developed a 3D inkjet printing technique to print electrodes on several soft substrates, including gummy bears. The main application is to develop a new class of sensor-based implants for life sciences. For this application, electrodes or microelectrode arrays (MEAs) are developed and printed on sof... » read more

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