System Bits: April 1


“Lock-free” vs. “wait-free” parallel algorithms Since computer chips have stopped getting faster, regular performance improvements are now the result of chipmakers’ adding more cores to their chips, rather than increasing their clock speed. And in theory, doubling the number of cores doubles the chip’s efficiency, but splitting up computations so that they run efficiently in parall... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 1


Heat-conducting polymer Polymer materials are usually thermal insulators but according to a team researchers including the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, and the Raytheon Company, by harnessing an electropolymerization process to produce aligned arrays of polymer nanofibers, they’ve developed a thermal interface material able to conduct heat 20 times better t... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 25


Proving the Big Bang theory A team of cosmologists using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole have discovered the first direct evidence of the Big Bang theory. The team includes Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University/SLAC and others. Using the BICEP2, researchers found direct evidence of a cosm... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 18


Bionic plants A team of MIT researchers wants to make plants more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them new functions including environmental pollutant monitoring. The team reported that they’ve boosted the ability of plants to capture light energy by 30% by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle w... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 4


Shrimp cocktail manufacturing Harvard's Wyss Institute has devised a new degradable bioplastic material, which was isolated from shrimp shells. The shrimp shell-based material could be used in the large-scale manufacturing of cell phones, food containers, toys and many other products. The material is also superior to most bioplastics on the market today. It could be used in place of existing... » read more

System Bits: March 4


Self-completing programs Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch -- which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code – and then automatically fills in the gaps. If it’s fleshed out and ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


SPIE Advanced Lithography is a patterning show. At the event, however, Applied Materials revealed more details regarding its selective materials removal opportunity, according to Weston Twigg, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, in a research note. Applied Materials presented a paper entitled, “Where Is Plasma Etching Going from Here?” “The presenter outlined concepts for thin layer... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 25


SiGe chip sets speed record Researchers from IHP-Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics in Germany and the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated what they say is the world's fastest silicon-based device to date. A silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip has been operated transistor at 798 gigahertz (GHz) fMAX, exceeding the previous speed record for silicon-germanium chips by abou... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 18


Polite cupcake helping robots Cornell and Carnegie Mellon have made a new discovery about robots. If they sound less snippy when they communicate, listeners will respond better. In fact, developers of robots should develop systems that use less confrontational language. In the study, entitled “How a Robot Should Give Advice,” researchers discovered that robots and humans are more lik... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 11


Low-power chip for cochlear implants without external hardware Existing versions of cochlear implants require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull, with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient’s ear...until now. Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory a... » read more

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