New Ways To Improve Batteries


Researchers around the world are racing to develop more efficient, denser, and safer battery technology, and they are reaching far beyond where research has gone before. Much of this is being driven by concern over exhaust from internal combustion engines, which are responsible for a significant portion of global CO2 emissions. Nearly all carmakers today have announced plans to develop batte... » read more

Batteries Take Center Stage


For any mobile electronic device, the biggest limiting factors are the size, age, type, and utilization of the batteries. Battery technology is improving on multiple fronts. The batteries themselves are becoming more efficient. They are storing more energy per unit of area, and work is underway to provide faster charging and to increase the percentage of that energy that can be used, as well... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 6


Tunable 2D semiconductors Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Hengyang Normal University, Nanjing University, National University of Singapore, and Zhejiang University identified a family of 2D semiconductors that could have lower resistance and enable further scaling. “Due to the quantum tunnelling effect, shrinking a silicon-based transistor too sm... » read more

The Sky’s The Limit For Electric Airplanes


Together, Rolls-Royce and Electroflight are ushering in the third age of aviation, with an all-electric aircraft capable of speeds exceeding 300 mph. A primary challenge is optimizing the 1,047-pound (475 kg) battery pack for structural strength, thermal management, and other critical performance criteria. As the team raced to introduce the world’s fastest zero-emissions aircraft, multiphysic... » read more

Making Batteries Denser And Safer


Battery technology is improving swiftly, driven by the rapidly rising demand for electric vehicles and the vast body of knowledge developed by the semiconductor industry. The market for electric vehicles (EVs) is on a fast upward trajectory, with global sales predicted to grow more than 12 times to more than 31 million vehicles. In fact, EVs will account for almost a third of new vehicle sal... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 24


Low power AI Engineers at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) designed an SoC for edge AI applications that can run on solar power or a small battery. The SoC consists of an ASIC chip with RISC-V processor developed at CSEM along with two tightly coupled machine-learning accelerators: one for face detection, for example, and one for classification. The first is a bin... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 20


Shrinking RFID chips Researchers at North Carolina State University built a new, tiny RFID chip. They expect the chip to help drive down costs for RFID tags, making it possible to embed them in more things for supply chain security. "As far as we can tell, it's the world's smallest Gen2-compatible RFID chip," said Paul Franzon, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State. I... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 13


Graphene PUFs Researchers at Pennsylvania State University propose using graphene to create physically unclonable functions (PUFs) that are energy efficient, scalable, and secure against AI attacks. The team first fabricated nearly 2,000 identical graphene transistors. Despite their structural similarity, the transistors' electrical conductivity varied due to the inherent randomness arising... » read more

Problems In The Power Grid


The gap is widening between power availability and peak demand. Ritesh Tyagi, head of innovation and growth strategy at Infineon Technologies, talks about what needs to be done to fix the power grid, particularly as more cars are electrified and more electronic devices are mobile. While there currently is a surplus in power being generated on a macro level in the United States, for example, it�... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 22


Terahertz silicon multiplexer Researchers from Osaka University and University of Adelaide designed a silicon multiplexer for terahertz-range communications in the 300-GHz band. “In order to control the great spectral bandwidth of terahertz waves, a multiplexer, which is used to split and join signals, is critical for dividing the information into manageable chunks that can be more easily... » read more

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