Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 22


Flexible battery Researchers at ETH Zurich developed a flexible thin-film battery that can be bent, stretched, and twisted without interrupting the supply of power. Key to the battery is a new electrolyte and entirely flexible components. "To date, no one has employed exclusively flexible components as systematically as we have in creating a lithium-ion battery," said Markus Niederberger, P... » read more

Why EV Battery Design Is So Difficult


Automotive batteries always have been treated as plug-and-play parts of a vehicle, but that approach no longer works in electric vehicles. In fact, the battery is now a differentiating factor, and it is the heaviest and most expensive component. What used to be a relatively simple component has been replaced by a variety of sensors to measure complex static thermal and aging effects, as well... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 1


Jumping the gap in microchips A quasi-particle that travels along the interface of a metal and dielectric material may be the solution to problems caused by shrinking electronic components, according to an international team of engineers. "Microelectronic chips are ubiquitous today," said Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering S... » read more

Scaling Battery Technology


Batteries are an essential ingredient for the growth of electronics from small devices used for IoT as well as large batteries for electric cars. Historically, battery energy density improves 5%-8% per year. While this is much slower than the historical improvements from Moore’s Law, it’s still the kind of growth that can result in leaps in efficiency, opening the door for a better experien... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 3


Nylon capacitor Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and Lodz University of Technology developed a way to fabricate ferroelectric nylon thin-film capacitors. Nylons consist of a long chain of polymers and, along with use in textiles, exhibit ferroelectric properties. However, electronic applications have been limited as there ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 15


Liquefied gas electrolyte Researchers at UC San Diego, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and South 8 Technologies developed an electrolyte that could enable the replacement of the graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with lithium-metal. Such a change would increase energy density 50% at the cell level, making for lighter batteries with more capacity. However, lithium-metal anodes are not compa... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Products/Services Arteris IP reports that Bitmain licensed the Arteris Ncore Cache Coherent Interconnect intellectual property for use in its next-generation Sophon Tensor Processing Unit system-on-a-chip devices for the scalable hardware acceleration of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. “Our choice of interconnect IP became more important as we continued to increase t... » read more

System Bits: June 25


Supercomputers around the world At last week’s International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, the 53rd biannual list of the Top500 of the most powerful computing systems in the world was released. Broken out by countries of installation, China has 219 of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers, compared with 116 in the United States. Ranking by percent of list flops, the ... » read more

System Bits: June 4


Thin films for quantum computing Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory report their development of two-dimensional tungsten/selenium thin films that can control the emission of single photons, potentially useful in quantum technologies. “Efficiently controlling certain thin-film materials so they emit single photons at precise locations—what’s known as deterministic quantum em... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 4


Flexible high-temp dielectric Researchers at Rice University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Cornell University developed a new high-temperature dielectric nanocomposite for flexible electronics, energy storage, and electric devices that combines one-dimensional polymer nanofibers and two-dimensional boron nitride nanosheets. The polymer nanofibers act as a structural reinforcement, w... » read more

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