Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 13


Silicon spintronics Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, developed new methods to detect signals from spintronic components made of low-cost metals and silicon. Spintronic devices generate little heat, use relatively minuscule amounts of electricity, and would require no energy to maintain data in memory. However, previously developed spintronic devices depend on complex struc... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 2


Hydrogen from seawater Engineers at Columbia University are developing an ocean-based photovoltaic-powered electrolysis device that can operate as a stand-alone floating platform to split water into hydrogen fuel and oxygen. State-of-the-art electrolyzers use expensive membranes to maintain separation of the H2 and O2 gases produced by water electrolysis. The new device relies instead on an... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 7


Exposing logic errors in deep neural networks In a new approach meant to brings transparency to self-driving cars and other self-taught systems, researchers at Columbia and Lehigh universities have come up with a way to automatically error-check the thousands to millions of neurons in a deep learning neural network. Their tool — DeepXplore — feeds confusing, real-world inputs into the ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 10


5/2 fractional states Using a powerful magnet, Columbia University has observed a quantum particle in a bilayer graphene material, an event referred to as a 5/2 fractional quantum state. The observation could bring the industry closer to quantum computing. More specifically, researchers from Columbia said that they have observed “an anomaly in condensed matter physics—the even-denominat... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 15


Self-collapse lithography The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a technology called self-collapse lithography. The technology, reported in the journal Nano Letters, resembles the combination of nanoimprint, selective removal and a chemical lift-off process. More specifically, though, the technology provides insights into patterning using a chemical lift-off lith... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 30


Looking for heavy photons The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and others have embarked on a mission to find hypothetical particles called heavy photons. In 2015, researchers from the so-called Heavy Photon Search (HPS) group started the experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Researchers installed a particle detector half a millim... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 2


Turning bottles into batteries Researchers at the University of California, Riverside used waste glass bottles and a low-cost chemical process to create nanosilicon anodes for high-performance lithium-ion batteries. Billions of glass bottles end up in landfills every year, prompting the researchers to ask whether silicon dioxide in waste beverage bottles could provide high purity silicon ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 21


Tiny redox flow batteries for chips Researchers at ETH Zurich and IBM Research Zurich built a tiny redox flow battery capable of both powering and cooling stacks of chips. In a flow battery, an electrochemical reaction is used to produce electricity out of two liquid electrolytes, which are pumped to the battery cell from outside via a closed electrolyte loop. Such batteries are usually u... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 23


Increasing lithium battery density Researchers at Columbia University developed a new method to increase the energy density of lithium batteries using a trilayer structure that is stable in ambient air. "When lithium batteries are charged the first time, they lose anywhere from 5-20% energy in that first cycle," said Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at C... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 18


Speeding up memory with T-rays Scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the University of Regensburg in Germany, Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and Moscow Technological University proposed a way to improve the performance of memory through using T-waves, or terahertz radiation, as a means of resetting memory cells. This process is several thousand... » read more

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