Power/Performance Bits: April 2


DNA programming Computer scientists at California Institute of Technology, University of California, Davis, Maynooth University, and Harvard University created a library of DNA molecules that can self-assemble to compute a variety of algorithms. Each molecule represents a six-bit binary number. The library created by the team is made up of around 700 short pieces, or tiles, of DNA. Each DNA... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Mar. 11


Reading qubits faster Researchers at Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland propose a faster way to read information from qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers. Currently, they are extremely sensitive to disruption even in cryogenic environments, holding quantum information for less than a millisecond. In the method now used to read information from a qubit... » 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: March 14


Magnetic storage on one atom Scientists at IBM Research created a single-atom magnet and were able to store one bit of data on it, making it the world's smallest magnetic storage device. Using electrical current, the researchers showed that two magnetic atoms could be written and read independently even when they were separated by just one nanometer. This tight spacing could, the team hop... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 15


Another record-breaking tandem perovskite solar cell University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists report a new design for perovskite solar cells that achieves an average steady-state efficiency of 18.4%, with a high of 21.7% and a peak efficiency of 26%. "This has a great potential to be the cheapest photovoltaic on the market, plugging into any... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 6


Carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform silicon transistors, improving the current 1.9 times. The new transistors are particularly promising for wireless communications technologies that require a lot of current flowing across a relatively small area. "This achievement has been a... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 12


Digital storage in DNA Computer scientists and electrical engineers from University of Washington and Microsoft detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies. Progress in DNA storage has been rapid: in 1999, the state-of-the-art in DN... » read more