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

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 16


Energy storage on microchips After more than half a decade of speculation, fabrication, modeling and testing, an international team of researchers from Drexel University in Pennsylvania and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, confirmed that their process for making carbon films and micro-supercapacitors will allow microchips and their power sources to become one and the same. Si... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 2


Single electron transistors A group coordinated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is setting out on a four year program to develop single electron transistors fully compatible with CMOS technology and capable of room temperature operation. The single electron transistor (SET) switches electricity by means of a single electron. The SET is based on a quantum dot (consisting... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 13


Is it time for one of the Seven Wonders to return? In this week's top engineering and tech picks, Ansys' Justin Nescott highlights a project to rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes. Plus, new tech for cars and a hoodie for taking naps. From CES, Rambus' Aharon Etengoff expands on a talk about intelligent transportation systems and the need to balance technology which could help reduce accidents wi... » read more

Keeping The Lights On


IoT is comprised of numerous industries. For the sake of analysis, these can be segmented into several tiers that function as independent networks or integrated complicated meshes. In my November post I examined the three-tier IoT architecture at a high level. Then last month I focused on the rapidly expanding market of intelligent gateways. Gateways receive information from cloud applicatio... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 23


GaN building blocks A team of engineers from Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, and the semiconductor company IQE created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches. In spite of having many desirable features as a material, GaN is notorious for its defects and reliability issues. So the team zeroed in on device... » read more

New Options For Power


Chipmakers have been talking for years about the next big breakthrough in battery technology, low-power architectures and energy harvesting. So far, none of them has made their job any easier. Batteries empty out too quickly, and the technology for improving the amount of energy that can be stored don't improve fast enough—or safely enough when they do show big improvements—to make a big... » read more

Challenges At Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss finFETs, 22nm FD-SOI and how the how the market will segment over the next few years with Marie Semeria, CEO of [getentity id="22192" e_name="Leti"]; Patrick Soheili, vice president of product management and corporate development at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Paul Boudre, CEO of Soitec; and Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 30


Tiny, solar-powered sensors Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous ultralow-power converters that used the same approach had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent. ... » read more

Energy Harvesting Update


Manos Tentzeris, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss energy harvesting. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What is the state of energy harvesting and are we making progress. Tentzeris: The latest results are systems with efficiency up to 40% to 45% utilizing ambient UH... » read more

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