Large-area photonic lift-off process for flexible thin-film transistors


Abstract "Fabricating flexible electronics on plastic is often limited by the poor dimensional stability of polymer substrates. To mitigate, glass carriers are used during fabrication, but removing the plastic substrate from a carrier without damaging the electronics remains challenging. Here we utilize a large-area, high-throughput photonic lift-off (PLO) process to rapidly separate polymer f... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 3


Optical device integration Researchers from the University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow, and the Australian National University propose a way to place multiple micron-scale optical devices made from different materials close together on a single silicon chip. “The development of electronics that are based on silicon transistors has enabled increasingly more powerful and flexible ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 28


Shrinking LEDs Researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) are working to make LEDs smaller. Micrometer-scale light-emitting diodes (μLEDs) could be an ideal building block for future microLED displays, but devices based on nitride-based alloys used to achieve a broad color range become poor emitters of light when shrunk to micrometer scales. “The main ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 24


Flexible, low power phase-change memory Engineers at Stanford University created a flexible phase-change memory. The non-volatile phase-change memory device is made up of germanium, antimony, and tellurium (GST) between two metal electrodes. 1s and 0s represent measurements of electrical resistance in the GST material. “A typical phase-change memory device can store two states of resis... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 2


GaN CMOS ICs Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) are working to increase the functionality available to wide bandgap gallium nitride (GaN) electronics. GaN is frequently used in power electronics, such as power converters and supplies. However, GaN CMOS technology has been hampered by the difficulties in implementing p-channel transistors and integrat... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 26


Printing circuits on irregular shapes Researchers at Pennsylvania State University propose a way to print biodegradable circuits on irregular, complex shapes. “We are trying to enable direct fabrication of circuits on freeform, 3-D geometries,” said Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, professor in Penn State's Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM). “Printing on complicated objec... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 31


Securing memory Researchers at Columbia University suggest several ways to make computing more secure without imposing a system performance penalty. The efforts focus on memory security, specifically pointers. "Memory safety has been a problem for nearly 40 years and numerous solutions have been proposed. We believe that memory safety continues to be a problem because it does not distribute... » read more

High-performance flexible nanoscale transistors based on transition metal dichalcogenides


Read the paper here. Published June 17, 2021, Nature Electronics. Abstract Two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides could be used to build high-performance flexible electronics. However, flexible field-effect transistors (FETs) based on such materials are typically fabricated with channel lengths on the micrometre scale, not benefitting from the short-channel advan... » 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

The “Natively Flexible” Processor Has Arrived: Here’s What We Need To Make It Mainstream


The microprocessor is one of history’s pivotal inventions, ranking in influence with breakthroughs such as the wheel, the transistor, and the printing press. There is no escaping their popularity or usefulness either: with tens of billions of processors produced each year they have revolutionized industries such as health care, media, retail, transportation, and of course information manageme... » read more

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