Power/Performance Bits: April 24


Waste heat to power Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a thin-film system that can be applied to electronics to turn waste heat into energy. The thin-film system uses pyroelectric energy conversion, which is well suited for tapping into waste-heat energy supplies below 100 degrees Celsius, called low-quality waste heat. In particular, the technology might be part... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 14


GaN for electric cars Leti is coordinating a new European project to improve the drivetrain in electric vehicles. The so-called ModulED project will focus on the development of gallium nitride (GaN) technology for electric vehicles. The goal is to use power-based GaN devices for the motor, enabling a change from direct current to alternating current. The three-year, €7.2 million proje... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 24


Molecular storage Chemists at the Institut Charles Sadron and Aix-Marseille University used mass spectrometry to read several bytes of data recorded on the molecular scale with synthetic polymers, setting a new benchmark for the amount of data stored as a sequence of molecular units (monomers) that can be read. Polymers have great potential since, to record a bit, their component monomers r... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 17


Harvesting body heat Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed a flexible, wearable thermoelectric generator that can harvest energy from body heat to power simple biosensors. Thermoelectric generators have been available for decades, but standard designs use inflexible inorganic materials that are too toxic for use in wearable devices. The team's device uses thousands... » read more

DARPA CHIPS Program Pushes For Chiplets


While the semiconductor industry plugs away at More Than Moore innovation, the U.S. government is guiding its own SoC development. A new program kicked off last year called ‘Common Heterogeneous Integration and IP Reuse Strategies’ or CHIPS to take its own approach the incredibly high cost of SoC design and manufacturing. DARPA said it recognizes that the explosive growth in mobile and t... » read more

System Bits: June 13


Nimble-fingered robots enabled by deep learning Grabbing awkwardly shaped items that humans regularly pick up daily is not so easy for robots, as they don’t know where to apply grip. To overcome this, UC Berkeley researchers have a built a robot that can pick up and move unfamiliar, real-world objects with a 99% success rate. Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, postdoctoral researcher Jeff M... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Analysis The Internet of Trains? That’s how Siemens sees its work in railroads, utilizing Big Data analytics and Internet of Things technology. “Sensors on an Internet of Trains system monitor everything from engine temperature, to the open or closed state of doors, to vibrations on the rails, and even image data from outside of the trains using cameras,” Bernard Marr writes in this anal... » read more

System Bits: May 9


Graphene adopts exotic electronic states In a platform that may be used to explore avenues for quantum computing, MIT researchers have found that a flake of graphene, when brought in close proximity with two superconducting materials, can inherit some of those materials’ superconducting qualities. They reminded that in normal conductive materials such as silver and copper, electric curren... » read more

System Bits: March 7


Math picture language Harvard University researchers reminded that Galileo called mathematics the “language with which God wrote the universe,” as he described a picture-language. Now that language has a new dimension. [caption id="attachment_35501" align="alignright" width="300"] Arthur Jaffe (left) and Zhengwei Liu are the creators of a new, 3D pictorial language for mathematics. They b... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 14


Potential anticancer drugs selected by neural network Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology researchers along with Mail.Ru Group, and Insilico Medicine have applied a generative neural network to create new pharmaceutical medicines with certain desired characteristics. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was developed and trained to "invent" new molecular structures in order to dram... » read more

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