System Bits: April 15


Making game play more engaging Engineers at Stanford University have developed what could be the next big thing in interactive gaming: handheld game controllers that measure the player's physiology and alter the game play to make it more engaging. The prototype controller was born from research conducted in the lab of Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in collab... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 1


Heat-conducting polymer Polymer materials are usually thermal insulators but according to a team researchers including the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, and the Raytheon Company, by harnessing an electropolymerization process to produce aligned arrays of polymer nanofibers, they’ve developed a thermal interface material able to conduct heat 20 times better t... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 25


A faster Internet While light is capable of carrying vast amounts of information, to utilize its potential, the laser light needs to be as spectrally pure—as close to a single frequency as possible. The purer the tone, the more information it can carry. For decades researchers have been trying to develop a laser that comes as close as possible to emitting just one frequency. Today's world... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 11


Ballistic transport in graphene Using electrons more like photons could provide the foundation for a new type of electronic device that would capitalize on the ability of graphene to carry electrons with almost no resistance even at room temperature in a process known as ballistic transport, according to researchers at Georgia Tech. Ballistic transport is the process by which electrical res... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 28


Collaborative software for linking performance, cost Researchers from Georgia Tech have created a web-based tool that lets physically-separated participants collaborate on model-based systems engineering projects. Referred to as the Framework for Assessing Cost and Technology (FACT), the program utilizes open-source software components to allow users to visualize a system's potential expens... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 7


Harvesting electricity In order to produce small amounts of electricity for portable devices and sensors, Georgia Tech researchers are developing a family of power generators that take advantage of the triboelectric effect. The researchers are using what’s technically known as the triboelectric effect to create surprising amounts of electric power by rubbing or touching two different mate... » read more

Non-Visual Defect Inspection: The Tech of Tomorrow?


Remember when it first became obvious that the semiconductor manufacturing industry was going to expect lithography to resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light used in the litho tools themselves? Thanks to techniques such as the use of phase shift photomasks, sub-wavelength lithography is standard in chip fabs today. It might even be viewed as “old hat,” although still an ex... » read more

System Bits Nov 26


Scaling The Quantum Slopes Like any task, there are easy and hard ways to control atoms and molecules as quantum systems, which are driven by tailored radiation fields. More efficient methods for manipulating quantum systems could help scientists realize the next generation of technology by harnessing atoms and molecules to create small but incredibly powerful devices, such as molecular electr... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 19


Toothpick Fab Tools NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. has developed a specialized atomic layer deposition (ALD) system and a "virtual toothpick" to enable ultra-thin films on chips and systems. NASA has built an ALD reactor chamber, which measures three inches in diameter and two feet in length. The system can deposit films inside pores and cavities, giving ALD the abilit... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 8


How light interacts with gold nanostructures With the potential to possibly increase the efficiency of solar cells and photo detectors, University of Manchester researchers have discovered that graphene can be used to investigate how light interacts with nano-antennas. The team, which also included researchers from Freie Universität Berlin and Imperial College London, have shown that graph... » read more

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