Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 31


Tiny jet engines The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has developed the world´s smallest jet engine. Samuel Sánchez, a researcher from the Stuttgart, Germany-based R&D organization, officially received the Guinness World Record certification for the smallest nanotube travelling through fluid. The technology makes use of propulsion, which resembles the characteristics of a ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 14


Making quark soup CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, recently presented its latest results on quark-gluon plasma, or quark soup, a state of matter that supposedly existed during the early formation of the universe. For this, CERN used the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC is situated in a tunnel 100 meters underground ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 16


Monoxide chips Two-dimensional (2D) materials are gaining steam in the R&D labs. The 2D materials could enable a new class of field-effect transistors (FETs), but the technology isn’t expected to appear until sometime in the next decade. The 2D materials include graphene, boron nitride and the transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). One TMD, molybdenum diselenide (MoS2), is gaining inter... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 26


Giant vice Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a research center within the Helmholtz Association, has installed a giant vise or press in its organization. The vise, dubbed the Large Volume Press (LVP), measures 4.5 meters in height and weighs 35 tons. It can exert a force of up to 500 tons on each of its three axes. [caption id="attachment_25030" align="alignleft" width="160"] Th... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 27


CD-SAXS makes progress For years, chipmakers have used metrology tools based on various optical techniques, such as scatterometry. But optical-based scatterometry may one day run out of steam, prompting the need for a possible replacement. One long-awaited candidate is called X-ray scattering. There are various flavors of X-ray scattering, including CD small-angle X-ray scattering (CD-SAXS)... » read more