Power/Performance Bits: Mar. 20


Proton battery prototype A team at RMIT University built a prototype rechargeable proton battery combining hydrogen fuel cells and battery-based electrical power that has the potential, with further development, to store more energy than currently-available lithium ion batteries. The working prototype proton battery uses an activated carbon electrode for solid-state storage of hydrogen with... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 30


Wavy display architecture Researchers at KAUST developed a new transistor architecture for flexible ultrahigh resolution devices aimed at boosting the performance of the display circuitry. Flat-panel displays use thin-film transistors, acting as switches, to control the electric current that activates individual pixels consisting of LEDs or liquid crystals. A higher field-effect mobility of... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 23


Atomristors for thin memory Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin and Peking University developed a thin memory storage device with dense memory capacity. Dubbed "atomristors," the device enables 3-D integration of nanoscale memory with nanoscale transistors on the same chip. "For a long time, the consensus was that it wasn't possible to make memory devices from materials that were... » read more

Exploring New Scaling Approaches


At the recent SPIE Photomask Technology + Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography 2017 conference, Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss semiconductor technology with Tsu-Jae King Liu, the TSMC Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. More specifically, Liu discussed some of the new... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 13


Theoretical all-carbon circuits Engineers at the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Central Florida, and Northwestern University designed a novel computing system made solely from carbon. "The concept brings together an assortment of existing nanoscale technologies and combines them in a new way," said Dr. Joseph S. Friedman, ass... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 23


Biosupercapacitor Researchers from UCLA and the University of Connecticut designed a biological supercapacitor, a new biofriendly energy storage system which operates using ions from fluids in the human body. The device is harmless to the body's biological systems, say the researchers, and could lead to longer-lasting cardiac pacemakers and other implantable medical devices. The supercapa... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 7


Materials database Electronic materials and nanocrystals are used in a variety of applications. To integrate materials and crystals in devices, researchers must search in multiple places to discover new technologies and their various properties. On top of that, researchers may require long hours in the lab, and large computational resources, to enable new materials. Seeking to help res... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 7


Infrared links for data centers Researchers at Penn State, Stony Brook University and Carnegie Mellon University developed a free space optical link for communication in data centers using infrared lasers and receivers mounted on top of data center racks. According to Mohsen Kavehrad, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, "It uses a very inexpensive lens, we get a very narrow... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 31


Microbial nanowires Microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that they have discovered a new type of microbial nanowire, the protein filaments that bacteria use to make electrical connections with other microbes or minerals. The team was motivated by the potential for improved "green" conducting materials for electronics. According to Derek Lovley, professor of... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 23


Materials database The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has published a study that quantifies the thermodynamic scale of metastability of some 29,902 materials. To quantify the materials, researchers used Berkeley Lab’s Materials Project, a large and open database of known and predicted materials. The open and Web-based database has calculated the properties ... » read more

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