System Bits: June 18


Another win for aUToronto Photo credit: University of Toronto The University of Toronto’s student-led self-driving car team racked up its second consecutive victory last month at the annual AutoDrive Challenge in Ann Arbor, Mich. The three-year challenge goes out to North American universities, offering a Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle to outfit with autonomous driving technology.... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 21


More speculative vulnerabilities Security researchers at the Graz University of Technology, KU Leuven, Cyberus Technology, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute point to two new speculative execution vulnerabilities related to Meltdown and Spectre. The first, which they dubbed ZombieLoad, uses a similar approach to Meltdown. After preparing tasks in parallel, the processor needs to discard th... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 30


Flexible nanogenerator acts as loudspeaker, microphone Engineers at Michigan State University developed a paper-thin, flexible ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG, that can both generate energy from human motion and act as a loudspeaker and microphone. "This is the first transducer that is ultrathin, flexible, scalable and bidirectional, meaning it can convert mechanical energy to electr... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 13


3D porous microsupercapacitors A research team from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) developed an integrated microsupercapacitor targeted at self-powered system applications where the power source may be intermittent, such as sensors for wearables, security, and structural health monitoring. The key to the microsupercapacitors is vertically-scaled three-dimen... » read more

Healthcare IoT: Promise And Peril


By Gale Morrison & Ed Sperling As more connectivity and communication capability is built into everyday healthcare and medical devices, engineers are tasked with ensuring these devices are both completely secure and ultra-reliable. Reliability generally is measured in mean time between failure (MTBF), but when it comes to safety-critical markets, that equation takes on a whole new... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 14


Photo-doping semiconductors Scientists at Michigan State University found that by shooting an ultrafast laser pulse into a semiconducting material, its properties would change as if it had been chemically doped, in a process known as photo-doping. "The material we studied is an unconventional semiconductor made of alternating atomically thin layers of metals and insulators," said Chong-Yu... » read more

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