System Bits: May 27


Making sheets of grapheme more easily Graphene’s promise as a material for new kinds of electronic devices, among other uses, has led researchers around the world to study the material in search of new applications but one of the biggest limitations to wider use of the strong, lightweight, highly conductive material has been the hurdle of fabrication on an industrial scale. Initial work w... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 20


Visualizing complex electronic states While producing the first detailed visualization — down to the level of individual atoms — of exactly how a material called sodium manganese dioxide that has shown promise for use in electrodes in rechargeable batteries behaves during charging and discharging, a team of researchers led by MIT has explained an exotic molecular state that may help in und... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 13


More electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today’s solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current but in a few materials, extra energy produces extra electrons. According to researchers at MIT, this behavior could significantly increase solar-cell efficiency. The team has identified the mechanism by which the phenomenon ... » read more

System Bits: May 6


Nonlinear optical resonance The drive to develop ultrasmall and ultrafast electronic devices using a single atomic layer of semiconductors, such as transition metal dichalcogenides, has received a significant boost. Researchers with Berkeley Lab have recorded the first observations of a strong nonlinear optical resonance along the edges of a single layer of molybdenum disulfide. The existence ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 6


Litho beam startup A startup has developed a new beam technology for advanced lithography applications. The company, called Digibeam, has demonstrated the ability to shoot a particle beam through a slow wave RF structure to create a train of compressed beam packets for high-throughput lithography. “Synchronized with high-speed deflection, the core technology enables shot rates well into t... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 22


Detecting counterfeit goods Rare earths are chemical elements found in the Earth’s crust. They are critical for use in the production of cars, consumer electronics, computers, communications, clean energy, health care, national defense systems and others. Researchers are looking for new ways to integrate rare earths into potential chips and other applications. For example, the Massachuset... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 15


Smaller is not always better While Moore’s Law-esque shrinking has allowed for economies of scale in many industries, when it comes to nanomedicine, however, smaller is not always better, according to researchers at UCLA. They have determined that the diminutive size of nanowire-based biosensors -- that healthcare workers use to detect proteins that mark the onset of heart failure, cancer an... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 8


Spit power According to researchers at Penn State who’ve created a saliva-powered micro-sized microbial fuel cell, their invention can produce minute amounts of energy sufficient to run on-chip applications. Researcher Justine E. Mink has been credited with the idea as she was thinking about sensors for such things as glucose monitoring for diabetics and wondered if a mini microbial fuel ... » read more

System Bits: April 1


“Lock-free” vs. “wait-free” parallel algorithms Since computer chips have stopped getting faster, regular performance improvements are now the result of chipmakers’ adding more cores to their chips, rather than increasing their clock speed. And in theory, doubling the number of cores doubles the chip’s efficiency, but splitting up computations so that they run efficiently in parall... » 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

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