Goals of Going Green


The chip industry is stepping up efforts to be seen as environmentally friendly, driven by growing pressure from customers and government regulations. Some manufacturers have been addressing sustainability challenges for more than a decade, but they are becoming more aggressive in their efforts, while others are joining them. A review of sustainability reports across the semiconductor indust... » read more

Photovoltaic Cell Harvests Energy After Sun Goes Down


New research paper "Nighttime electric power generation at a density of 50 mW/m2 via radiative cooling of a photovoltaic cell" from Stanford, supported by U.S. Department of Energy and the Strategic Energy Alliance program at Stanford University. Abstract: "A large fraction of the world's population lacks access to the electric grid. Standard photovoltaic (PV) cells can provide a renewabl... » read more

A freeze-thaw molten salt battery for seasonal storage


New research paper from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Abstract "Grid-level storage of seasonal excess can be an important asset to renewable electricity. By applying the freeze-thaw thermal cycling strategy, here, we report Al-Ni molten salt batteries with effective capacity recovery over 90% after a period of 1–8 weeks as a proof-of-concept. We explore three activation methods... » read more

Where Do The Chips Fall In The Energy Transformation?


The energy industry is in the first stages of a once-in-a-century transformation. And one of the most important aspects of this shift is that EVs, solar farms grid equipment, and appliances will inherently rely more on digital technologies. As Hamed Heyhat, General Manager of Grid Automation at General Electric, says, “Decarbonization cannot happen without digitization of the grid.” So h... » read more

A Novel Fundamental Frequency Switching Operation for Conventional VSI to Enable Single-Stage High-Gain Boost Inversion with ANN Tuned QWS Controller


Abstract "Single-stage high-gain inverters have recently gained much research focus as interfaces for inherent low voltage DC sources such as fuel cells, storage batteries, and solar panels. Many impedance-assisted inverters with different input stage configurations have been presented. To decrease passive component sizes, these inverters operate at high-frequency switching. The high-frequency... » read more

System Bits: March 26


Swear to tell the truth Lots of lies are told on the Internet. Shuyuan Ho of Florida State University wants to unveil those falsehoods with an online polygraph. “The future of my research is an online polygraph that could be used many different ways,” said Ho, an associate professor in the College of Communication and Information. “You could use it for online dating, Facebook, Twitter... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 19


Atomic storage In the search for ever-smaller storage, a team of scientists at Delft University in the Netherlands built a 1 kilobyte memory where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom. "In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp," said lead scientist Sander Otte. They reached a storage de... » read more

The Power Of Low Power


In the United States, new rules that cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025, and 35.5 mpg by 2016, suddenly seem very achievable. In fact, some cars in development are reporting close to an equivalent of nearly 100 mpg, and the numbers are likely to go well into the triple digits. The same kinds of results are showing up in handheld mobile devices, which now have th... » read more