Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 7


Crumpled graphene MIT researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding together layers of the 2D form of carbon — can yield properties that could be useful for creating extremely stretchable supercapacitors to store energy for flexible electronic devices, such as wearable or implantable biomedical sensors. The team said the new, fl... » read more

Grappling With Graphene


By Brian Fuller Silicon CMOS is a tough act to follow. The workhorse building block for the world’s electronics has been delivering for system designers for a half century. Despite hand-wringing over its apparent scalability limits, it shows only vague signs of slowing down. For nearly as many years, it seems, the next great material or alternative to silicon CMOS has popped into the indu... » read more

Making Batteries Better


By Brian Fuller The world has changed dramatically in the 209 years since Alessandro Volta hunched over his table by candlelight and figured out how to capture energy in his voltaic pile, the first electric battery. What has changed little, however, is the battery itself. Since Volta’s conception, the battery has remained a cell with negative and positive electrodes, an electrolyte, and... » read more