Manufacturing Bits: April 8


Designing metamaterials Sandia National Laboratories has developed an inverse-design software technology that automates the design of optical metamaterials. Metamaterials are artificial materials containing arrays of metal nanostructures or mega-atoms. Some metamaterials are able to bend light around objects, rendering them invisible. But they only interact with light over a very narrow ran... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 11


Body heat harvesting Chemists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst developed a fabric that can harvest body heat to power small wearable electronics such as activity trackers. The device works on the thermoelectric effect created by body temperature and ambient cooler air. "What we have developed is a way to inexpensively vapor-print biocompatible, flexible and lightweight polymer fil... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 8


Ferrimagnetic memory Engineers at the National University of Singapore, Toyota Technological Institute, and Korea University propose a new type of spintronic memory that is 20 times more efficient and 10 times more stable than commercial ones. In spintronic devices, data is stored depending on up or down magnetic states. Current devices based on ferromagnets, however, suffer from a few issu... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 14


Strange metals The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) has unraveled the behavior in a new class of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) materials called cuprates. Cuprates are sometimes referred as a "strange" or "bad" metal. They don't conduct electricity well despite being a superconducting material. Superconductors are devices that have zero electrical resistance,... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Auto, Security


Executive Changes Rambus' board of directors named Luc Seraphin, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Memory and Interfaces Division, as interim CEO while it searches for a replacement for Ron Black. The board terminated Black this week, saying the reason for termination did not involve Rambus' financial and business performance. The company also named Mike Noonen as se... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Siemens acquired Austemper Design Systems, which provides tools for functional safety and safety-critical designs. Founded in 2015, Texas-based Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults, as well as correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 26


Long-range communication Researchers at the University of Washington developed devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers. The long-range backscatter system, which uses reflected radio signals to transmit data at extremely low power, achieved reliable coverage throughout 4800-square-foot house, an office area covering 41 rooms and a one-acr... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 22


Weighing protons The Max Planck Institute and Riken have conducted the world’s most precise measurement of the mass of a proton. Based on an experiment, researchers determined that the mass of a proton is 1.007276466583(15)(29) atomic mass units. This is three times more precise than the previous measurements from others. The numbers in parentheses refer to the statistical and systematic ... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 7


Large scale quantum computer blueprint An international team comprised of researchers from the University of Sussex, Google, Aarhus University, RIKEN, and Siegen University recently unveiled what they say is the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer. The team asserted that once built, the computer would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create n... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 24


Trapping antimatter Japan’s Riken has conducted measurements in order to discover the differences between matter and antimatter, namely in the complex field of antiprotons. Antimatter is a material composed of antiparticles, according to Wikipedia. Antimatter has the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but it has an opposite charge, according to Wikipedia. Basically, neutron... » read more

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