Research Bits: March 26


Skyrmion switches Researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and National University of Singapore harnessed skyrmions to build a switch that has the potential to process data faster while using significantly less energy. Skyrmions are magnetic whirls that form in very thin metal layers and can be efficiently moved between magnetic regions. Using a magnetic tun... » read more

Research Bits: Nov. 29


Earth-bound, more accurate GPS A new idea for terrestrial-based global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that uses very accurate national atomic clocks on the ground may help self-driving cars in urban environments get where they are going. Researchers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and VSL have prototyped a hybrid optical–wireless mobile netw... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 10


Fast-moving magnetic particles for data storage According to MIT researchers, an exotic kind of magnetic behavior discovered just a few years ago holds great promise as a way of storing data — one that could overcome fundamental limits that might otherwise be signaling the end of Moore’s Law. Rather than reading and writing data one bit at a time by changing the orientation of magnetize... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 13


Cooling down FPGAs Georgia Institute of Technology researchers found a way to put liquid cooling a few hundred microns away from where the transistors are operating by cutting microfluidic passages directly into the backsides of production FPGAs. The research, backed by DARPA, is believed to be the first example of liquid cooling directly on an operating high-performance CMOS chip. To ... » read more