Power/Performance Bits: April 12


Digital storage in DNA Computer scientists and electrical engineers from University of Washington and Microsoft detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies. Progress in DNA storage has been rapid: in 1999, the state-of-the-art in DN... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 29


Photonic-phononic circuit Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a piezo-optomechanical circuit that converts signals among optical, acoustic and radio waves. At the heart of the piezoelectric optomechanical circuit is an optomechanical cavity, which consists of a suspended nanoscale beam. Within the beam are a series of holes that act like a ha... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers In a blog, GlobalFoundries discussed the global push towards 5G or fifth-generation wireless networks. Samsung Electronics Australia has announced the creation of brainBAND, a wearable technology designed to facilitate research into concussions in sports. In the prototype, a headband houses sensors at the back of the head that measure the force of an impact. This information wou... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 1


Low power Wi-Fi Computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington came up with a way to generate Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods and which consumes 1,000 times less power than existing energy-efficient wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee. The system, Passive Wi-Fi, uses backscatte... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 26


New switchable material Two MIT researchers developed a thin-film material whose phase and electrical properties can be switched between metallic and semiconducting simply by applying a small voltage. The material then stays in its new configuration until switched back by another voltage. The discovery could pave the way for a new kind of nonvolatile memory. The findings involve the thin-... » read more

The Internet Of Power Also Benefits From Moore’s Law


By Jef Poortmans It may sound strange, but striving to achieve smaller dimensions with Moore’s Law is an important enabler for producing increasingly better solar cells, with a more elaborate technology toolbox (including ALD, epitaxy, etc.) Improved process steps are constantly being developed to achieve these small transistor dimensions (for growing material layers or to etch away str... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 23


GaN building blocks A team of engineers from Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, and the semiconductor company IQE created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches. In spite of having many desirable features as a material, GaN is notorious for its defects and reliability issues. So the team zeroed in on device... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 1


Hiding wires from the sun There's a problem with most solar cells: the electricity-carrying metal wire grid on top prevents sunlight from reaching the semiconductor below. A team from Stanford University tackled this problem, discovering a way to hide the reflective upper contact and funnel light directly to the semiconductor below. For the study, the researchers placed a 16-nanometer-thi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 17


Speeding up optical networks A tunable filter for high-capacity optical networks that can be integrated onto a photonic chip has been designed by researchers at the Université Laval in Québec, Canada. The device's performance is comparable to the best bench-top systems, according to the reasearchers, but at a fraction of the size and cost. The filter's tuning span, which is a measure of... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 10


Singing to your storage Existing research on 'racetrack memory', which uses tiny magnetic wires, each one hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, down which magnetic bits of data run like racing cars around a track, has focused on using either magnetic fields or electric currents to move the data bits down the wires. However, both these options create heat and reduce power efficiency. ... » read more

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