System Bits: March 4


Self-completing programs Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch -- which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code – and then automatically fills in the gaps. If it’s fleshed out and ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 14


MoS2 FETs Two-dimensional materials are gaining steam in the R&D labs. The 2D materials include graphene, boron nitride (BN) and the transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). One TMD, molybdenum diselenide (MoS2), is an attractive material for use in future field-effect transistors (FETs). MoS2 has several properties, including a non-zero band gap, atomic scale thickness and pristine int... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 14


Fastest organic transistor Research teams from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Stanford University have worked together to produce what they believe are the world’s fastest thin-film organic transistors, proving that this experimental technology has the potential to achieve the performance needed for high-resolution television screens and similar electronic devices. The researchers sa... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 17


Low-power tunneling transistor to enable high-performance devices To make fast and low-power computing devices possible for energy-constrained applications such as smart sensor networks, implantable medical electronics and ultra-mobile computing, a new type of transistor is needed. To this end, researchers at Penn State, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and specialty wafer fo... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 10


Lasers From Nano Wires A few weeks ago, Semiconductor Engineering published a special report about silicon photonics and concentrated on the integration of the laser onto the silicon surface. Growing III-V materials on silicon is problematic because of the lattice mismatch, but researchers at the Technische Universität München (TUM) may have found a way around that problem. Thread-like semic... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 22


Thermal emitter improves solar cell efficiency Stanford University scientists have created a heat-resistant thermal emitter -- an element used in specialized solar cells -- that could significantly improve the efficiency of the cells. The heat-resistant thermal emitter is designed to convert heat from the sun into infrared light that can be absorbed by solar cells to make electricity – a tec... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 8


The next big thing in particle accelerators Stanford University engineers have helped create what may be the next big thing in particle accelerators – and it fits on a fingertip. In a project that included scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a linear accelerator two miles long, accelerators energized charged particles to accomplish a ran... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 24


Generating electricity from sewage Stanford University researchers have come up with a new way to generate electricity from sewage using naturally-occurring “wired microbes” as mini power plants, producing electricity as they digest plant and animal waste. Calling their invention a ‘microbial battery,’ the researchers hope one day it will be used in places such as sewage treatment p... » read more

What’s After 3D NAND?


By Mark LaPedus Planar NAND flash memory is on its last scaling legs, with 3D NAND set to become the successor to the ubiquitous 2D technology. Samsung Electronics, for one, already has begun shipping the industry’s first 3D NAND device, a 24-level, 128-gigabit chip. In addition, Micron and SK Hynix shortly will ship their respective 3D NAND devices. But the Toshiba-SanDisk duo are the lo... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 10


Using DNA to assemble transistors from graphene Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arrayed in a honeycomb pattern, just a single atom thick. It could be a better semiconductor than silicon – if we could fashion it into ribbons 20 to 50 atoms wide. Could DNA help? Stanford chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao, believes it could. Bao and her team of researchers hope to solve a problem... » read more

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