System Bits: April 15


Making game play more engaging Engineers at Stanford University have developed what could be the next big thing in interactive gaming: handheld game controllers that measure the player's physiology and alter the game play to make it more engaging. The prototype controller was born from research conducted in the lab of Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in collab... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 8


Making cheap diamonds Graphite and diamonds are two forms of the same element--carbon. In graphite, carbon atoms are arranged in planar sheets and the material is soft. On the other hand, diamonds consist of carbon atoms that are bonded in all directions, making these structures extremely hard. [caption id="attachment_11311" align="alignleft" width="150"] This illustration shows four layers... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 25


Proving the Big Bang theory A team of cosmologists using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole have discovered the first direct evidence of the Big Bang theory. The team includes Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University/SLAC and others. Using the BICEP2, researchers found direct evidence of a cosm... » read more

System Bits: March 18


Bending light with a tiny chip Imagine your smartphone being able to project a bright, clear image from a presentation or a video onto a wall or a big screen – all made possible with a light-bending silicon chip developed by Caltech researchers. Traditional projectors pass a beam of light through a tiny image, using lenses to map each point of the small picture to corresponding, yet expan... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 17


Implantable TFETs At the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Washington, D.C., a number of companies, R&D organizations and universities described new breakthroughs in perhaps the next big thing in semiconductors--the tunnel field-effect transistor (TFET). Aimed for the 5nm node, TFETs are steep sub-threshold slope transistors that can scale the supply voltages bel... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 5


Silicon Photonics And Graphene The industry is looking towards silicon photonics that will increase the rate at which electronic systems can communicate with each other and reduce power consumption. Researchers at MIT, Columbia University and IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center are already a few steps beyond the traditional attempts to build optical components using materials such as Gallium ... » read more

A Nobel Prize For Modeling And Simulation


This year, a Nobel Prize has been awarded for devising a computer model and simulation process. Bloomberg, which interviewed Marinda Wu by phone, said: “The models let us slow down…and let us look at them one piece at a time.” This enables them to optimize things. At this point you may be thinking one of three things. Either 1) I don’t remember that prize being awarded or, 2) at last ED... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 23


It was a good week for good questions. Cadence’s Brian Fuller asks what applications dream about—or rather what’s their potential. In the context of technology development, that’s worth pondering. Mentor’s Mike Jensen asks what will you be remembered for. There are a couple other important addendums to that, such as how long you will be remembered. And perhaps even more important, ... » read more

Stanford Photonics In 2013


Every September, the Stanford Photonics Research Center and their partners at Scottish Universities and in industry showcase the latest developments in laser applications at an on-campus symposium in Palo Alto, Calif. This year, highlights included remarkable developments in particle accelerators, pollution detection and bio-medicine and looked toward increased societal impact through the Ameri... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 1


First Computer Based On Carbon Nanotubes Pointing toward a new generation of energy-efficient electronics, a team of Stanford engineers has built a basic computer using carbon nanotubes (CNT), a semiconductor material that has the potential to launch a new generation of electronic devices that run faster, while using less energy, than those made from silicon chips. People have been talking ... » read more

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