Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 19


Flexible energy harvesting rectenna Researchers from MIT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University Carlos III of Madrid, Boston University, University of Southern California, and the Army Research Laboratory created a flexible rectenna capable of converting energy from Wi-Fi signals into electricity to power small devices and sensors. The device uses a flexible RF antenna to capture e... » read more

Five DAC Keynotes


The ending of Moore's Law may be about to create a new golden age for design, especially one fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning. But design will become task-, application- and domain-specific, and will require that we think about the lifecycle of the products in a different way. In the future, we also will have to design for augmentation of experience, not just automation... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 25


Metrology for the intelligence community The semiconductor industry continues to move full speed ahead with traditional chip scaling. There are several challenges in the arena. One of the big but lessor known challenges is metrology. Metrology, the science of characterizing and measuring films and structures, is becoming more complex, challenging and expensive at each node. Looking to solv... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 28


Power converter for IoT At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, researchers from MIT presented a new power converter that is efficient at a wide range of currents, which could be a boon for IoT sensors that have variable power requirements. The device maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 200,000-fold increase in... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Sept. 6


DARPA ALD The University of Colorado at Boulder has developed an atomic layer deposition (ALD) technology that can be performed at room temperatures. The technology, dubbed electron-enhanced ALD (EE-ALD), has been developed as part of the Local Control of Materials Synthesis (LoCo) program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The LoCo program is developing tech... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 26


Precisely controlling graphene molecules Researchers at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute have found that in the same way gardeners may use sheets of plastic with strategically placed holes to allow plants to grow but keep weeds from taking root, the same basic approach can be applied in terms of placing molecules in the specific patterns they need within tiny nanoelectronic devices, w... » 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

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 27


Growing tubes Single-wall carbon nanotubes could one day be used in electronics, optoelectronics, biomedical imaging and other applications. But the synthesis of nanotubes with defined chiralities has been a stumbling block. A chiral molecule is a molecule that has a non-superposable mirror image. The University of Southern California has shown that chirality-pure short nanotubes can be use... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 6


Printing Ears Engineered cartilage is an option for auricular reconstruction. Enabling the development of engineered cartilage, Massachusetts General Hospital has fabricated a bioartificial ear using a 3D printer technology. The ear looks and mechanically behaves like a human one. Researchers used a titanium wire framework within a composite collagen ear-shaped scaffold to maintain the dime... » read more

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