This can lead the way to tiny, solar-powered sensors. The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards he Internet of thingsthe idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment,
and even livestock would have embedded their own sensors that report information directly to networked servers,
however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.
this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.
All of those operations also share a single inductor the chip main electrical component which saves on circuit board space
Nonetheless, the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,
and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best.
The prototype chip was manufactured through the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company University Shuttle Program. Ups and downs The circuit chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery,
To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan,
the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical engineering, use an inductor, which is a wire wound into a coil.
When a current passes through an inductor, it generates a magnetic field, which in turn resists any change in the current.
Throwing switches in the inductor path causes it to alternately charge and discharge, so that the current flowing through it continuously ramps up
however, the switches in the inductor path need to be thrown immediately; otherwise, current could begin to flow through the circuit in the wrong direction,
El-Damak and Chandrakasan use an electrical component called a capacitor, which can store electrical charge.
The higher the current, the more rapidly the capacitor fills. When it full, the circuit stops charging the inductor.
The rate at which the current drops off however, depends on the output voltage, whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip.
Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance.
El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes.
As the current drops, it charges a subset of those capacitors, whose selection is determined by the solar cell voltage.
Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor path are flipped. n this technology space,
there usually a trend to lower efficiency as the power gets lower, because there a fixed amount of energy that consumed by doing the work,
who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at the chip manufacturer Maxim Integrated. f youe only coming in with a small amount,
he adds. t really kind of a full system-on-a chip for power management. And that makes it a little more complicated
and electron those reaching the detectors simultaneously are very likely to have come from the same molecule.
and trees when under stress and detectors to identify concentrations in air samples could be used to monitor our changing ecology.
and still be deciphered accurately by a receiver. This advance has the potential to increase the data transmission rates for the fiber optic cables that serve as the backbone of the internet, cable wireless and landline networks.
said Nikola Alic, a research scientist from the Qualcomm Institute, the corresponding author on the Science paper and a principal of the experimental effort.
the researchers at UC San diego successfully deciphered information after it traveled a record-breaking 12,000 kilometers through fiber optic cables with standard amplifiers and no repeaters,
so the receiver is caused free of crosstalk by the Kerr effect. The photonics experiments were performed at UC San diego Qualcomm Institute by researchers from the Photonics Systems Group led by Radic.
Pitch Perfect Data transmission The UC San diego researchersapproach is akin to a concert master who tunes multiple instruments in an orchestra to the same pitch at the beginning of a concert.
The frequency comb ensured that the system did not accumulate the random distortions that make it impossible to reassemble the original content at the receiver.
said Bill Kuo, a research scientist at the Qualcomm Institute, who was responsible for the comb development in the group.
using tiny semiconductor nanoparticles called quantum dots. Such devices could be used to diagnose diseases, especially skin conditions,
and the reaction time, scientists can generate a nearly unlimited number of dots with differences in an electronic property known as bandgap,
and Bao showed a beautiful way to exploit the controlled optical absorption of semiconductor quantum dots for miniature spectrometers.
#Niobium Nanowire Yarns Make High-performance Supercapacitors Using yarns made from niobium nanowire, researchers at MIT have developed a new approach to making supercapacitors.
Wearable electronic devices for health and fitness monitoring are a rapidly growing area of consumer electronics; one of their biggest limitations is the capacity of their tiny batteries to deliver enough power to transmit data.
Now, researchers at MIT and in Canada have found a promising new approach to delivering the short
The key is a new approach to making supercapacitors devices that can store and release electrical power in such bursts,
as the electrodes in tiny supercapacitors (which are essentially pairs of electrically conducting fibers with an insulator between).
Nanotechnology researchers have been working to increase the performance of supercapacitors for the past decade. Among nanomaterials, carbon-based nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes and graphene have shown promising results,
At the moment, the coin-sized batteries used in many small electronic devices have limited very ability to deliver a lot of power at once,
So an alternative is to go to a combination of a battery and a capacitor, Hunter says:
and the capacitor for short bursts of high power. Such a combination should be able to either increase the range of the device,
The new nanowire-based supercapacitor exceeds the performance of existing batteries, while occupying a very small volume. f youe got an Apple Watch and
Other groups have made similar supercapacitors using carbon nanotubes or other materials, but the niobium yarns are stronger and 100 times more conductive.
Overall, niobium-based supercapacitors can store up to five times as much power in a given volume as carbon nanotube versions.
onvincingly demonstrates the impressive performance of niobium-based fiber supercapacitors. The team also included Phd student Mehr Negar Mirvakili and professors Peter Englezos and John Madden, all from the University of British columbia s
and challenging to make autonomous because most motors, pumps, batteries, sensors, and microcontrollers are rigid.
But what if you could combine the autonomy and speed of a rigid robot with the adaptability and resiliency of a soft robot
The robot body transitions from soft to hard, reducing the stress where the rigid electronic components join the body
our soft robots typically have some rigid components things like batteries and control electronics. This robot is a demonstration of a method to integrate the rigid components with the body of the soft robot through a gradient of material properties
and the excellent precision of our detector, we have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states says LHCB physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University. ore precisely the states must be formed of two up quarks,
In the new study, King and his colleagues report that treatment with the drug led to dramatic improvement in six patients with moderate to severe eczema who had tried previously conventional therapies without success. During treatment all six
Council Lead Partner Qualcomm is helping to change that. Pick 100 Kenyans at random, and odds are at least six of them are infected with HIV.
A connection that saves lives Qualcomm is changing that by providing something that you won find in a typical medical bag:
Before Qualcomm stepped in, all of that work was done manually on paper. If a report was lost or delayed,
And the project in Kenya is just one of those that Qualcomm has been involved with to bring wireless services to remote communities around the world.
Its effort is called Qualcomm Wireless Reach and so far has touched 40 countries through more than 100 projects.
Microsoft, andcisco and Associate Partner Siemens have been working with Chinese companies on national information security as well as technologies
A wireless transmitter on the robot sends camera video and sensor data such as the unit's speed,
For its guidance system, the Trakür employs sensors that allow it to follow a 1 mm copper cable,
not including the robot's chassis, motor, pump and electronics.""Purchased abroad, it very likely that would cost you some $20, 000 all told.
and to encourage proposals for demonstrations of advanced, high-bandwidth applications. With all the resources marshaled behind U s. Ignite,
to commodity items such as consumer electronics technologies, said Jordan Socran, vice president of business development. There are even technologies emerging to help small local businesses.
and we'll cool planet Siemens: 880m euros'worth of wind power orders since July Google invests $75 million in U s. wind far r
The rise of sensors: Information technology is at the heart of successful share models, and sensors are a critical part of that mix
because they allow us to track and know where physical things are --or will be given--at a moment in time.
The idea of wireless charging is tantalizing--a vision of electronic devices that stay powered up without wall sockets,
A few examples include the Lumia smartphone from Nokia, the Nexus 4 from LG Electronics, and the Droid DNA from Verizon Wireless and HTC.
WPC has nearly 150 member companies including major mobile phone manufacturers and semiconductor companies. The consortium introduced the Qi inductive power standard in late 2010,
along with Samsung, Qualcomm and more; and the Power Matters Alliance, which is supported by Powermat as well,
-or solar-powered sensors that are distributed in a greenhouse or field. These sensors connect to backend servers that process the data collected,
and the information is displayed as requested by the customer. So, for example, a farmer could monitor conditions for his
a former electronics engineer with IBM and Sun who got the idea for a water-monitoring system
as it is equipped with an infrared video camera. This could apply to assisting humans in search and rescue--or for military combat awareness.
#A Tunable Liquid Metal Antennas for Tuning in to Anything Tuning in is getting to be complicated a thing.
All those need antennas of different lengths and shapes to accommodate the sometimes widely spread wavelength bands.
Monopole antennas, consisting of a single conducting rod, transmit maximum power when their length corresponds to half the wavelength of the RF signal,
"The present solution is to have a switchable filter bank along with switchable and/or multi-band antenna, ays Jacob Adams,
a liquid metal antenna that can continuously adapt to different wavelengths by changing its length inside a capillary.
Such antennas have been developed in the past but with little success because they rely on pneumatic pumps for controlling the length in the capillary,
making integration into electronics difficult. Instead of external pumps, the NC State researchers used a voltage to control the amount of liquid metal allowed to flow into a capillary.
For centimeter-wavelengths, liquid metal antennas would remain separate elements in the circuitry, but for millimeter waves they could be integrated on microfluidic chips,
says Adams. However even larger liquid metal antennas could be useful in defense communications and radar systems that use bands ranging from a few megahertz to tens of gigahertz,
says Adams."While a single tunable element will probably never be able to cover this entire range,
they could potentially cut down on the'antenna farms'found on large defense platforms, such as on ships and planes,"says Adams
These report blood glucose levels every 5 minutes, thanks to a small radio transmitter attached to a fine sensor wire that runs under the skin (the wire is replaced weekly, the transmitter every six months.
The receiver costs US $400, and it another $400 for each transmitter. Sensor wires cost $99.
We were no longer flying blind between finger checks. We could merge the data from the G4 with reams of nutrition data we had been collecting
and thus fine-tune Evan insulin dosing. But dropping Evan off at day care triggered a wave of panic:
but I knew that the Dexcom G4 receiver could furnish glucose data via its USB port.
It took about 3 hours to code A c#program that polled the receiver and uploaded the data to a Google spreadsheet.
We sent Evan to day care with a small laptop equipped with the receiver. While he was in his classroom,
or long walks, putting him out of range of the laptop receiver, we were blind again.
but power limitations and closed frameworks made hooking up the receiver to an iphone far more difficult than to an Android phone.
and once I had the basic USB enumeration downo my phone could eethe receiver when it was plugged in started decoding the G4 communication protocol.
and captured the USB traffic as it flowed between my computer and the receiver. With this data,
But researchers are now working on more affordable, crowdsourced warning systems based on low-cost sensors and cellphone electronics.
extremely sensitive seismic sensors that detect energy waves, along with GPS sensors to detect permanent ground movement due to the motion of the geological fault that triggers the earthquake.
Battalgazi Yildirim, founder of Zizmos, based in Palo alto, Calif.,thinks he can get as goodr in some cases even betterarthquake data from a network of cheap sensor packages.
These are made up of microelectromechanical accelerometers attached to inexpensive off-the-shelf cellphone equipment that manages data gathering
and communication. he sensor packages used by the USGS cost about US $30, 000 each,
he says. ee putting out sensors that cost $100 each to build. The network should have virtually no installation or maintenance costs,
because Yildirim plans to rely on the kindness of the crowd. Zizmos asks for volunteers to donate a tiny bit of interior wall space
and a power outlet to host a sensor package, which is about the size of a deck of cards.
involving 268 sensors distributed in California. When a sensor detects a rumble, it will send information about the time of the event and the magnitude of the shaking to a cloud-based server;
algorithms will check reports from neighboring sensors to determine whether the vibration was localay, from a truck going byr felt elsewhere.
If the latter, the system will calculate a hypothetical epicenter for the earthquake, the original time of the event,
Why not tap into the GPS sensors in people phones and navigation systems, he says. GPS-equipped cellphones are ubiquitous in developing countries,
Both GPS sensors picked up the smallest motion. Next, the researchers performed simulations using data from a hypothetical magnitude-7 earthquake in northern California and from the real 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake that hit Tohoku-oki
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, Fraunhofer IIS (Institute for Integrated circuits) demonstrated a system based on a combination of powerful standard algorithms that can encode
but it fit the limited bandwidth of old analog copper phone lines. In 1988, the International Telecommunication Union approved the G. 722 standard for HD Voice,
The broader bandwidth of the Internet allowed Skype and some other Voip services to carry 7, 000-Hz HD Voice,
To verify performance of the codec and its loss tolerance, Fraunhofer IIS and 11 partnersncluding Ericsson, Huawei, Qualcomm,
Full-HD Voice quality was possible even at data rates as low as 9. 6 kb/s. The processing power of modern smartphone chips is a key enabler for the new codecs.
They can be implemented in digital signal processing chips as the 7 000-Hz codecs in 4g smartphones are,
but be sure to use good headphones in a quiet environment. Stern compares the difference to the shift from standard resolution to HD television. t going to be subtle, not a huge difference in intelligibility,
#Knitted Supercapacitors to Power Smart Shirts Researchers from Drexel University in collaboration with the U s. Naval academy, have invented a way to embed activated carbon particles into different types of yarn to form a knitted textile that can store
energy to power sensors and electronics integrated into smart clothing. Smart fabrics, which incorporate different types of sensors into garments,
have been in development for decades. However, only in recent years have started we seeing the first consumer smart garments reaching the market,
including biometric smartwear that can monitor an athlete's health (like the ones made by Hexoskin,
Last year teams from China and the United states demonstrated a fiber-like supercapacitor made from both graphene
At the time these fibers were said to obtain the highest volumetric energy density reported for carbon-based microscale supercapacitors (6. 3 microwatt-hours per cubic millimeter,
including diverse types of knitted sensors and low energy communication devices o
#Molecular electronics Takes Large Stride Forward Molecular electronics has promised long a day when individual molecules would serve as the basic building blocks for electronics.
That day has moved a bit closer thanks to research out of the Columbia University School of engineering and Applied science.
Researchers there have developed a new technique that makes it possible to produce a diode from a single molecule.
In research published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers claim that they have not only produced a single-molecule diode,
but that it greatly outperforms all previous designs. ur new approach created a single-molecule diode that has a high rectification and a high ncurrent,
ever since its inception with Aviram and Ratner's 1974 seminal paper, represents the ultimate in functional miniaturization that can be achieved for an electronic device."
"Diodes are key elements in integrated circuits. They are two-terminal components with asymmetric conductance, which means that they keep current passing in only one direction.
Molecule-scale diodesabricated by attaching molecules to metal electrodes to form single-molecule junctions that serve as a host of different circuit elementsave been tried before.
But previous attempts, in which researchers looked to achieve asymmetric conductance by making the diodes asymmetric in design,
have been less than satisfactory. hile such asymmetric molecules do indeed display some diode-like properties, they are explained not effective
A well-designed diode should only allow current to flow in one directionhe ndirectionnd it should allow a lot of current to flow in that direction.
To overcome this poor current flow in single-molecule diodes, the Columbia researchers, in cooperation with colleagues at the University of California Berkeley, looked at putting the asymmetry in the area around the molecular junctionhere the molecule meets the metal electrode.
To do this they simply covered the molecules with an ionic solution and then attached them to gold metal electrodes of differing sizes.
The results were impressive. As Venkataraman pointed out in the press release, the rectification ratios resulting from the new design are as high as 250,
which is notably high for a single-molecule diode, according to Venkataraman. t amazing to be able to design a molecular circuit,
It links data from an implanted blood-sugar sensor to a computer, which then controls how a pump worn on the hip dribbles insulin under the skin through a pipette.
A slew of improvements in sensors, actuators, algorithms, and insulin are coming together to create the artificial pancreas.
and engineers. e used a Dexcom continuous glucose sensor, hooked through a cellphone with an algorithm and to a Roche pump, linked to it by a Bluetooth signal,
but with some help from a Dexcom glucose sensor that he applies to his upper arm,
now that improved coatings and other engineering details have allowed patients to keep their superthin electrochemical sensors under the skin for seven days. e had this one in for eight,
Pumps clog, algorithms misfire, sensors get walled off by scar tissue. Some of the recent technical advances are proprietary and still under wraps,
and Dexcom have developed biocompatible coatings as well as sensors with multiple electrochemical sites that can be polled to see which ones no longer work properly.
Glucose sensors typically show you where your blood sugar was 10 minutes ago, but because they also track changes over time,
Besides the sensor and the pump are the algorithms, the secret sauce that allows the artificial pancreas to analyze,
#Green Microchips Created on Cellulose Nanofibril Paper In September 2007, while leafing through his copy of IEEE Spectrum, Zhenqiang"Jack"Ma, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research focus is microwave electronics,
came across a news item that left him baffled: was shocked by the number of cell phones that are discarded daily in the U s
each cell phone contains chips made of poisonous gallium arsenide (Gaas. In the 26 may issue of Nature Communications, Ma and his colleague, materials scientist Shaoqin arahgong, plus collaborators at UW-Madison and the Madison-based U s. Dept of agriculture Forest Products
Laboratory (FPL) published research describing a technique for making biodegradable semiconductor chips out of wood.
What more, they demonstrated that microwave transmitter and receiver chips made this way perform as well as their silicon or Gaas counterparts. ctually,
our work was inspired by the IEEE Spectrum article, says Ma. Unlike the silicon, Gaas, and petroleum-based plastic substrates that are used in electronicsnd are not biodgradablehe substrate for Ma
and company"green"chips is made of a type of paper. But unlike paper which typically consists of wood fibers 10 micrometers thick
To create the green chips, the researchers started out with silicon or Gaas devices sitting atop substrates made of the same material.
the researchers created several microwave Gaas devices, such as arrays of Gainp/Gaas heterojunction bipolar transistors, as well as circuits containing capacitors, RF inductors and Schottky diodes.
The performance of these flexible devices is exactly the same as that of rigid circuits
Using paper substrates would allow a reduction in the amount of Gaas used in chips by a factor of 3000,
which would make chips conform to the pollution standards for arsenic set by the U s. Environmental protection agency.
such as gallium arsenide and highly purified silicon, that are packed into electronic gadgets.""What we are looking at are future applications,
The paper includes a market survey comparing today's production of rigid electronics with the projected flexible electronics production.
The volume of flexible electronics is expected to largely exceed rigid electronics. e
#Graphene Heating system Dramatically Reduces Home energy Costs Breakthroughs in energy generation using nanomaterialsike their enabling of better supercapacitors
or photovoltaicsften grab the headlines. But it is unheralded in the area of energy savings that nanomaterials are perhaps making the biggest inroads.
and that led us to evaluate a wide range of heating materials and systems before we finally arrived at graphene. o meet the company third criteria,
Now researchers at Columbia University from James Hone lab, in cooperation with a team at Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), have taken this huge step forward by creating the first on-chip incandescent visible light source
in a press release. his new type of'broadband'light emitter can be integrated into chips and will pave the way towards the realization of atomically thin, flexible,
and graphene-based on-chip optical communications. n work published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology researchers suspended graphene above a silicon substrate by attaching it to two metal electrodes
The aim of creating integrated circuits that use photons rather than electrons sometimes called integrated photonic circuits,
depends on being able to generate light on the chip itself. While a number of approaches have been developed for generating this light,
and often led to damaging the surrounding chip. But graphene makes all the difference. The international team demonstrated heating the graphene-based filament to 2500 Degree celsius,
Graphene unusual heat conduction was key to keeping the light emitter from destroying the chip it was built on.
each with 96 electrodes that could record the electrical activity of single neurons. The grids linked to two metal edestalsthat jutted out of Sorto skull.
From the population of neurons tapped by those electrodes, the researchers could distinguish cells whose activity coded for the location that Sorto wanted to reach, movement trajectories,
because the electrodes shifted slightly within Sorto head and picked up different neurons. ur decoding algorithms took that into account,
If a given electrode was no longer contributing useful information to the decoding of a goal location
More than two years after his surgery, his electrodes are still functioning and his enthusiasm is undimmed.
a dimension easily achievable by the photolithography processes used for making computer chips. But Kante points out that microwave cloaks could be useful for the military,
For instance, it could shield antennas in cell towers from each other, lowering crosstalk. Or it could make better solar concentrators,
In 2014, General electric signed an exclusive global licensing deal with Highview Power storage, a U k. startup that makes utility-scale liquid-air energy storage systems.
which predicts that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double about every two years, causing an exponential growth in performance.
John Gunnels, is that the pace of Moore Law has slowed. f you can shrink these chips at the rate you were shrinking them before,
The semiconductor industry seems to be reaching the limits of its ability to shrink chips using conventional chip technology.
IBM researchers are trying to prop up Moore law using silicon-germanium transistor channels in effort to create a 7-nanometer chip within the next four years.
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