#Compound discovery sets stage for speedier electronic devices A discovery at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids could pave the way for further leaps forward in the speed of electronic systems.
The material could find use in faster, higher-capacity hard drives and other electronic components. Electronic components such as hard disks typically use layers of different materials in filigree structure (tiny beads
and threads of metal soldered onto the surface) to exploit a phenomenon known as magnetoresistance to develop a high electric resistance,
The researchers believe that niobium phosphide has"enormous potential for future applications in information technology"not only in hard drives but also in many other electronic components that use magnetoresistance to function.
This unprecedentedly high graphene composition means that the oft-praised electric and mechanical properties of graphene might soon find their way into all kinds of macroscopic 3d printed creations, with important consequences for the electronics and biomedical fields (among many others.
paving the way for these materials to be used for biodegradable sensors and medical implants. But the applications of a highly-conductive graphene ink could be
just as exciting in building high-performance electronics. The study appears in the latest issue of the scientific journal ACS Nano.
along with cameras and sensors that monitor the plants bunches of basil (used to make Liguria's iconic pesto sauce) growing either in hydroponics or in soil.
with smartphones repurposed as blood-scanning microscopes, HIV testers and sleep apnea detectors. The latest advance in this area comes in the form of a fiber optic sensor for smartphones that monitors bodily fluids,
a tool that could be used for biomolecular tests such as pregnancy or diabetes monitoring. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is a process where a stream of light is directed onto a metallic film, with most,
The scientists fixed a 400 micrometer fiber optic cable curved into a U-shape across the phone's camera and LED light.
The team says the sensor's readings could then be processed by a smartphone application to turn out real-time results."
"So, surface plasmon resonance sensors could become ubiquitous now.""The research is published in the journal Optics Express.
Unlike previous designs, their hybrid tungsten trioxide/titanium dioxide (WO3/Tio2) photoelectrode can store electrons effectively for long periods of time,
According to the researchers, the vanadium flow battery works especially well with their hybrid electrode, allowing them to boost the electric current,
the scientists assembled a thin, flat rectangle-shaped transmitter. While their original power transmitting system employed two magnetic coils placed in parallel,
The results were published in last month's issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics,
There's also a built-in LCD screen that displays the current being delivered to a connected device.
An ultrasonic rear sensor provides a warning when cars approach from behind, both via the handlebars and the accompanying Mode:
and has added since a smartwatch extension. The new smartwatch app includes a"no sweat"mode,
which adjusts output of the bike's electric drive based upon the rider's watch-read heart rate,
#First 7nm node test chips developed IBM Research has created successfully the first 7nm node test chip with functioning transistors,
Developed in conjunction with Globalfoundries and Samsung, the new manufacturing technique has the potential to see a whopping 20 billion transistors packed into a chip the size of a fingernail.
In order to achieve this, the team used a number of nonconventional semiconductor manufacturing methods including the development of transistor channels made of silicon-germanium, or Sige
rather than pure silicon. Sige is suited better for smaller transistors because of the fact that it has higher electron mobility than pure silicon.
Basically, when pure silicon is used, the gap between silicon nuclei gets so small that silicon atoms cannot carry enough current.
These transistors are each only 7 nanometers wide that's about 1/10, 000th the width of a human hair and three times the width of a single strand of DNA.
The smallest transistors in use on chips today are 14 nm wide although 10 nm chips are in development by the likes of Intel and Samsung.
The team also used extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUVL, for etching. Current chips are etched using an argon fluoride laser,
which has a beam that is 193 nm wide. EUV beams are only 13.5 nm wide,
We probably won see any 7 nm chips on the market for at least a few years because of how expensive they are to produce,
and powered by a capacitor that is charged up before use. As the capsule makes its way through the body,
The findings were published in the journal Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Biomedical engineering.
#Quantum dots and perovskite combined to create new hyper-efficient light-emitting crystal Two optoelectronic materials getting a lot of press these days are perovskite and quantum dots.
In explaining the remarkable optoelectronic properties of these so-called"heterocrystals, "the team claims that this is due to the fact that photoelectrons
and holes generated in the larger bandgap of the perovskite are transferred with 80 percent efficiency to become excitons in the quantum dot nanocrystals.
The material could also form the basis of the basis for a new family of highly energy-efficient near-infrared LEDS,
and cellular-scale inorganic light-emitting diode(-ILED) arrays, allowing it to shine light on targeted cells.
Using an implantable glucose-monitoring sensor is one alternative, although it must be installed surgically and subsequently removed for replacement.
while researchers at Google, Fraunhofer and Microsoft are developing noninvasive sensors that measure glucose content in tears or sweat.
#New molecular transistor can control single electrons Researchers from Germany, Japan and the United states have managed to create a tiny,
reliable transistor assembled from a single molecule and a dozen additional atoms. The transistor reportedly operates so precisely that it can control the flow of single electrons,
paving the way for the next generation of nanomaterials and miniaturized electronics. For our electronics to become more powerful it's vital that the transistors,
the tiny switches that make them up, keep getting smaller and smaller. However, there is a limit to just how much the silicon-based transistors as we currently use can shrink.
A single silicon atom is about half a nanometer in size meaning that, in the current generation of electronics,
the terminals of the switch are separated only by around 30 atoms. Once that number drops to single digits these transistors will become inoperable as quantum mechanics starts getting in the way,
with electrons spontaneously jumping from one end of the switch to the other whether the switch is closed open
or. Tiny molecular transistors much smaller than the ones inside our computers (as small as two nanometers) have already been built,
but the issue that researchers now face is to find a way to control them in a reliable way.
This is not an easy feat as molecular transistors are often so small that their on/off state depends on the location of a single electron.
Now, an international team from Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI), the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL),
and the U s. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has built a molecular transistor that can reportedly be controlled precisely, in
what could mark an important step toward the advancement of miniaturized electronics. The transistors of today are built using a top-down approach where bulk silicon is gradually etched into the desired pattern.
A molecular transistor however, must be built from the bottom up, by assembling atoms one by one in a chemistry lab.
Although this may sound highly unusual and extremely laborious, it's also a very precise and reproducible process that has the potential to make the transistors of tomorrow highly reliable despite their incredibly small size.
Researchers Stefan Fölsch and team built their transistor using a highly stable scanning tunneling microscope (STM.
The device was assembled by taking a crystal of indium arsenide and placing 12 indium atoms laid out in a hexagonal shape on top of it, with a phthalocyanine molecule in the middle.
As the researchers explain, the central molecule is only weakly bound to the crystal surface beneath it,
The positively charged atoms around the molecule act as the gate of the transistor regulating the electron's flow and leading to a functioning and reliable molecular transistor.
One unusual fact observed was that the molecule orients itself in a different direction depending on its charge state and, in turn,
If exploited, this knowledge could help us build molecular nanostructures with a very precise control over single electrons, leading to new types of high-performance semiconductors and nanomaterials r
These LEDS are used also to light the exits of junctions and roundabouts. It's not just Ford working on safer lighting technology.
Mercedes'new E-Class will offer optional headlamps with 84 LEDS that allow full-beam to be used without blinding oncoming drivers,
and wirelessly transmitted to electrodes implanted onto the surface of the retina. Providing the implant works as intended,
#Silk-based functional inks put biosensor data on your fingertips Although we've seen"bio-inks"that allow sensors to be drawn directly on a person's skin
the other in 2014) that involved surgically implanting an electrode array on the spinal cord. This time,
which involves strategically placing electrodes on the skin of the lower back. While receiving stimulation, the men's legs were supported by braces that hung from the ceiling.
#Low-cost prosthetic knee could let the impoverished walk normally Some higher-end prosthetic legs are equipped with things like gyroscopes and accelerometers,
Instead of hydraulics, electronic sensors or other high-tech goodies, the prototype knee designed by mechanical engineer Amos Winter operates mainly via a spring and two dampers.
Then, sensors that measure pressure are placed on the bottom of the prosthetic. The sensors essentially relay pressure points through a stimulator in the shaft of the prosthetic
which touches the end of the stump. The nerves send signals to the brain, and, miraculously, the prosthetic toes have touch.
#Nest Thermostats Now Link Up to Products From LG Philips Whirlpool and Others Last June, Nest announced some big names in the first round of integration with its thermostat,
which acts as the hub for its smart home platform. This week at the Consumer electronics Show 2015, the list of names has gotten bigger.
LG, Whirlpool, Lutron, Osram and Philips are just some of the companies that have announced integration available now
when the Nest thermostat senses that the house is occupied. Door locks such as Chamberlain garage doors or the August Smart Lock can set the Nest thermostat to its"home"setting as soon as the doors are unlocked.
Safety features are also part of the integration for devices such as Philips'LED Hue bulbs and Beep, a Wi-fi-connected music dial.
thermostats, pool pumps and water heaters), the savings could be considerable for many regions like Texas,
Chargepoint is one of the companies that also announced it is integrating its residential EV charger with the Nest thermostat h
which its inverters will trip offline, as well as extending how long each inverter waits for disruptions to correct themselves before switching off,
Enphase CEO Paul Nahi said in a Monday interview. This is the kind of basic mart inverterfunctionality that Germany has introduced already for its solar-impacted grid.
In the United states, Hawaii and California are the furthest along in putting together advanced inverter features to be included in new solar installations.
But Enphase already has nearly 8 million inverters worldwide, all designed with software-defined functionality to provide flexibility in how theye used,
and ask inverters to provide reactive power or ramping mitigation as a irtual power plant, all from the company Petaluma, Calif. headquarters,
Enphase is far from the only player in the distributed solar universe that had the foresight to connect its inverters to a two-way communications network.
and Department of energy researchers to show that smart inverter technologies can allow more solar per circuit--an important concession for HECO,
theye likely to look to the inverters already installed as possible tools for managing the resulting disruptions,
and grid sensors out to all kinds of remote devices--including those that aren plugged into the power grid.
and more processing power and memory for its Silverlink Sensor Network-enabled devices. All of these networking advances are built on Silver Spring use of the IEEE 802.15. 4g specification,
Adding low-power sensors to the mesh also allows Silver Spring to potentially get its network into areas that point-to-point wireless systems might have a hard time reaching,
trash bins and traffic detectors, or air or water pollution sensors, to name a few of the systems most often talked about in the context of networking municipal assets and services.
Silver Spring is just one of the many smart meter players targeting this nascent field, of course.
and cameras, parking sensors and other devices that do need them, Reeves said. Silver Spring says its Milli 5 platform can achieve decades of operation in the field without sacrificing network security
SMA launched its Sunny Boy Smart energy PV inverter and battery system. Sharp followed suit at the end of last year by offering a solar-and-storage device that uses Samsung batteries.
Bosch is hoping for certification of a solar-storage inverter next month and various other solar players, such as Renesola of China, seem to be clamoring to enter the U k. market.
These companies could be looking to cash in on growth in U k. solar installations. While much of the European solar market has suffered from a slowdown last year,
a connected thermostat company that has been selling the devices since 2007, and announced a Homekit certified thermostat last week.
Christian science monitor: Not All Call Dealers Hate Tesla's Direct Sales Several large car-dealer groups are"quietly supporting"Tesla, according to Marketwatch.
the battery will also use other inexpensive elements, such as carbon electrodes. He also cites the fact that quinones are natural
semisolid electrode material into a revolution in how lithium-ion batteries are designed and built. Back then, cofounder and Massachusetts institute of technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang described a lean sheet of paperapproach, combining concepts from flow batteries and fuel cells,
And by using a fluid-like set of electrodes that can be formed into a working cell in one step,
as well as established battery giants like Samsung, Panasonic and LG Chem. Breakthroughs being promised by startups with new nano-structured materials and designs, such as Amprius, Nanosys,
During 24m early days, Chiang and startup cofounder and fellow MIT professor W. Craig Carter saw its semisolid electrode material--dubbed ambridge crudefor its MIT roots--as a material to be used in flow batteries,
The startup received early funding from the Department of energy ARPA-E program to explore the potential uses for this material. e originally conceived of using this type of electrode in a flow battery,
he said. ut what we realized upon forming the company was that this semisolid electrode capability had a much better home--reinventing how lithium-ion batteries are made.
He referring to the inactive material that layered between the super-thin electrodes that allow today lithium-ion batteries to charge
and discharge quickly. aving a thin electrode means that the distance the lithium ion has to travel is short--and in the beginning,
he said. ut our semisolid electrode design allows you to get around this problem, and to create a battery that has much thicker electrodes,
and thus much less inactive materials. p until now, it has not been possible to create electrodes that are this thick
and still allow the lithium to be transported fast enoughto provide fast charge-discharge characteristics, he said. 24m seeks to solve that problem through combination of the physical arrangement of the charge material within these electrodes,
and the material we actually use, he said. he key technical concept is reducing something called tortuosity,
like the semisolid materials that 24m forms into anodes and cathodes. hat we do is provide more line of sight paths for the lithium ions to get out of the electrode,
but it also permeates both of the electrodes. It infused into both the cathode and the anode.
and then layers liquid nk or painton it to form its electrodes, he said. That coated metal foil then has to be dried in a series of ovens,
including the use of solvents that have to be recovered for reuse on the next round of products. e bypass all that by starting with a wet electrode that has need everything you in it,
At the same time, hese electrodes do not have any exotic costly components in them, he said. verything they use is already in the lithium-ion supply chain.
That in contrast to 24m process, in which hat goes into the electrodes is just
much simpler than the processes used to make lithium-ion batteries today. he formulation process for making these electrodes is spent exacting,
are less expensive data carriers than RFID chips. And RFID chips have higher read-failure rates than bar codes."
"Proximity reads are an advantage when I want to read everything that is in a kit, as opposed to handling
In other words, they can read the chip through the sheets, for example. However, if two patients are side-by-side
if RFID chips will ever displace barcodes on drug packages any more than on cereal boxes in grocery stores.
"A universal shift from bar codes to chips seems as likely to me as the US converting to the metric system,
But I think people are going to continue to push the envelope to see how the chips could be leveraged.
found that use of vital signs alone led to false-positive identification of serious events 46 percent of the time.
#Tunable voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna North carolina State university (NCSU) researchers have created, using electrochemistry, a reconfigurable,
voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna that may play a role in future mobile devices and the coming Internet of things.
and indium that can change its shape allows us to modify antenna properties such as frequency more dramatically than is possible with a fixed conductor,
Although antenna properties can be reconfigured to some extent by using solid conductors with electronic switches,
which the antenna operating frequency can be tuned. ur antenna prototype using liquid metal can tune over a range of at least two times greater than systems using electronic switches,
Previous liquid-metal designs typically required external pumps that can be integrated easily into electronic systems. Extending frequencies for mobile devicesobile device sizes are continuing to shrink
which the antenna and RF front-end must operate. This combination will create a real antenna design challenge for mobile systems
because antenna size and operating bandwidth tend to be conflicting tradeoffs. his is why tunable antennas are highly desirable:
they can be miniaturized and adapted to correct for near-field loading problems such as the iphone 4 well-publicized eath gripissue of dropped calls
Liquid metal systems ield a larger range of tuning than conventional reconfigurable antennas, and the same approach can be applied to other components such as tunable filters,
In the long term, Adams and colleagues hope to gain greater control of the shape of the liquid metal in two-dimensional surfaces to obtain nearly any desired antenna shape. his would enable enormous flexibility in the electromagnetic properties of the antenna
and allow a single adaptive antenna to perform many functions, he added. Image and article via Kurzweila o
a feature that many stretchable electronics do not possess. What more, the ultralight material they created to build the devices,
enabling us to fit more electronics in a smaller device. And cramming more in means that more power can be stored
a hybrid battery and a supercapacitor, which is a rapidly charging and discharging device capable of storing huge amounts of electrical charge.
and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) that have demonstrated for the first time ever an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon,
They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate,
Wang Fon-Jen Professor of Mechanical engineering at Columbia Engineering and co-author of the study. his new type of roadbandlight emitter can be integrated into chips
and graphene-based on-chip optical communications. Creating light in small structures on the surface of a chip is crucial for developing fully integrated hotoniccircuits that do with light
what is now done with electric currents in semiconductor integrated circuits. Researchers have developed many approaches to do this but have not yet been able to put the oldest and simplest artificial light sourcehe incandescent light bulbnto a chip.
This is primarily because light bulb filaments must be extremely hothousands of degrees Celsiusn order to glow in the visible range
and micro-scale metal wires cannot withstand such temperatures. In addition, heat transfer from the hot filament to its surroundings is extremely efficient at the microscale,
making such structures impractical and leading to damage of the surrounding chip. By measuring the spectrum of the light emitted from the graphene,
or the metal electrodes is due to another interesting property: as it heats up, graphene becomes a much poorer conductor of heat.
Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECOG)) for their neurological treatment.
and Projects group (ATAP), provides an enticing example of the type of powerful motion controller that could actually change how we interact with everything from smartwatches and tablets to appliances and other everyday objects.
Since Soli sensors can capture motion at up to 10,000 frames per second, it is much more accurate than camera-based systems,
he talked about Project Soli mainly in the context of smartwatches. As displays shrink, he said,
Even the most responsive smartwatch displays can be difficult to navigate in some situations. But Soli utility isn limited to wearables at all.
In its current form, its radar tech lives in a single tiny chip that can be embedded in about any type of device,
even objects that don have a traditional display. t in chip form, since there are no moving parts involved it can be embedded inside devices,
Soli sensors can detect motion at a range of about two to three feet, Schwesig says,
But the size and flexibility of the chip itself leaves many, many more possibilities open. In hands-on demos at Google I/O, ATAP focused more on displaying Soli gesture-recognizing capabilities rather than specific implementations.
A prototype I saw used visualizations to show how the chip was able to detect
#Researchers invent super-elastic conducting fibers to make artificial muscles, sensors, and capacitors A University of Texas at Dallas research team has made electrically conducting fibers that can be stretched reversibly to more than 14 times their initial length and
whose electrical conductivity increases 200-fold when stretched. The research team is using the new fibers to make artificial muscles,
as well as capacitors with energy storage capacity that increases about tenfold when the fibers are stretched. Fibers and cables derived from the invention might one day be used as interconnects for super-elastic electronic circuits
robots and exoskeletons having great reach, morphing aircraft, giant-range strain sensors, failure-free pacemaker leads,
and super-stretchy charger cords for electronic devices. Wrapping carbon nanotube sheets into fibers In a study published in the July 24 issue of the journal Science,
the scientists describe how they constructed the fibers by wrapping lighter-than-air, electrically conductive sheets of tiny carbon nanotubes to form a jellyroll-like sheath around a long rubber core.
the researchers made strain sensors and artificial muscles in which the buckled nanotube sheaths serve as electrodes
and the thin rubber layer is a dielectric, resulting in a fiber capacitor. These fiber capacitors exhibited the unrivaled capacitance change of 860 percent
when the fiber was stretched 950 percent. Adding twist to these double-sheath fibers resulted in fast,
electrically powered torsional or rotating artificial muscles that could be used to rotate mirrors in optical circuits
And now the company has added self-driving capabilities that use a range of sensors to drive safely and more efficiently.
But the company has added now an array of sensors, including a laser scanner, several video cameras and ultrasonic and radar sensors.
All of that data is fed into he central driver assistance control unit (zfas), a compact central computer
In the monkey experiment, the three animals were attached together using special sensors that were implanted in their brain
IBM has announced that it has produced an integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will allow the bulk manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
Research into ways of boosting the speeds of both processors and interconnects is looking at many different technologies.
while other avenues being explored include server on a chip and IBM Openpower initiative as discussed in Robert Roe second article on Future processing technologies.
and tested a fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will soon enable manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
This will allow datacenters to offer greater data rates and bandwidth for cloud computing and Big data applications.
IBM silicon photonics chips uses four distinct colours of light travelling within an optical fibre to transmit data in and around a computing system.
The critical point is that IBM has integrated the optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using sub-100nm semiconductor technology.
The ability to manufacture the components using conventional electronic industry techniques thus permits mass production and hence lower prices that will ensure more widespread commercial use of silicon photonics.
Most of the optical interconnect solutions employed within datacenters as of today are based upon vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) technology,
which can overcome the bandwidth-distance limitations inherent to multimode VCSEL links. IBM CMOS integrated nanophotonics technology combines the essential parts of an optical transceiver, both electrical and optical, on one silicon chip.
IBM engineers have demonstrated a reference design, targeting datacenter interconnects with a range up to two kilometers.
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