#'Nano-raspberries'could bear fruit in fuel cells (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the National Institute of Standards
For fuel cells, nanoparticles often are mixed with solvents to bind them to an electrode. To learn how such formulas affect particle properties,
#Stretchy sensors can detect deadly gases and UV radiation (Nanowerk News) RMIT University researchers have created wearable sensor patches that detect harmful UV radiation and dangerous, toxic gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen dioxide (Small,"Stretchable
and Tunable Microtectonic Zno-Based Sensors and Photonics")."These transparent, flexible electronics which can be worn as skin patches
or incorporated into clothing-are bringing science fiction gadgets closer to real life. Dr Madhu Bhaskaran, project leader
and co-leader of the RMIT Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group, said the sensors can be placed on work
and safety gear to detect dangerous gases. Hydrogen leaks can lead to explosions as happened with the Hindenburg disaster
The latest development follows RMITS Micronano Research Facility breakthrough in bendable electronics which has paved the way for flexible mobile phones.
stretchy electronic sensors are also capable of detecting harmful levels of UV radiation known to trigger melanoma.
In future, they will be able to link to electronic devices to continuously monitor UV-levels and alert the user when radiation hits harmful levels.
Dr Bhaskaran said the sensors are cheap and durable attributes which will see flexible electronics
and sensors become an integral part of everyday life e
#Mimicking the body on a chip for new drug testing Scientists in an EU-supported project have developed a microfluidic chip that simultaneously analyses the reactions of several human organ tissues
when they come into contact with candidates for new drugs. The ground-breaking device could save millions of euros in drug development costs.
One of the biggest challenges for pharmaceutical companies is reducing the multi-million-euro cost of drug development
This led the EU to back an early-stage research project called Body-on-a-Chip (BOC), replacing the 2d cell culture conventionally used for drugs testing with a multi-tissue device that better mimics real-life conditions in the body, by combining several organ
-specific 3d cultures into a single chip. Researchers then created a prototype BOC to assess the toxicological risk of new candidate compounds
and their effectiveness prior to formal clinical testing. he pharma industry loses a lot of money by keeping drug candidates in the development process for too long,
Developing the 3d micro-tissues off the chip, instead of culturing them in situ, means they can last a remarkable 60 days,
The partners also experimented with four tissues on the same chip, representing a liver, tumour, heart muscle and neurological system,
Body-on-a-Chip involved five partners in four countries and received EU investment of EUR 1. 4 million n
such as small cooling elements or connections between stacked chips in smartphones. However, metals melt at a high temperature.
They also printed vertical electrodes in a cavity as well as lines of copper. In effect, virtually any shape can be printed by smartly choosing the location of the drop impact.
These scatterings are captured as images by photon detectors inside the machine. From the dizzying cascade of lines
all of them creating those frantic lines etched on the detectors. To read between the lines, quite literally, Young
#Researchers develop the first flexible phase-change random access memory (Nanowerk News) Phase change random access memory (PRAM) is one of the strongest candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory for flexible and wearable electronics.
the ultrathin silicon-based diodes were integrated with phase-change memories (PCM) to suppress the inter-cell interference,
which demonstrated random access capability for flexible and wearable electronics. Their work was published in the March issue of ACS Nano("Flexible One Diode-One Phase change Memory Array Enabled by Block copolymer Self-Assembly".
"Low-power nonvolatile PRAM for flexible and wearable memories enabled by (a) self-assembled BCP silica nanostructures and (b) self-structured conductive filament nanoheater.
"In addition, he wrote a review paper regarding the nanotechnology-based electronic devices in the June online issue of Advanced Materials entitled"Performance Enhancement of Electronic and Energy Devices via Block copolymer Self-Assembly
such as flexible electronics, stretchable displays or wearable sensors. The dimensions of each ridge directly affect the transparent conductors stretchability.
In particular, finding effective ways to remove heat energy is vital to the continued miniaturization of electronics.
who led the theoretical and modeling aspects of the new imaging technique, adds:""we now have sophisticated a understanding of what the images mean".
the volume of the electrode expands dramatically. It can break down and reduce battery life and storage capacity.
High Efficiency as a result of an Indirect Electronic Band gap?"."Organic solar cells made of metal-organic frameworks are highly efficient in producing charge carriers.
suggest that the excellent properties of the solar cell result from an additional mechanism the formation of indirect band gaps that plays an important role in photovoltaics.
high efficiency resulting from an indirect electronic band gap?.The clou is that we just need a single organic molecule in the solar cell,
as fully transparent oxygen barrier films to encapsulate organic electronics, or to protect against fire with halogen-and heavy-metal-free compositions
#With 300 kilometres per second to new electronics It may become significantly easier to design electronic components in future.
Electronic systems are expected to process and store a steadily increasing amount of data, faster and faster,
Luckily, physicists discover effects that help engineers to develop better electronic components with surprising regularity, for instance a phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance.
and touchscreen electronics. The scientists synthesized the materials at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)
#Toward 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,
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
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's 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
Both papers offer the microelectronics industry a possible answer to the long term challenge of creating a new powerful and energy efficient,
yet smaller transistor to pave path for technology scaling for advanced CMOS nodes. Researchers from the IBM Materials Integration and Nanoscale Devices group demonstrated a novel, robust and yet versatile approach for integrating III-V compound semiconductor crystals on silicon wafers a novel and an important step
toward making chips smaller and more powerful at lower power density. The technique developed can be used to combine III-V materials,
including indium, gallium and arsenide (Ingaas), with silicon germanium technology to create CMOS chips. It is fully compatible with current high volume chip fabrication technology,
making it economically viable for chip manufacturers. The first paper was published last week in the journal Applied Physics Letters("Template-assisted selective epitaxy of III nanoscale devices for coplanar heterogeneous integration with Si")by lead
author Heinz Schmid who describes the crystal growth starting from a small area and evolving into a much larger,
defect-free crystal. In this so-called template-assisted selective epitaxy the oxide templates are defined and selectively filled via epitaxy to create arbitrary shaped III-V semiconductors such as nanowires,
cross junctions, nanostructures containing constrictions and 3d stacked nanowires. Using this small seed area epitaxy, today at the VLSI Symposium in Kyoto,
Integrating high quality III-V materials on silicon is critical for getting the benefit of higher electron mobility to build transistors with improved power and performance for technology scaling at 7 nm and beyond.
The new technique may also impact photonics on silicon, with active photonic components integrated seamlessly with electronics for greater functionality.
IBM is betting that future chips made of these materials will create more energy efficient and powerful cloud data centers and consumer devices d
which could greatly reduce the amount of power used in multiple consumer electronics products, is the latest version of an established commercial product known as Qualcomm Mirasol.
Based on a new color rendering format that the researchers call Continuous Color, the new design helps solve many key problems affecting mobile displays such as how to provide an always-on display function without requiring more frequent battery charging
"said John Hong, a researcher with Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. and lead author on the Optica paper."
lithography and etching processes that are used to create liquid crystal displays.""Our goal is to improve the technology
Unlike conventional water splitters, the Stanford device uses a single low-cost catalyst to generate hydrogen bubbles on one electrode
A conventional water-splitting device consists of two electrodes submerged in a water-based electrolyte.
A low-voltage current applied to the electrodes drives a catalytic reaction that separates molecules of H2o, releasing bubbles of hydrogen on one electrode and oxygen on the other.
Each electrode is embedded with a different catalyst typically platinum and iridium, two rare and costly metals.
for both electrodes,'said graduate student Haotian Wang, lead author of the study.''This bifunctional catalyst can split water continuously for more than a week with a steady input of just 1. 5 volts of electricity.
'Marriage of batteries and catalysis To find catalytic material suitable for both electrodes, the Stanford team borrowed a technique used in battery research called lithium-induced electrochemical tuning.
#New technique for'seeing'ions at work in a supercapacitor Researchers from the University of Cambridge, together with French collaborators based in Toulouse,
have developed a new method to see inside battery-like devices known as supercapacitors at the atomic level.
the researchers were able to visualise how ions move around in a supercapacitor. They found that
while charging, different processes are at work in the two identical pieces of carbon pongewhich function as the electrodes in these devices, in contrast to earlier computer simulations.
Supercapacitors are used in applications where quick charging and power delivery are important, such as regenerative braking in trains and buses, elevators and cranes.
a supercapacitor is useful when a short burst of power is required, such as when overtaking another car, with the battery providing the steady power for highway driving. upercapacitors perform a similar function to batteries
At its most basic level, a battery is made of two metal electrodes (an anode and a cathode) with some sort of solution between them (electrolyte.
A supercapacitor is similar to a battery in that it can generate and store electric current, but unlike a battery, the storage and release of energy does not involve chemical reactions:
instead, positive and negative electrolyte ions simply tickto the surfaces of the electrodes when the supercapacitor is being charged.
When a supercapacitor is being discharged to power a device, the ions can easily opoff the surface
The reason why supercapacitors charge and discharge so much faster is that the tickingand oppingprocesses happen much faster than the chemical reactions at work in a battery. o increase the area for ions to stick to,
we fill the carbon electrode with tiny holes, like a carbon sponge, said Griffin. ut it hard to know what the ions are doing inside the holes within the electrode we don know exactly what happens
when they interact with the surface. In the new study, the researchers used NMR to look inside functioning supercapacitor devices to see how they charge and store energy.
They also used a type of tiny weighing scale called an electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance (EQCM) to measure changes in mass as little as a millionth of a gram.
what happens inside a supercapacitor while it charges. n a battery, the two electrodes are different materials,
so different processes are said at work Griffin. n a supercapacitor, the two electrodes are made of the same porous carbon sponge,
so you think the same process would take place at both but it turns out the charge storage process in real devices is complicated more than we previously thought.
Previous theories had been made by computer simulations no one observed this in eal lifebefore. What the experiments showed is that the two electrodes behave differently.
In the negative electrode, there is the expected tickingprocess and the positive ions are attracted to the surface as the supercapacitor charges.
But in the positive electrode, an ion xchangehappens, as negative ions are attracted to the surface, while at the same time,
positive ions are repelled away from the surface. Additionally, the EQCM was used to detect tiny changes in the weight of the electrode as ions enter and leave.
This enabled the researchers to show that solvent molecules also accompany the ions into the electrode as it charges. e can now accurately count the number of ions involved in the charge storage process
and see in detail exactly how the energy is stored, said Griffin. n the future we can look at how changing the size of the holes in the electrode
and the ion properties changes the charging mechanism. This way we can tailor the properties of both components to maximise the amount of energy that is stored.
The next step, said Professor Clare P. Grey, the senior author on the paper, s to use this new approach to understand why different ions behave differently on charging, an ultimately design systems with much higher capacitances. i
However, these approaches involve mechanical sensors and pumps, with needle-tipped catheters that have to be stuck under the skin
and cadmium sulfide to provide a route to low-cost, scalable and green synthesis of Cds nanocrystals with extrinsic crystallite size control in the quantum confinement range.
The result is Cds semiconductor nanocrystals with associated size-dependent band gap and photoluminescent properties. This biosynthetic approach provides a viable pathway to realize the promise of green biomanufacturing of these materials.
renewable energy and optoelectronics, are typically expensive and complicated to manufacture. In particular, current chemical synthesis methods use high temperatures and toxic solvents,
#Sensors and drones: hi-tech sentinels for crops (Nanowerk News) Sensors and drones can be among the farmers'best friends,
helping them to use less fertilizers and water, and to control the general condition of their crops.
in charge of the DSS research at CSP, installing in the vineyard five sensors that control the temperature and the humidity of air and soil,
and sensors are channelled into the same database, says Molino, and it allows facts about different years to be compared.
These sensors give us several indexes, explains Sgrelli, such as the normalized difference vegetation index, also known as NDVI,
Connecting these results with those gathered by agronomists and sensors on the ground, the farmer can have a complete overview of
CSP, together with the Association Piattella Canavesana di Cortereggio"and the municipality of San Giorgio Canavese, started monitoring via sensors that control temperature and humidity at 10 and 40 centimetres underground,
which involves shuttling tiny drops of water around on a series of small electrodes that looks like a miniature checkerboard.
flexible, color-changing displays that don need a light source their skin. ll manmade displays LCD, LED,
The research has major implications for existing electronics like televisions, computers and mobile devices that have considered displays thin by today standards but monstrously bulky in comparison.
#Spintronics advance brings wafer-scale quantum devices closer to reality (Nanowerk News) An electronics technology that uses the"spin
Now researchers at the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) have made a crucial step toward nuclear spintronic technologies.
Light polarizes silicon nuclear spins within a silicon carbide chip. This image portrays the nuclear spin of one of the atoms shown in the full crystal lattice below.
so using silicon carbide (Sic), an industrially important semiconductor. Nuclear spins tend to be oriented randomly. Aligning them in a controllable fashion is complicated usually a and only marginally successful proposition.
had tried the group to achieve the same degree of spin alignment without optical cooling they would have had to chill the Sic chip physically to just five millionths of a degree above absolute zero(-459.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Getting spins to align in room-temperature silicon carbide brings practical spintronic devices a significant step closer,
said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Spintronics and Quantum Information. The material is already an important semiconductor in the high-power electronics and optoelectronics industries.
Sophisticated growth and processing capabilities are already mature. So prototypes of nuclear spintronic devices that exploit the IME researchers'technique may be developed in the near future.
Said Awschalom:""Wafer-scale quantum technologies that harness nuclear spins as subatomic elements may appear more quickly than we anticipated
With the aid of cryo-electron microscopes, Medalia's team was able to display the miniscule nuclear pores,
which would greatly benefit from the ability to tune material properties with processing similar to current semiconductor technologies."
as it can be implemented using established ion implantation infrastructure in the semiconductor industry, "Ward said. The method uses a low energy ion gun to add small numbers of helium ions into the material after it has been produced.
#University spinout signs deal to commercialize microchips that release therapeutics inside the body (Nanowerk News) An implantable,
microchip-based device may soon replace the injections and pills now needed to treat chronic diseases:
Earlier this month, MIT spinout Microchips Biotech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to commercialize its wirelessly controlled, implantable,
microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over many years. Invented by Microchips Biotech cofounders Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering,
and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, the microchips consist of hundreds of pinhead-sized reservoirs,
each capped with a metal membrane, that store tiny doses of therapeutics or chemicals. An electric current delivered by the device removes the membrane,
and osteoporosis. Michael Cima (left) and Robert Langer Now Microchips Biotech will begin co-developing microchips with Teva Pharmaceutical, the worlds largest producer of generic drugs,
Apart from providing convenience, Microchips Biotech says these microchips could also improve medication-prescription adherence a surprisingly costly issue in the United states. A 2012 report published in the Annals of Internal medicine estimated that Americans who dont stick to prescriptions rack up $100 billion
Microchips Biotech will continue work on its flagship product, a birth-control microchip, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Cima, who now serves on the Microchips Biotech board of directors with Langer sees this hormone-releasing microchip as one of the first implantable artificial organs because it acts as a gland.
A lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems, Cima says. We are doing that with this artificial organ we created.
A version of Microchip Biotech's implantable, wirelessly controlled microchip. When an electrical current is delivered to one of the chip's tiny reservoirs,
a single dose of therapeutics is released into the body. Wild ideas Inspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s,
when Langer watched a documentary on mass-producing microchips. I thought to myself Wouldnt this be a great way to make a drug-delivery system?
Langer says. He brought this idea to Cima, a chip-making expert who was taken aback by its novelty.
But being out-of-this-world is not something that needs to stop anybody at MIT,
and then-graduate student John Santini Phd 99 co-founded Microchips, and invented a prototype for their microchip that was described in a paper published that year in Nature.
This entrepreneurial collaboration was the first of many for Cima and Langer over the next decade.
For years, the technology underwent rigorous research and development at Microchips Biotech. But in 2011, Langer and Cima,
and researchers from Microchips, conducted the microchips first human trials to treat osteoporosis this time with wireless capabilities.
In that study, published in a 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, microchips were implanted into seven elderly women,
Results indicated that the chips delivered doses comparable to injections and did so more consistently with no adverse side effects.
That study, combined with ongoing efforts in contraceptive-delivery microchips, led Cima to believe the microchips could someday,
essentially, be considered the first artificial glands that could regulate potent hormones inside the body. This may sound like a wild idea but Cima doesnt think so.
The chip sends an endocrine or chemical signal instead of an electrical signal. MEMS innovations Microchips Biotech made several innovations in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing process to ensure the microchips could be commercialized.
A major innovation was enabling final assembly of the microchips at room temperature with hermetic seals. Any intense heat during final assembly, with hermetic sealing, could destroy the drugs already loaded into the reservoirs
which meant common methods of welding and soldering were off-limits. To do so, Microchips Biotech modified a cold-welding tongue
and groove process. This meant depositing a soft, gold alloy in patterns on the top of the chip to create tongues,
and grooves on the base. By pressing the top and base pieces together, the tongues fit into the grooves,
The company has also found ways to integrate electronics into the microchips to shrink down the device.
the company could refine the microchips to be even smaller, yet carry the same volume of drugs.
For many decades, silicon has been the heart of modern electronics--but as a material, it has its limits.
As our devices get smaller and smaller, the basic unit of these devices, a transistor,
the size of the silicon transistor is reaching its physical limit. As silicon devices are based on
These physical limitations have driven the race for new materials that can be used as semiconductors in lieu of silicon.
Atomic force microscope image of a black arsenic-phosphorus field-effect transistor. Image courtesy of Chongwu Zhou and Bilu Liu) The demand for a silicon material aided the discovery of graphene, a single layer of graphite
Layered Anisotropic Infrared Semiconductors with Highly Tunable Compositions and Properties"."What the researchers are excited most about is the ability to adjust the electronic and optical properties of these materials to a range that cannot be achieved by any other 2d materials thus far.
and the materials'ability to sense long wavelength infrared (LWIR) waves due to their small energy gaps. This particular electromagnetic spectral range of LWIR is important for a range of applications such as LIDAR (light radar) systems,
and manufacture of superconductors or high-efficiency solar cells and light sensors, said leader of the research,
such as an altered band gap, and possibly superconductivity if properly doped.""From left are: Professor Jim Williams, Professor Andrei Rode and Associate professor Jodie Bradbury with the complex electron diffraction patterns.
"The semiconductor industry is a multi-billion dollar operation-even a small change in the position of a few silicon atoms has the potential to have a major impact
which is the first of its kind, in a paper published May 6, 2015, in the journal Nano Energy("Single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator for scavenging friction energy from rolling tires").
"The nanogenerator relies on an electrode integrated into a segment of the tire. When this part of the tire surface comes into contact with the ground,
During initial trials, Wang and his colleagues used a toy car with LED LIGHTS to demonstrate the concept.
They attached an electrode to the wheels of the car, and as it rolled across the ground,
the LED LIGHTS flashed on and off. The movement of electrons caused by friction was able to generate enough energy to power the lights
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