and his colleagues is electronics cooling. he heat fluxes in electronics cooling are skyrocketing, Varanasi says.
It might be a job for efficient spray cooling f we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.
These devices consist of microfluidic channels engraved on tiny chips, but current versions usually require a great deal of extra instrumentation attached to the chip,
limiting their portability. Much of that extra instrumentation is needed to keep the particles flowing single file through the center of the channel,
The beam-stabilization system on the space terminal is based on inertial sensors which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets.
And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
Then the Laboratory did the more detailed full-system design the detailed design of the three modules that make up the space terminal and the detailed design of the primary ground terminal.
changing it from a conductor to a semiconductor just by changing the laser beam polarization. Normally, to produce such dramatic changes in a material properties,
Electrodes record the angular displacement and torque at the joint, which researchers use to calculate the ankle stiffness.
as well as surface electrodes attached to the ankle four major muscles. The robot was connected to a video display with a pixelated bar that moved up and down
and made it a thrombin sensor. The system consists of iron oxide nanoparticles which the Food and Drug Administration has approved for human use coated with peptides (short proteins) that are specialized to interact with thrombin.
as well as microelectronics devices. Such devices have many potential applications in research and diagnostics but they could be even more useful
through a silicon wafer similar to those used in most electronics labs. As red blood cells flow through the body,
are made of metals, semiconductors, and glass, and can damage nearby tissues during ordinary movement. t a big problem in neural prosthetics,
optical waveguides to carry light, hollow tubes to carry drugs, and conductive electrodes to carry electrical signals.
These polymer templates, which can have dimensions on the scale of inches, are heated then until they become soft,
of which could then be monitored with embedded electrodes. At the same time, one or more drugs could be injected into the brain through the hollow channels,
Electrodes recorded the activity of these identified neurons during animal behaviors. Mice naturally love sucrose similar to humans loving sugar-rich sodas
Activating the projections led to compulsive sucrose-eating and increased overeating in mice that were full.
HVAC system efficiency is affected by the system itself, by household behavioral factors such as thermostat and window usage and
Many researchers see improved interconnection of optical and electronic components as a path to more efficient computation and imaging systems.
to create tiny optical waveguides, about 20 nanometers in size the same size range as the smallest features that can now be produced in microchips.
This could lead to chips that combine optical and electronic components in a single device, with far lower losses than when such devices are made separately and then interconnected,
they say. Co-author Tony Low, a researcher at IBM and the University of Minnesota, says,
The work is retty criticalfor providing the understanding needed to develop optoelectronic or photonic devices based on graphene and hbn,
#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
In this so-called low battery, the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid
while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles.
e realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the lithium ion manufacturing process. nstead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material,
the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all.
thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent.
Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles instead of consolidated slabs greatly reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material a property known as ortuosity.
A less tortuous path makes it possible to use thicker electrodes, which, in turn, simplifies production
While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent,
equipped with cameras and sensors, that can be tossed into potentially hazardous areas to instantly transmit panoramic images of those areas back to a smartphone. t basically gives a quick assessment of a dangerous situation,
peeking out at different indented spots around the circumference, and LED LIGHTS. When activated, the camera snaps photos from all lenses, a few times every second.
There are plans to add sensors for radiation, temperature and carbon monoxide in future models. For this first manufacturing run, the startup aims to gather feedback from police,
#Major step for implantable drug-delivery device An implantable, microchip-based device may soon replace the injections
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. Now Microchips Biotech will begin co-developing microchips with Teva Pharmaceutical, the world largest producer of generic drugs,
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 don stick to prescriptions rack up $100 billion to $289 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 rtificial organsecause it acts as a gland. lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems Cima says. e are doing that with this artificial organ we created. ild ideasinspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s,
when Langer watched a documentary on mass-producing microchips. thought to myself, ouldn 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. ut being out-of-this-world is not something that needs to stop anybody at MIT,
Cima adds. n fact, that should be the criterion. o in 1999, Langer, Cima, and then-graduate student John Santini Phd 9 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 microchipsfirst 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 ith no adverse side effects.
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 ut Cima doesn think so.
The chip ends an endocrine or chemical signal instead of an electrical signal. EMS innovationsmicrochips 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 ongue and grooveprocess.
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, and plastically deforms to weld the metal together. ach one of these reservoirs,
Cima says. here was no precedent for that. he 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. his means making the drugs take up more volume than the electrical and other components,
#Tiny wires could provide a big energy boost 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.
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
#Making the new silicon An exotic material called gallium nitride (Gan) is poised to become the next semiconductor for power electronics,
In 2013, the Department of energy (DOE) dedicated approximately half of a $140 million research institute for power electronics to Gan research,
Now MIT spinout Cambridge Electronics Inc. CEI) has announced a line of Gan transistors and power electronic circuits that promise to cut energy usage in data centers, electric cars,
Power electronics is a ubiquitous technology used to convert electricity to higher or lower voltages and different currents such as in a laptop power adapter
Many of these power-electronics systems rely on silicon transistors that switch on and off to regulate voltage but, due to speed and resistance constraints, waste energy as heat.
CEI Gan transistors have at least one-tenth the resistance of such silicon-based transistors, according to the company.
and orders-of-magnitude faster switching frequency meaning power-electronics systems with these components can be made much smaller.
CEI is using its transistors to enable power electronics that will make data centers less energy-intensive
and laptop power adapters one-third the size or even small enough to fit inside the computer itself. his is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change electronics
While Gan transistors have several benefits over silicon, safety drawbacks and expensive manufacturing methods have kept largely them off the market.
Power transistors are designed to flow high currents when on, and to block high voltages when off.
or fail, the transistors must default to the ffposition to cut the current to avoid short circuits and other issues an important feature of silicon power transistors.
But Gan transistors are typically ormally onmeaning by default, theyl always allow a flow of current,
and DOE grants developed Gan transistors that were ormally offby modifying the structure of the material.
To make traditional Gan transistors, scientists grow a thin layer of Gan on top of a substrate.
The MIT researchers layered different materials with disparate compositions in their Gan transistors. Finding the precise mix allowed a new kind of Gan transistors that go to the off position by default. e always talk about Gan as gallium and nitrogen
but you can modify the basic Gan material, add impurities and other elements, to change its properties,
But Gan and other nonsilicon semiconductors are manufactured also in special processes, which are expensive. To drop costs, the MIT researchers at the Institute and, later, with the company developed new fabrication technologies,
we are fabricating our advanced Gan transistors and circuits in conventional silicon foundries, at the cost of silicon.
Major applications CEI is currently using its advanced transistors to develop laptop power adaptors that are approximately 1. 5 cubic inches in volume the smallest ever made.
Among the other feasible applications for the transistors, Palacios says, is better power electronics for data centers run by Google, Amazon, Facebook,
and other companies, to power the cloud. Currently, these data centers eat up about 2 percent of electricity in the United states. But Gan-based power electronics
Palacios says, could save a very significant fraction of that. Another major future application, Palacios adds,
will be replacing the silicon-based power electronics in electric cars. These are in the chargers that charge the battery,
and the inverters that convert the battery power to drive the electric motors. The silicon transistors used today have constrained a power capability that limits how much power the car can handle.
This is one of the main reasons why there are few large electric vehicles. Gan-based power electronics, on the other hand, could boost power output for electric cars
while making them more energy-efficient and lighter and, therefore, cheaper and capable of driving longer distances. lectric vehicles are popular,
Gan power electronics will be key to make them mainstream, Palacios says. Innovative ideas In launching CEI, the MIT founders turned to the Institute entrepreneurial programs,
he took his idea for Gan-based power electronics to Innovation Teams (i-Teams), which brings together MIT students from across disciplines to evaluate the commercial feasibility of new technologies.
showed him the huge market pull for Gan power electronics, and helped CEI settle on its first products. any times, it the other way around:
#Sensor Sunday: Doggie Wearables Monitoring Shoppers and Catching TV While You Doze off In the past two years there been a boom in talk around the Internet of things and Wearables.
People are putting more sensors into cities, into their homes and onto themselves. Interest in the quantified self and home automation are on the rise.
A lot of talk has gone into the sensors in cameras that enable quicker focusing and better colours.
The proliferation of fingerprint sensors is expected to rise with companies like Samsung Apple and Mastercard adopting the technology.
Biometric sensors are getting smaller and the ease with which data can be analyzed and shared is improving.
Already, much of the world interacts with sensors on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Gartner released their predictions on where sensor technology is headed.
They predicted that y 2017,30 percent of smart wearables will be inconspicuous to the eyeand y 2016,
biometric sensors will be featured in 40 percent of smartphones shipped to end users With the way technology is developing and the increasing consumer demand,
wee looked at new sensor technology and new ways that sensors are being used. More news comes in every week.
Wel keep it coming into the new year, but here the last roundup for 2014. Looking at Shoppers in a New Way Looking at Shoppers in a New Way This year,
The data from the sensors can show if the dog is under unusual stress or if a chronic health condition may be worsening.
Mark Waugh) Two teenagers from Manchester have developed a 3d printed wristband with embedded sensors that can detect
#Researchers use oxides to flip graphene conductivity Graphene a one-atom thick lattice of carbon atoms is touted often as a revolutionary material that will take the place of silicon at the heart of electronics.
and n-type semiconductors silicon that has either more positive or more negative charge carriers. The junctions between p-and n-type semiconductors are the building blocks of electronic devices.
Put together in sequence these p-n junctions form transistors which can in turn be combined into integrated circuits microchips and processors.
Chemically doping graphene to achieve p -and n-type version of the material is possible but it means sacrificing some of its unique electrical properties.
but manufacturing and placing the necessary electrodes negates the advantages graphene's form factor provides.
what p-n junctions and complementary circuitry has done for the current state-of-the-art semiconductor electronics. What's even more exciting are the enabling of optoelectronics using graphene
and the possibility of waveguiding lensing and periodically manipulating electrons confined in an atomically thin material.
This ability would represent an advantage over chemically doped semiconductors. Once the atomic impurities are mixed into the material to change its carrier density they can't be removed.
These properties can lead to new electronic devices that are more robust and multifunctional. The finding has the potential to increase graphene's use in computers as in computer chips that use electronic spin to store data.
Study results appeared online earlier this month in Physical Review Letters. The magnetic insulator Shi and his team used was yttrium iron garnet grown by laser molecular beam epitaxy in his lab. The researchers placed a single-layer graphene sheet on an atomically smooth layer of yttrium iron garnet.
but semiconductors allow a measure of control over those electrons. Since modern electronics are all about control,
semiconducting graphene (and semiconducting two-dimensional materials in general) are of great interest to scientists and industry working to shrink electronics for applications.
In the work, which appeared this month in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale,
Are formed by Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing for Light-emitting diodes. Their paper was published in Nano Letters an ACS journal.
and operating conditions that allow for high-resolution printing of layers of quantum dots with precise control over thickness and submicron lateral resolution and capabilities for use as active layers of QD light-emitting diodes.
Writing in IEEE Spectrum on Monday Prachi Patel similarly made note that Quantum dots (QDS) are light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that used in light-emitting diodes (LEDS) hold the promise of brighter faster displays.
They sandwiched these patterns between electrodes to make bright QD LEDS. Patel also reported on the team's future efforts.
Princeton team explores 3d printed quantum dot LEDS More information: High-resolution Patterns of Quantum dots Formed by Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing for Light-emitting diodes Nano Lett.
Article ASAP. DOI: 10.1021/nl503779eabstracthere we demonstrate materials and operating conditions that allow for high-resolution printing of layers of quantum dots (QDS) with precise control over thickness and submicron lateral resolution and capabilities for use as active layers of QD light-emitting diodes (LEDS).
The shapes and thicknesses of the QD patterns exhibit systematic dependence on the dimensions of the printing nozzle and the ink composition in ways that allow nearly arbitrary systematic control when exploited in a fully automated printing tool.
Homogeneous arrays of patterns of QDS serve as the basis for corresponding arrays of QD LEDS that exhibit excellent performance.
Sequential printing of different types of QDS in a multilayer stack or in an interdigitated geometry provides strategies for continuous tuning of the effective overall emission wavelengths of the resulting QD LEDS.
This strategy is useful to efficient additive use of QDS for wide ranging types of electronic and optoelectronic devices c
It was research conducted by Yingnan Zhao of the University of Twente's MESA+Institute for Nanotechnology that led to this discovery.
#Carbon nanotube finding could lead to flexible electronics with longer battery life University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have made a significant leap toward creating higher-performance electronics with improved battery lifend the ability
In addition to paving the way for improved consumer electronics, this technology could also have specific uses in industrial and military applications.
In a paper published recently in the journal ACS Nano, Arnold, Gopalan and their students reported transistors with an on-off ratio that's 1
so they could also be used to make flexible displays and electronics that can stretch and bend, allowing you to integrate electronics into new places like clothing,
"says Arnold.""The advance enables new types of electronics that aren't possible with the more brittle materials manufacturers are currently using."
"Carbon nanotubes are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. As some of the best electrical conductors ever discovered, carbon nanotubes have long been recognized as a promising material for next-generation transistors,
which are semiconductor devices that can act like an on-off switch for current or amplify current. This forms the foundation of an electronic device.
However, researchers have struggled to isolate purely semiconducting carbon nanotubes, which are crucial, because metallic nanotube impurities act like copper wires and"short"the device.
The team's most recent advance also brings the field closer to realizing carbon nanotube transistors as a feasible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips and in high-frequency communication devices,
Our carbon nanotube transistors are an order of magnitude better in conductance than the best thin film transistor technologies currently being used commercially
while still switching on and off like a transistor is supposed to function.""The researchers have patented their technology through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
That is why ribbons or rows of graphene with nanometric widths are emerging as tremendously interesting electronic components.
The forming of heterostructures with different materials has been a concept widely used in electronic engineering and has enabled huge advances to be made in conventional electronics.
We have managed now for the first time to form heterostructures of graphene nanoribbons modulating their width on a molecular level with atomic precision.
Bandgap Engineering of Bottom-up Synthesized Graphene nanoribbons by Controlled Heterojunctions. Y.-C. Chen T. Cao C. Chen Z. Pedramrazi D. Haberer D. G. de Oteyza F. Fischer S. Loiue M
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