#Tunnel Transistor May Meet Power Needs of Future Chips A new kind of transistor consumes 90 percent less power than conventional transistors,
dramatically exceeding a theoretical limit for electronics, researchers say. These findings could one day lead to super-dense low-power circuits as well as ultra-sensitive biosensors and gas sensors, the investigators added.
The relentless advance of computing power over the past half-century has relied on constant miniaturization of field-effect transistors (FETS),
which serve as the building blocks of most microchips. Transistors act like switches that flick on and off to represent data as zeroes and ones.
A key challenge that FETS now face is reducing the power they consume. The switching properties of conventional FETS are restricted currently by a theoretical limit of 60 millivolts per decade of current at room temperature.
This limit, known as the subthreshold swing, means that each 60-millivolt increase in voltage leads to a 10-fold increase in current.
so switching would require less energy. One way that scientists have sought to overcome this limit is with tunnel FETS (TFETS.
These devices take advantage of the ability of electrons to penetrate barriers, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.
Now researchers at the University of California, Santa barbara (UCSB), and Rice university in Houston, Texas, have developed a TFET that could operate with voltages as low as 0. 1 volts.
This led to a more than 90 percent reduction in power consumption compared with conventional FETS. The scientists and engineers detailed their findings in the 1 oct. issue of the journal Nature. his transistor represents a major breakthrough in the electronics and semiconductor industry
says study co-author Kaustav Banerjee, an electrical engineer at UCSB. The new TFET is made from two atomically-thin layers of semiconducting molybdenum sulfide crystal on top of a substrate of germanium.
It achieved a subthreshold swing as little as 3. 9 millivolts per decade of current. Until now, the only experimental TFET to meet the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) goal of average subthreshold swing below 60 millivolts per decade over four decades of current was a transistor that used nanowires.
But that type is often challenging to fabricate using conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques. This new TFET not only meets the ITRS goal
it also uses flat channels that are easier to fabricate. UCSB Banerjee suggests that potential applications for these new TFETS may include ultra-low-power electronics and computing,
longer battery life or lower power consumption in data centers to reduce their costs and greenhouse gas emissions, and ultra-sensitive and low-power biosensors and gas sensors to enhance the Internet of things.
However, Banerjee cautions that TFETS are designed not for speed or high performance. hey are desirable for low-power electronics,
he says s
#MIT's 3-D Microwave Camera Can See through Walls Visible light is all well and good for things like eyeballs,
but here at IEEE, we do our best to cover the entire spectrum. As always, wee especially interested in anything that confers superhero-like abilities, like X-ray vision,
or in this case, M-wave vision, which sounds even more futuristic. At MIT, theye been working on a prototype for a time of flight microwave camera
which can be used to image objects through walls, in 3-D. A microwave camera is sort of like a cross between a visible light camera and a radar imaging system,
incorporating some of the advantages of each. Like radar, microwaves don really notice things like darkness or fog or walls,
but unlike radar theye not confused by the kinds of angled surfaces that make the stealth fighter so stealthy.
Radar systems also tend to be big, complex, low resolution, and expensive. By taking a more camera-like approach to radio frequency imaging,
essentially treating microwaves like waves of light and using a passive reflector like a lens,
MIT has been able to leverage computational-imaging techniques to develop a low cost, high resolution imaging system.
MIT microwave camera can do 3-D imaging using time of flight in the same way that Microsoft latest Xbox Kinect sensor works.
The time of flight camera sends out bursts of microwaves and then keeps careful track of how long it takes for the microwaves to bounce off of something
and return to the sensor. After doing some not very fancy math with the speed of light,
you can then calculate how far away that something is. MIT camera has a temporal resolution of 200 picoseconds,
allowing it to resolve distances with an accuracy of 6 cm, enough for usable 3-D imaging.
Here's a video showing the microwave camera taking pictures of (among other things) a mannequin through a solid wall:
If the mannequin in the video looks suspiciously like it's covered in aluminum foil, that almost certainly because it is covered,
in fact in aluminum foil. Doing this actually makes the mannequin more human like: wee very good at reflecting microwaves in this frequency range
because wee ugly bags of mostly water, and covering the plastic mannequin in tin foil makes it a close approximation to the real thing.
and at 41 x 41 pixels, it sufficient resolution o be able to see how many limbs a person has, according to MIT.
just in case whatever is on the other side of the wall has extra limbs, which means you probably don want to enter that room.
One other trick that the microwave camera is capable of is multispectral imaging. As the camera takes each measurement
the microwave emitter sweeps through a frequency range of 7. 835 GHZ to 12.817 GHZ over 10 ms (your microwave oven operates at 2. 45 GHZ.
Different materials respond to the microwaves differently at lower and higher frequencies, and the camera can separate out these spectra.
This gives you an image with multiple frequency response olors, and the patterns of colors that you get provides information about the materials.
The microwave camera is, at the moment, probably not something that you want to carry around. The reflector is over a meter wide,
including the use of reconfigurable focal-plane sensors or shrinking the transmission wavelength from microwave (3 cm) down to millimeter wave (5 mm),
which means that it may not be scalable down to cellphone size. Obviously, this is a disappointment for those of us who were looking forward to regularly misusing this kind of technology,
genetic disorders are the leading cause of death. But pediatricians typically can scan an infant entire genome
and analyze it for clues quickly enough to make a difference in the baby treatment.
and analyze the entire genome of a critically ill infant to find a diagnosis that can significantly alter the course of treatment.
In a new study published in Genome Medicine, pediatricians explained how hardware and software specialized for genetic analysis can provide such fast and lifesaving information.
The key piece of technology: A processor from the company Edico Genome that designed to handle the big data of genetics.
Lead researcher Stephen Kingsmore, a pediatrician and genomics expert at Children Mercy Hospital in Kansas city, explains that doctors typically run targeted genetic tests for specific diseases
if they have a good guess about what wrong with an infant. Such tests check a few specific spots on the genome,
looking for disease-causing mutations. But with more than 8000 possible genetic diseases, such tests eren really relevant to clinical care, he tells IEEE Spectrum.
Whole-genome sequencing is a different matter entirely. These scans check for mutations at each of the 3. 2 billion locations on the human genome.
Remarkably while it took $3 billion to sequence the first human genome, it can now be done for about $1000 a pop.
That cheap enough to make economic sense in medical emergencies, like those encountered in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Kingsmore 26-hour diagnostic pipeline starts with the machines that do the brute-force work of sorting through an individual baby genome.
This task is like putting together a 3-billion-piece jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the box.
Right now, Illumina Hiseq machines are the gold standard for this genetic sequencing. Kingsmore team got the sequencing time down to about 18 to 21 hours (reduced from 25 in their prior studies.
But sequencing is pretty mature technology, he says, and there weren speed huge gains to be had there.
The emarkable gains, Kingsmore says, came from the technology that analyzed each infant genome. That task is like taking the completed 3-billion-piece jigsaw puzzle
and comparing it to the picture on the box, noting the roughly 5 million places where this imperfect puzzle deviates slightly from the generic image.
Using Edico Genome DRAGEN processor, the researchers got this step down from 15 hours to 40 minutes.
About 40 minutes after a sequencing machine finished its work, the researchers had a file listing all the mutations in a sick baby genome.
After that, Kingsmore team used in-house software to search through the mutations for those associated with a disease that matched the baby symptoms.
These programs an almost make an instant diagnosis, says Kingsmore, noting that Children Mercy is going to make its software packages available as freeware by the end of the year.
How can critically ill babies benefit from this speed? In a prior study, Kingsmore team used whole-genome sequencing for 35 sick infants,
and diagnosed a genetic disease in 20 of those babies. In 13 cases, the doctors dramatically changed their treatment plans.
For example, a baby with liver failure received the proper surgeries and pharmaceutical treatments based on the accurate diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder,
and is now a healthy 2-year-old. In other cases, the genome scan allowed doctors to rule out diseases,
which Kingsmore says can be equally valuable. octor always worry: id I miss something that was treatable??
he says. But if a certain disease-associated mutation isn found, doctors needn give justin-case treatments.
The DRAGEN processor delivered its critical speed gains to the hospital servers thanks to its architecture,
which is designed to deal with genomic data, says Pieter van Rooyen, CEO of Edico Genome.
The data comes from the sequencing machine in a particular file format, which is streamed efficiently through the chip without caching,
says van Rooyen. Its algorithms are tailor-made to identify genetic mutations, and while these identification processes are ticking along the data is constantly being compressed
and written to disk. verything takes place roughly at the same time, van Rooyen tells Spectrum. Van Rooyen predicts that in a few years,
every infant born in the developed world will have sequenced its genome in the hospital.?It just a matter of time before clinical genomics will be with us everywhere,
he says. t prudent to have the infrastructure ready. He envisions the DRAGEN processor outputting its analysis directly into a patient electronic medical record,
where actionable intelligence would be flagged for the physician. Automating medicine to this degree, from genome sequencing to diagnosis,
doesn alarm Kingsmore. In fact, he thinks it will be necessary if we want to make use of today best genetic technologies:
f wee going to scale this, it has to be on the backs of smart machines, he says. e want to take humans out of the equation,
because wee the bottleneck. m
#A Particle accelerator the Size of a Sewing needle An international research team has demonstrated a high-performance particle accelerator the size of a 1-millimeter mechanical pencil replacement lead.
Tens of thousands of particle accelerators around the world are used for more than physics research. They are used also to manufacture semiconductors,
probe new materials, illuminate too-fast-to-follow chemical reactions, treat cancer, strengthen polymers, sterilize medical devices,
and even to make diamonds green and pearls black. A key accelerator parameter is the acceleration gradient,
the energy (measured in mega electron volts, Mev) gained per meter of travel. The amount of energy the accelerator can pump into a cluster of particles
electrons, for example, thus becomes a function of the device gradient and length. And cost, of course, increases with physical size of the accelerator.
Thus, conventional linear accelerators, with acceleration gradients around 300 Mev/m, can grow as big as the 3, 073-meter-long Stanford Linear accelerator in Menlo Park,
Calif.,housed in what may be the world longest building. These machines accelerate charged particles using either a pulse of radio frequency radiation
or a wakefield (using high energy unchesof electrons to blast a tunnel through plasma; when the tunnel collapses back on itself,
following particles accelerate by riding the charged wake of the collapsing front). RF accelerators can reach energies of a few tens of mega electron volts before the RF energy itself begins to destabilize the mechanism in what called plasma breakdown.
In wakefield approaches, balancing the skittish plasma bubble requires terawatt or petawatt lasers, tricky micromachinging,
and femtosecond laser timing. In Nature Communications, researchers describe an alternative: a compact device that uses pulses of terahertz (THZ) radiation.
The research group includes scientists from the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT), the University of Toronto, and the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY, the German Electron Syncrotron), the Center For free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics,
and the University of Hamburg (all in Hamburg, Germany). It was led by Franz Kärtner, who is affiliated with MIT, CFEL,
and DESY. erahertz frequencies provide the best of both worlds, the group writes. n one hand,
the wavelength is long enough that we can fabricate waveguides with conventional machining techniques, provide accurate timing,
and accommodate a significant amount of charge per bunch of electrons On the other hand, the frequency is high enough that the plasma breakdown threshold for surface electric fields increases The terahertz approach also allows them to use readily available picoseconds lasers.
The accelerator itself is a quartz capillary about 1. 5 centimeters long and 940 micrometers in diameter
sheathed in a copper jacket. The quartz walls are 270 m thick, leaving a central vacuum 400 m in diameter.
In operation, a 0. 45 THZ pulse is polarized radially bounced off a mirror to enter at one end (call it the right end) of quartz tube.
As the pulse traveled down the tube, electrons are injected at 60 kev through a pinhole at the left end.
When the terahertz pulse reflects off the left wall (around the injection pinhole) it catches the electrons,
accelerating them back towards the right. In the initial experiments, the electrons could ride the wave for just 3 mm before the wave started to spread out.
That short ride however, boosted their energy to 67 kev. A back of the envelope calculation translates this modest energy gain into an acceleration gradient over 2 Mev/m. his is not a particularly large acceleration,
but the experiment demonstrates that the principle does work in practice, explains co-author Arya Fallahi of CFEL. he theory indicates that we should be able to achieve an accelerating gradient of up to one gigavolt per meter.
Or, as the paper itself concludes, his proof-of-principle terahertz linear accelerator demonstrates the potential for an all-optical acceleration scheme that can be integrated readily into small-scale laboratories providing users with electron beams that will enable new experiments in ultrafast electron diffraction and X-ray production
. i
#Bright blue PHOLEDS Almost Ready for TV A new energy-efficient organic LED (OLED) that glows a deep blue is finally close to meeting the most stringent U s. video display brightness requirements,
researchers say. OLEDS have enabled a new generation of bright, high-quality, low-cost, power-efficient, flexible, lightweight flat panel displays.
Each pixel in an OLED display typically consists of red, green, and blue OLEDS that shine with different brightnesses to produce any desired color.
Phosphorescent OLEDS (PHOLEDS) use only one quarter the energy of conventional OLEDS. Green and red PHOLEDS are used already in smartphones and TVS
leading to longer battery lives and lower electricity bills, but developing the kind of bright deep blue PHOLEDS needed for video displays has proven challenging.
Now scientists have developed what they say are the brightest deep blue PHOLEDS reported so far,
work sponsored by Universal Display Corporation and the U s. Air force. The researchers added their new lights nearly meet the most stringent requirements of the National Television systems Committee (NTSC),
the video standards used across most of The americas.""There have been previous works that reported PHOLEDS having similar color as ours,
but their brightnesses were very dim, about 10 times less,"says study lead author Jaesang Lee, an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann arbor."
"A combination of high brightness and deep blue color is quite revolutionary.""The new PHOLEDS are based on a kind of molecule known as A n-heterocyclic carbene iridium-III complex,
which emits deep blue light very brightly. This compound also emits light efficiently because its design reduces the chances that light-emitting excitonslectrons bound to their positively charged counterparts,
holesill either get lost as heat or destroy the compound itself, Lee says. Unfortunately, this new PHOLED has a brief operational lifetime,
just like many other blue PHOLEDS, Lee says. Future research will focus on stabilizing the molecule at the heart of this new PHOLED to create a longer-lasting version of the device.
Lee along with IEEE Fellow Stephen Forrest and their colleagues, detailed the device in the journal Nature Materials r
#Computer Count of Huge Crowds Now Possible Getting a headcount of crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands need not strain human eyes any longer.
New software has carried out the first automated crowd count on that scale ever by analyzing aerial photographs of a huge demonstration timesaving innovation that could eventually help save lives
and prevent disasters. The software, developed by University of Central Florida researchers, can drastically cut the time needed for crowd counts from a week to just half an hour.
That represents the difference between the old method of humans painstakingly counting the number of heads per inch of aerial photograph and the new automated method.
and other dangers. utomated computer analysis of such large-scale and dense crowds has never been done before,
said Mubarak Shah, computer science professor and director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida, in a press release.
Shah and his colleagues tested their software on aerial photographs of a demonstration involving thousands of people calling for the independence of the Catalonia province from Spain.
The software analyzed 67 aerial photographs taken of the demonstration in Barcelona and came up with a headcount within 30 minutes.
The images and software calculations were double checked by a team at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain.
The timesaving software could also make accurate crowd counts a crucial new tool for managing large crowds.
For more, see the IEEE Spectrum article on how the Hajj crowds defy conventional computer simulations.
Automated crowd counting could also prove increasingly potent with the growing use of aerial drone surveillance,
whether in the hands of civilian authorities or militaries i
#The New Wrinkle in Graphene Is Wrinkles One of the holy grails of graphene research has been a method for achieving wafer-scale growth of wrinkle-free single-crystal monolayer graphene on a silicon wafer.
Now researchers at the RIKEN research institute in Japan have discovered that the wrinkles in graphene may be their most attractive feature.
This restriction of electron movement results in a junction-like structure that changes from a zero-gap conductor to a semiconductor and back to zero-gap conductor.
The other revelation yielded by this research is that it possible to manipulate the wrinkles to change graphene band gap using mechanical methods rather than chemical techniques. p until now,
The discovery that it was possible to produce graphene semiconductors without the need to chemically dope the carbon sheets was the result of trying to produce graphene films using chemical vapor deposition (CVD.
and during that process we accidentally found small nanowrinkles, just five nanometers wide, in the sample.
the researchers discovered that there were band gaps within them, which meant that they could act as semiconductors a
#Agtech Is The New Queen Of Green Before Monsanto acquired Climate Corporation in late 2013 for nearly $1 billion,
few investors gave much thought to technological innovation in our agriculture system. What a difference a year can make.
In what can be described as the Netscape moment for agriculture technology, the sector had a breakout year in 2014,
receiving over $2. 36 billion of investment across 264 deals spanning the agriculture value chain,
according to data we pulled from Crunchbase as well as press releases and SEC filings for last year. Surprisingly, this $2. 36 billion figure has surpassed now well-known sectors like fintech ($2. 1 billion) and the former queen of green
cleantech ($2 billion. Why now? According to data from the Cleantech Group, investment in Agtech was relatively flat before 2013.
Most tech innovation in agriculture was concentrated narrowly in biotechnology and seed genetics, and both investment and innovation was limited to players with close ties to the ag sector.
Outside of seed genetics and crop inputs, most other Agtech was bundled typically with Cleantech. Then, in 2013, there was a shift.
Agtech grew 75 percent to reach $860 million across 119 deals. Taken together with our data
(while recognizing our unique methodological approaches), Agtech subsequently grew 170 percent in 2014 and it continued to show strong investment in early 2015.
The momentum shift leading up to the phase-transition 2013 can be traced to a confluence of three underlying trends a groundswell of macro economic trends that tipped the balance between supply
and demand in agriculture shifting consumer tastes, and a confluence of new hardware technologies that freed computation from the desktop and automated multivariate collection of big data.
A sea change Advances from the mechanization in the 1920s and the Green revolution from 1940-1960 have largely been exhausted.
Rates of yield increases for major crops have been trending negatively on a 10-year curve at the very time that global forces of population growth, prosperity,
and globalization are putting basic supply -and-demand pressure on our agriculture system. The population is growing at approximately 77.6 million per year
and it is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. At the same time, the middle class is expected to double by 2030.
And as incomes rise people spend more on food (Engel law) and eat more animal protein (8 pounds of grains are needed for 1 pound of beef).
To meet the demand for food, fuel and fiber from a growing and increasingly affluent population,
experts predict that we will need to double global crop production over the next 35 years. With demand outstripping supply since the emergence of China starting in the mid 1990s,
the agriculture sector has outperformed quietly all other sectors except for tech since 1999. It taken a while,
but investors and entrepreneurs have started to take notice. In addition to secular trends driving the agriculture sector, the public at large is informed now better about the state of our food system
and more concerned about the impact that agriculture has on the environment. Agriculture now accounts for about 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
a 75 percent increase since 1990, which makes agriculture a huge target for disruption. In addition, informed consumers are demanding locally grown, sustainable food with fewer chemicals,
and the agriculture supply chain must evolve to deliver such products. This has created opportunities for a new generation of startups to gain a toehold into new markets that are too small for larger agriculture players.
Finally, a confluence of hardware and software technology advances are creating opportunities to address this market.
Inexpensive and infinitely configurable mobile devices (enabled by advances in wireless and energy storage) have liberated technology from the office desktop.
At the same time inexpensive but sophisticated hardware sensors have emerged to automate the collection of massive data sets. With these technology shifts, exciting technologies like drones, AI, satellite mapping, robotics,
and the Internet of things, have realized quickly that the agriculture value chain provides fertile first market opportunities for many technologies that are advanced not enough or have not yet found solutions in the consumer space.
Many investors looking at these technologies are going to need to get smart on agriculture if theye going to make informed investment decisions.
Growth potential Agriculture has a long value chain and the sector is described often as being more horizontal than vertical (we tracked 16 subcategoriess diverse as biotech,
food e-commerce, and smart equipmentnd 10 of these subsectors had more than 5 percent share of the Agtech market),
and currently there is room for growth across the value chain. Already this year, wee seen a $50m investment into drone maker 3d Robotics and a $95m investment into microsatellite company Planet Labs, both of which count agriculture as key early market opportunities.
Foodtech company Soylent raised $20 million at a $100 million valuation, and plant trait company Arcadia Biosciences recently filed a $86 million IPO.
And in what might seem like a jump-the-shark moment while still in the first inning
a company called Flowhive has emerged as the highest grossing campaign on Indiegogo, raising over $6. 8 million for its honey-on tap technology,
already making it one of the top 10 crowdfunding campaigns of all time. Capital keeps lining up.
In the first quarter of 2015, Finistere Ventures and Maumee Ventures both announced the launch of their new Agtech funds,
and Ag-focused Paine & Partners announced a new $893m Private Equity Fund that will be allocating a portion of its investment to Agtech.
Investors are even jonesing for cannabis startups; Snoop Dogg announced a $25 million fund, and Founders Fund invested in Privateer Holdings$75 million fund,
which backed Leafy, the Yelp for marijuana. We even saw an exit this year, as precision ag company Farmers Edge, fresh off a Series B from Kleiner Perkins, announced the acquisition of Granduke Geomatics.
Farmers Edge seems to be taking a page out of Climate Corporation playbook, which made several acquisitions in 2014,
including Solum, Yieldpop, and 640 Labs. With VC backing that is focused on hyper growth, this may put more pressure on the incumbents in big ag,
who have traditionally been more conservative with acquisitions and have not fostered a robust environment of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Big hairy audacious goals Like cleantech before it many Agtech companies are have set their sights on Big Hairy Audacious Goals.
This is also a lure for investors who are attracted to companies looking to solve big problems with big market potential.
Agriculture accounts for 70%of freshwater withdrawals, and under Byzantine water rights laws that date back to the 1820s there has been little incentive for farmers to manage this resource more sustainably.
In response to the massive multi-year drought, Agtech companies are developing new solutions to use water more sustainably.
SWIIM, a company that was named recently a partner for the White house Climate Initiative is developing the Airbnb for H20.
It hardware/software solution enables farmers to analyze every drop of water on their property,
optimize its uses, and then rent out their surplus water needs to thirsty municipalities and industrials.
On the other end of the spectrum, Hampton Creek, a vegan mayonnaise company, is attempting to formulate an egg-less egg product.
If Hampton Creek can create a palatable all-vegan egg, the product could have a disruptive effect on the $120 billion egg industry.
Investors seem to think so, toohe company took in $90m from the likes Silicon valley heavyweights Khosla Ventures,
Founders Fund, Li-Kai Shing Horizons Ventures, Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), and Eduardo Saverin (Facebook).
And even further out there, New york-based Modern Meadow is printing meat and leather products with 3d technology.
Returns still need to be proved This new generation of Agtech has seen only a few major liquidity events,
and this will be a test for the industry in the years to come as investors assess their portfolios.
strategic acquisitions have largely been the path for liquidity for Agtech companies, but most of the incumbents have shown little appetite.
and has been on an acquisition spree itself with other Silicon valley startups like Farmers Edge following suit.
In several subsectors, notably food e-commerce and bioenergy, companies are reaching sizes where an IPO is within grasp,
The agriculture industry has sprouted historically large public corporations, and Agtech, still in its infancy, should be no different b
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