Research

Key areas where flexible electronics are having a commercial impact are examined by Liam Critchley, who finds smaller companies are carving their own industry niches. The growth of advanced fabrication methods, small-scale nanomaterials and the ability to embed flexible circuitry and components into polymeric hosts have given rise to flexible electronics with advanced functionalities. This has become a popular way ...

Imec has unveiled another pioneering design – the nanowell FET. Building upon traditional FinFET principles, this innovation introduces an additional well in the nanowire that further enhances the sensitivity of the device. The device features a 35-40nm wide silicon FinFET with a 25nm nanowell as the active sensing area. Within the well, binding of an estimated ten short single-stranded DNA ...

Birmingham University is looking for licensees and commercial development partners for patented technologies for  power system frequency control and forced oscillations which can cause widespread disruption over entire power grids. Professor Xiao-Ping Zhang (pictured) Chair in Electrical Power Systems at Birmingham’s Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering, and his researchers have  developed technologies to overcome these challenges. Grid frequency ...

There are a few ways to harvest 10μW from the environment but, perhaps, none so much fun as a generator based on a ‘drinking bird’ toy built by researchers in China. Dubbed a DB-THG (drinking-bird triboelectric hydrovoltaic generator), power is extracted from the movement of the bird by the rubbing action of different materials – think rubbing a balloon on ...

An ultrasound-based sensing technique developed for medicine could have wider application. The question that inspired the technique was: how do we spot leaks from the gut after gastric surgery? Neither ultrasound, CT or MRI scanning could be used to remotely determine local chemistry around the internal wound, according to Northwestern University, which teamed up with the Washington University School of ...

World-renowned semiconductor research lab Imec has named Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, as the winner of the 2024 Imec Innovation Award. “Since taking the helm of AMD in 2014, Dr Su’s technological acumen and leadership have propelled the company to the forefront of semiconductor technology development,” said Imec CEO Luc Van den hove. “Under her leadership, AMD has ...

100Tbyte of information could be stored on each side of a optical disc the same size as a DVD, according to the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST), which worked with the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) to build a technology demonstrator. Artists impression This is a far higher than current magnetic recording techniques, and ...

Researchers at the University of Michigan have made what is in effect a very agile ruler using a novel sub-THz radar technique, and reported it last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Its 235GHz antennas and the core active components are integrated on a single IC, and across a desktop it measures the range to a target with sub-mm ...

Instantaneous power demand on large processor ICs is getting crazy, with a thousand amps flowing at times. Pondering future system-in-package designs that will consume around 1kW, Intel has used a 16nm finfet cmos process to created a prototype 52 phase buck converter that can be built into such ICs, which it revealed at the International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San ...

Renesas has developed an AI accelerator for real-time processing of algorithms in robots, and described it at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. This accelerator appeared in a product a month later The foreseen robot needs conventional processing for planning and control, alongside AI processing at ~100Top/s peak for vision-based environmental recognition, with low power dissipation to avoid ...