University Electronics

A hand-held blood cell analysis device for doctors' surgeries is being developed by the University of Southampton.

The University of Southampton has won Synopsys' £25,000 Charles Babbage Grant, the first university outside the US to do so. Also part of the Grant, the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will receive licenses of Synopsys' EDA software and intellectual property for two years.

Georgia Tech is claiming 100MA/cm2 current densities for graphene interconnect. Graphene, a single layer of graphite molecules discovered at the University of Manchester, is being touted both for future on-chip interconnect and super-fast semiconductors.

The University of Surrey and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have signed an agreement to collaborate in a £10m programme to realise the full potential of research into areas such as signal processing and nanotechnology.

The sensor is part of a project called Transport Information Monitoring Environment (TIME) that is looking at ways to gather traffic information, then process it into formats that are useful to traffic managers and road planners.

Professor Andy Hopper and Dr Andrew Rice of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, examine the role of computing in the quest to reduce our impact on the environment and improve our lives.

Researchers at the University of Southampton are to cut the need for multi-voltage manufacturing testing at deep sub-micron chip plants. The issue is, Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi told Electronics Weekly, that certain defects only show up at certain voltages.

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) and the National Science Foundation of China and the National Science Foundation of China have funded a three-year 'spintronics' study to be carried out by the London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL (University College London), the Institute of Microelectronics at Peking University and the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute.

A magnetic robot 'ferret' is to search cargo containers at UK ports, if a project at the University of Sheffield goes to plan. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the requirement came out of the UK Boarder Agency (UKBA) which is looking for alternatives to unpacking suspect containers, at least for preliminary searches.

The University of Southampton has been awarded £6m to establish a centre for nanostructured photonic metamaterials by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).