Circuit

Although you are fairly unlikely to start zapping your gadgets with high-power lasers any time soon, scientists are already hard at work trying to make electronics immune to such cruelty. In another in a series of self-healing electronics breakthroughs, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) demonstrated chips capable of dealing not only with laser-inflicted physical damage but also with far more common ailments such as aging, power fluctuations, changes in temperature or load mismatch.  Read More

Educational electronics kits like the one from Minty Geek are a great introduction to the world of circuit building and electronic tinkering, but are perhaps a little too basic for more advanced hobbyists. Three MIT students are currently enjoying enormous success on the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform with a DIY Tesla coil kit called oneTesla that can make artificial lightning sing ... well, erm, play music from a MIDI source. Now where did I put that polyphonic version of This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us by Sparks?  Read More

While the silicon chips found in the electronic devices that we rely on every day are built around the flow of electrons through circuits, with the development of an “integrated chemical chip,” a doctoral student in Organic Electronics at Sweden’s Linköping University has created the basis for an entirely new circuit technology based on the transmission of ions and molecules.  Read More

As I discovered when reviewing the Minty Geek Electronics Lab a while back, experimenting with circuit building can be a great deal of fun. There was one particular project in this kit that made use of the human body to complete a circuit, with a simple lie detector test being the end result. With their Makey Makey open source hardware project, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum have taken such touch interaction to a much more entertaining and inventive degree. Everyday objects like bananas, coins, and even Play-Doh can be transformed into a computer keyboard key or mouse click to control onscreen gaming action, play software-based instruments or type out short messages.  Read More

Although we may think of smartphones as being like tiny desktop computers, they do have at least one key difference – in order to save battery power, many of their functions are hardwired into highly-efficient dedicated processors, instead of taking the form of software. Because smartphones perform so many functions, however, not all of them can be hardwired. As a result, designers of mobile devices must decide which functions will be handled by software, and which by hardware. Computer scientists from MIT have recently devised a system that should make those designers’ jobs a lot easier – if they’re willing to adopt it.  Read More

A team of scientists from Montreal’s McGill University have successfully formed a circuit between two wires which were separated by a gap of only 15 nanometers – that’s about the width of 150 atoms. It is reportedly “the first time that anyone has studied how the wires in an electronic circuit interact with one another when packed so tightly together.” Along with being one of the smallest electronic circuits ever created, it has also led to a discovery that may have big implications for the world of computing.  Read More

Graphene has already brought us the world’s smallest transistor – twice – and now the one atom thick form of carbon that recently won its discoverers the Nobel Prize has been used to create a triple-mode, single-transistor amplifier. The new transistor has the potential to replace many traditional transistors in a typical integrated circuit and its developers say the device could become a key component in future electronic circuits.  Read More

Silicon is the main substrate used for the integrated circuits found in almost all electronic equipment available today. However, silicon could soon be replaced by plastic, film or even fabrics, with Xerox scientists developing a low-temperature silver ink that they say paves the way for the commercialization and low-cost manufacture of printable electronics. This process will offer manufacturers an inexpensive way to add “intelligence” or computing power to a wide range of surfaces to produce things like electronic clothing and cheap games.  Read More

Dropping an electrical device such as a mobile phone or laptop can prompt a few anxious moments as you rush to see whether your beloved device has survived the fall. Now researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working to make such incidents a little less distressing - they're developing a self-healing first-aid kit for electrical systems that could stop circuits failing and lead to safer, longer lasting batteries.  Read More