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Electronics
Implantable Silicon-Silk electronics could mean LED tattoos
By Darren Quick
22:52 November 11, 2009 PST
Tattooing dates back to at least Neolithic times and has experienced a resurgence in popularity in many parts of the world in recent years. Advancements in tattoo pigments and the refinement of tattooing equipment has seen an improvement in the quality of tattoos being produced. Today it’s possible to get ink that glows under UV light, but a new technology could see tattoos that emit their own light. Researchers have been able to build thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates that almost completely dissolve inside the body, paving the way for embedded LED tattoos that offer much more than just aesthetic appeal. Read More
New spintronics breakthrough paves the way to faster computing
19:30 October 29, 2009 PDT
A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati have achieved control of the spin of electrons traveling on a wire by simply regulating an electrical voltage. This is a major milestone in the brief history of spintronics, the emerging technology that uses the spin of electrons to store and manipulate digital information with much higher speeds and efficiency. Read More
Xerox develops silver ink to usher in new era of low cost printable electronics
By Darren Quick
01:35 October 28, 2009 PDT
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
Newly developed nanomaterial could boost data storage density and cars' fuel efficiency
18:00 October 25, 2009 PDT
By manipulating matter at the nanoscale level, engineers from North Carolina State University led by Dr. Jagdish Narayan have developed a new material that could make it possible to manufacture terabyte memory chips the size of a fingernail, boost vehicles' fuel economy significantly and reduce heat dissipated by semiconductors, with applications ranging from spintronics to solar panel technology. Read More
'Time telescope' speeds up optical transmission by 27 times
22:17 October 4, 2009 PDT
Most of today's telecommunication data is encoded at a speed of 10 Gbit/s, but researchers are constantly looking for new ways to push this limit even further. A group of researchers at Cornell University have recently come up with the "time telescope," a sophisticated system that can speed up optical communication by 27 times to an outstanding 270 Gbits/s by squeezing more information into a single flash of light and that, unlike previous solutions, does so in an energy-efficient manner. Read More
Better control over nanotube growth promises important advances in electronics
02:12 October 3, 2009 PDT
Researchers at the Honda Research Institute, Purdue University and the University of Louisville have discovered a way to systematically grow carbon nanotubes with either metallic or semiconducting properties, solving a long-standing problem in nanotechnology research and paving the way for the widespread use of nanotubes in electronics. Read More
New advances in excitonics promise faster computers
16:44 October 1, 2009 PDT
Much of today's research in electronics is geared towards obtaining faster computing and higher communication speeds. Researchers at UC San Diego are no exception, and have recently announced they have made another important step towards achieving exciton-based computation at room temperatures. Excitonics exploits the unique properties of excitons instead of the usual electrons, and promises much faster performance by interfacing more naturally with optical communications such as fiber optics. Read More
Intel unveils world's first working 22nm chips
04:06 September 24, 2009 PDT
During the keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum recently held in San Francisco, Intel CEO Paul Otellini displayed a silicon wafer containing the world's first working chips featuring 22nm transistor technology, which include both densely packed SRAM memory and logic circuits to be used in future Intel microprocessors. Read More
Self-healing electronics using carbon nanotube-filled microcapsules
By Darren Quick
21:02 September 17, 2009 PDT
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
Algae used to create a quick-charge, lightweight battery
16:21 September 13, 2009 PDT
Algae blooms are unpleasant and unpredictable phenomena that arise quickly and strike seas and oceans, often causing serious problems to local ecosystems. But, in an effort to try and find a use for such algae, a research team from Uppsala University, Sweden, has recently managed to design a record-breaking "green" lightweight battery that is incredibly easy to produce and might just even out the environmental consequences of these blooms. Read More
Graphite could revolutionize mass data storage AND circuit design
11:25 September 10, 2009 PDT
Graphite has long been known to have unique electrical properties and has therefore been put forward by many as a possible substitute for silicon for use in integrated circuitry. Now, in a major step towards making graphene-based electronics, researchers from Rice University have published the results of work on graphite-based mass data storage and reprogrammable gate arrays. Read More
New NanoPen technique could make your home projector a cutting-edge nanotech lab
17:10 September 9, 2009 PDT
A research team from the University of California, Berkeley, has reported developing NanoPen, an innovative and accessible technique that could prove especially useful in laying down patterns of nanoparticles for conveniently manufacturing miniaturized electronics with great speed and accuracy. Read More
Newly-developed 'graphone' makes spintronic devices closer than ever
19:29 September 3, 2009 PDT
A team of researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University, Peking University in Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Science, and Tohoku University in Japan has designed a new graphite-based magnetic nanomaterial that behaves as a semiconductor and could prove very important for ongoing research in the field of spintronics. Read More
Smarter touch surfaces with new pressure sensitive technology
By Darren Quick
01:43 August 28, 2009 PDT
Resistance touch technology, which generally relies on the use of a stylus or similar instrument, typically detects touch by measuring changes in electrical resistance. But it can only detect one touch at a time. Touch screen using capacitance technology can detect multiple inputs, but can’t detect pressure. Now researchers at New York University (NYU) are looking to get the best of both worlds with a new type of touch-sensitive pad that responds precisely to pressure and can detect multiple inputs at once. Read More
Liquid-OLED design could boost lifetime for OLED displays
17:36 August 27, 2009 PDT
Researchers from the Center for Future Chemistry at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, have been exploring a new kind of organic light-emitting diodes that use a generated liquid to transfer electrical charge, addressing problems such as flexibility and quick degradation in standard OLED technology. Read More
Tiny lasers hold key to nano-circuitry
18:31 August 23, 2009 PDT
Researchers at Cornell, Purdue and Norfolk State University have reported the successful creation of a 'spaser', a new kind of nanoscale laser that breaks dimensional limits previously thought to be insurmountable, leading the way to significantly faster and more efficient computer processing and data transfer rates. Read More
Researchers take first steps towards strain-based graphene engineering
19:08 August 5, 2009 PDT
Scientists have long known the unique properties of graphene, a material just one-atom thick that shows promise as a replacement for silicon in electronics of the future. One of the difficulties is that unpredictable ripples form in graphene when exposed to temperature changes, but now scientists are learning more about how to control formation of these ripples, which could open up a new field of research - strain-based graphene electronics. Read More
Nanoscale lasers are about to get even smaller
20:48 August 4, 2009 PDT
In a collaborative effort between the Arizona State University and Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, researchers have found a way to make optical lasers much smaller than it was previously thought was possible, making dreams of speedier computers and faster Internet access closer to reality than ever before. Read More
Reconfigurable supercomputer aims for best of both worlds
17:51 July 28, 2009 PDT
Today's computers can carry on a wide range of tasks thanks to a general architecture that allows for great flexibility at the cost of a non-optimal performance; on the other end, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) can carry on a very specific task with great speed and energy efficiency, but are very inflexible. Now Novo-G, a reconfigurable supercomputer developed at the University of Florida that's described as the most powerful of its kind, is attempting to take the best from both worlds by being able to effectively change its hardware configuration as needed to compute with the greatest possible speed and efficiency. Read More
MIT team develops hi-fi quantum memory
20:27 July 21, 2009 PDT
Scientists are rapidly achieving important breakthroughs in quantum computing, from obtaining precise manipulation of four photons at the same time to the very first quantum processors. But just like in traditional electronics, a quantum computer can't be realized with information processing alone — we need a reliable way to store and retrieve quantum information too. A new breakthrough by MIT researchers represents a step forward in acheiving this goal of high-fidelity quantum memory. Read More
Holographic laser projection technology to transform any surface into a touch screen
By Darren Quick
01:02 July 21, 2009 PDT
Light Blue Optics (LBO) has received an injection of funds to further its development of, among other things, a holographic laser projection technology. The big news is that this technology can be touch-enabled, meaning any flat surface, such as a table, can be instantly transformed into a touch-sensitive display, eliminating the need for a touch screen and allowing users to directly interact with multimedia content. Read More
Sound laser could be the key to manipulating nanoparticles
19:04 June 23, 2009 PDT
A team of researchers has managed to build the first "saser" or sound laser, a device capable of generating a highly concentrated beam of sound waves at terahertz frequency that, while built out of simple scientific curiosity, could have important repercussions on nanoscale microchips' performance. Read More
Stickers may lead to stretchable electronics
17:08 June 19, 2009 PDT
Wrinkling, blisters and delamination on stickers applied to curved or bendable surfaces are usually an annoyance, but examining this phenomena has led researchers to a new, powerful approach to fabricating stretchable electronics that could pave the way to the production of components with very high mechanical resistance. Read More
Long sought-after material could revolutionize electronics
20:29 June 16, 2009 PDT
How often do you find yourself with a portable computer burning up on your lap with strange noises coming from your fan? Thanks to a recent research conducted at Stanford University, bismuth telluride — a new, easy-to-manipulate material with unique electrical properties — could make computer fans a distant memory while allowing for much faster and power-efficient devices. Move over electronics - here comes spintronics. Read More
Pioneer makes AVIC in-car navigation easier on the eye
23:32 June 14, 2009 PDT
Concentrating on improved functionality, visual clarity and ease-of-use for the driver, Pioneer Electronics' latest update to its AVIC range of navigation systems offer a variety of screen views, pop-up highway signs for major junctions, on-screen info designed for ‘at-a-glance’ reading and more than 1300 3-D icons of major landmarks. Read More
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- November 21, 2009 @ 03:30 UTC
