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- 2014-10-09 New semiconductor research may extend integrated circuit battery life tenfold
The key to the breakthrough is a tunneling field effect transistor. Transistors are switches that control the movement of electrons through material to conduct the electrical currents needed to run circuits. Unlike standard transistors, which are like driving a car over a hill, the tunneling field effect transistor is more like tunneling through a hill, says Sean Rommel, associate professor of electrical and microelectronic engineering.
"The tunneling field effect transistors have not yet demonstrated a sufficiently large drive current to make it a practical replacement for current transistor technology," Rommel says, "but this work conclusively established the largest tunneling current ever experimentally demonstrated, answering a key question about the viability of tunneling field effect transistor technology."
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- 2014-10-09 A KAIST research team developed in vivo flexible large scale integrated circuits
A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication. Silicon-based semiconductors have played significant roles in signal processing, nerve stimulation, memory storage, and wireless communication in implantable electronics. However, the rigid and bulky LSI chips have limited uses in in vivo devices due to incongruent contact with the curvilinear surfaces of human organs. Especially, artificial retinas recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration require extremely flexible and slim LSI to incorporate it within the cramped area of the human eye.
Although several research teams have fabricated flexible integrated circuits (ICs, tens of interconnected transistors) on plastics, their inaccurate nano-scale alignment on plastics has restricted the demonstration of flexible nano-transistors and their large scale interconnection for in vivo LSI applications such as main process unit (MPU), high density memory and wireless communication. Professor Lee's team previously demonstrated fully functional flexible memory using ultrathin silicon membranes (Nano Letters, Flexible Memristive Memory Array on Plastic Substrates), however, its integration level and transistor size (over micron scale) have limited functional applications for flexible consumer electronics.
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- 2014-10-09 Margination Gets The Integrated Circuit Treatment To Fix Sepsis
- Integrated circuit techniques can do just about anything - perhaps even help cure sepsis.
Margination is natural phenomenon where bacteria and leukocytes (white blood cells) move toward the sides of blood vessels. Now it's the inspiration for a novel method of treating sepsis, a systemic and often dangerous inflammatory response to microbial infection in the blood.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore have designed a branchlike system of microfluidic channels, 20 micrometers (about a fifth the size of a grain of sand) high by 20 micrometers wide, and thesemicrofluidic channels mimic the marginizing action of vessels on bacteria and inflammatory cellular components (leukocytes and platelets) to separate them from red blood cells. - See Details
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- 2014-10-09 Modeling Nano-worlds: Slashing Production Development Time And Costs For Integrated Circuits
Modelling the fabrication processes for integrated circuits can slash production development time and costs by up to 40%. But as transistors, already at nano-scales, become ever smaller, researchers are modelling new worlds.
Over the past seven years, the microprocessors in everyday electronic equipment have delivered astonishing advances in speed while reducing power consumption per transistor.
That is because the scale of the transistors manufactured in high volumes for these electronic devices decreased considerably. Current research is preparing for the 32nm and 22nm nodes and even beyond.
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- 2014-10-09 Physicists demonstrate quantum integrated circuit that implements quantum von Neumann architecture
- A new paradigm in quantum information processing has been demonstrated by physicists at UC Santa Barbara. Their results are published online in the journal Science.
The UCSB physicists have developed a quantum integrated circuit that implements the quantum von Neumann architecture. In this architecture, a long-lived quantum random access memory can be programmed using a quantum central processing unit, all constructed on a single chip, providing the key components for a quantum version of a classical computer.
The UCSB hardware is based on superconducting quantum circuits, and must be cooled to very low temperatures to display quantum behavior. The architecture represents a new paradigm in quantum information processing, and shows that quantum large-scale-integration is within reach.
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- 2014-10-09 Barrier to faster integrated circuits may be mere speed bump, scientists say
Integrated circuits, which enable virtually every electronics gadget you use on a daily basis, are constantly being pushed by the semiconductor industry to become smaller, faster, and cheaper. As has happened many times in the past and will continue in the future, integrated circuit scaling is perpetually in danger of hitting a wall that must be maneuvered around. According to Maxime Darnon, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in order to continue increasing the speed of integrated circuits, interconnect insulators will require an upgrade to porous, low-dielectric constant materials. Darnon and colleagues discuss the details in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
"The integration of a replacement, porous SiCOH (pSiCOH), however, poses serious problems such as an unacceptable 'roughening' that occurs during plasma processing," explains Darnon. "This is considered a 'showstopper' to faster integrated circuits at the moment, so a fundamental understanding of the roughening mechanisms that occur during the etch process of integrated circuit manufacturing is highly desirable to material designers and etch-process engineers.
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- 2014-10-09 Microfluidic integrated circuit could help enable home diagnostic tests
As a way to simplify lab-on-a-chip devices that could offer quicker, cheaper and more portable medical tests, University of Michigan researchers have created microfluidic integrated circuits. Just as electronic circuits intelligently route the flow of electricity on computer chips without external controls, these microfluidic circuits regulate the flow of fluid through their devices without instructions from outside systems.
A paper on the technology is newly published online in Nature Physics.
A microfluidic device, or lab-on-a-chip, integrates multiple laboratory functions onto one chip just centimeters in size. The devices allow researchers to experiment on tiny sample sizes, and also to simultaneously perform multiple experiments on the same material. They can be engineered to mimic the human body more closely than the Petri dish does. They could lead to instant home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases, among other advances.
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- 2014-10-09 New high-speed integrated circuit for world's biggest physics experiment is fastest of its kind
A new high-speed integrated circuit to reliably transmit data in the demanding environment of the world's largest physics experiment is the fastest of its kind. This new "link-on-chip" — or LOC serializer circuit — was designed by physicists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for use in a key experiment of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Europe.
The miniscule SMU LOC serializer was designed for ATLAS, which is the largest particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The LHC is a massive, high-tech tunnel about 100 meters underground. Within the circular, 17-mile-long tunnel, protons traveling at high energy are smashed together and broken apart so physicists worldwide can analyze the resulting particle shower detailed in a flood of electronic data.
The data is transmitted from the LHC via a tiny serializer circuit enabling electronic readouts. Physicists analyze the data to discover answers to unsolved scientific mysteries such as the Big Bang, dark matter, black holes, the nature of the universe and the Higgs particle that gives mass to quarks and electrons. SMU is a member of the ATLAS Experiment.
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- 2014-10-08 New Integrated Circuits Consume No Standby Power
NEC and Rohm are going back and forth on new engineering breakthroughs that will allow integrated circuits inside chips to consume no power when they're briefly inactive between cycles. And unlike most chip-level developments on the edge, we may see the technology in consumer products by the end of the year.
Rohm plans to start shipping their design this year, with products possibly appearing before the end of 2009. NEC plans to release a System-on-a-Chip prototype some time this year as well.
Many of our electrical devices suck up power even while they're "off." Same goes with the circuits that make up our processors--even while fully powered-on and working, there are brief intervals of inactivity when individual circuits in the system are at rest between cycles. The new chip designs differ in that they don't require the inactive portions of the circuit to receive full power at all times, allowing for more efficiency both during use and in a traditional "standby mode."
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- 2014-10-08 Terahertz Waves Are Effective Probes For Integrated Circuit Heat Barriers
By modifying a commonly used commercial infrared spectrometer to allow operation at long-wave terahertz frequencies, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered an efficient new approach to measure key structural properties of nanoscale metal-oxide films used in high-speed integrated circuits.
Their technique, described in a recent paper, could become an important quality-control tool to help monitor semiconductor manufacturing processes and evaluate new insulating materials.
Chip manufacturers deposit complicated mazes of layered metallic conductor and semiconconductor films interlaced with insulating metal oxide nanofilms to form transistors and conduct heat. Because high electrical leakage and excess heat can cause nanoscale devices to operate inefficiently or fail, manufacturers need to know the dielectric and mechanical properties of these nanofilms to predict how well they will perform in smaller, faster devices.
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- 2014-10-08 Metal ink could ease way toward flexible electronic books, displays
Scientists are reporting the development of a novel metal ink made of small sheets of copper that can be used to write a functioning, flexible electric circuit on regular printer paper. Their report on the conductive ink, which could pave the way for a wide range of new bendable gadgets, such as electronic books that look and feel more like traditional paperbacks, appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Wenjun Dong, Ge Wang and colleagues note that the tantalizing possibilities of flexible electronics, from tablets that roll up to wearable circuits woven into clothes, have attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. But much of the progress toward this coming wave of futuristic products has entailed making circuits using complicated, time-consuming and expensive processes, which would hinder their widespread use. In response, researchers have been working toward a versatile conductive ink. They have tried several materials such as polymers and gold and silver nanostructures. So far, these materials have fallen short in one way or another. So, Dong and Wang's group decided to try copper nanosheets, which are inexpensive and highly conductive, as a flexible circuit ink.
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- 2014-10-08 Vibrating micro plates bring order to overcrowded radio spectrum
GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G, GPS: a smartphone already has to handle many wireless standards. And this number will only increase further. There are still no good filters to keep all those future standards separate. Researchers at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology have taken an important step with a new type of filter, based on micromechanics. They have published their finding in Applied Physics Letters.
Filters that can be accurately tuned to the frequency band you want to receive as a user are becoming increasingly important. Otherwise, if a nearby signal is much stronger, it drowns out the signal you want to receive. The number of available frequencies is limited, so it is becoming ever busier. Intelligent use of the airwaves, by utilising every available piece, is becoming more important. The filters now presented by the researchers are based on micromechanical resonators and can be accurately tuned to the desired frequency.
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- 2014-10-08 Brain circuits multitask to detect, discriminate the outside world
Imagine driving on a dark road. In the distance you see a single light. As the light approaches it splits into two headlights. That's a car, not a motorcycle, your brain tells you.
A new study found that neural circuits in the brain rapidly multitask between detecting and discriminating sensory input, such as headlights in the distance. That's different from how electronic circuits work, where one circuit performs a very specific task. The brain, the study found, is wired in way that allows a single pathway to perform multiple tasks.
"We showed that circuits in the brain change or adapt from situations when you need to detect something versus when you need to discriminate fine details," said Garrett Stanley, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, whose lab performed the research. "One of the things the brain is good at is doing multiple things. Engineers have trouble with that."
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- 2014-10-08 Move over, silicon, there's a new circuit in town
When it comes to electronics, silicon will now have to share the spotlight. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering describe how they have overcome a major issue in carbon nanotube technology by developing a flexible, energy-efficient hybrid circuit combining carbon nanotube thin film transistors with other thin film transistors. This hybrid could take the place of silicon as the traditional transistor material used in electronic chips, since carbon nanotubes are more transparent, flexible, and can be processed at a lower cost.
Electrical engineering professor Dr. Chongwu Zhou and USC Viterbi graduate students Haitian Chen, Yu Cao, and Jialu Zhang developed this energy-efficient circuit by integrating carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film transistors (TFT) with thin film transistors comprised of indium, gallium and zinc oxide (IGZO).
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- 2014-10-08 Self-powered wireless light detectors
A low-power photodetection system can harness enough energy to power an autonomous sensor and monitoring network.
Light detectors are used extensively in daily life as brightness sensors and as receivers for remote control devices in electrical gadgets, for example. However, operating these detectors requires electrical energy, which limits their versatility.
Now, Kui Yao and colleagues from the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore have developed a photodetector that can harvest just small quantities of detected light to generate enough energy to power a sensing signal transmission through a radio-frequency transmitter.
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- 2014-10-08 Circuits and sensors direct from the printer
Printers are becoming more and more versatile. Now they can even print sensors and electronic components on 2D and 3D substrates. A new, robot-assisted production line allows the process to be automated.
These days, no office is complete without a printer. But digital printing technologies also play an important role in microelectronics, microsystems engineering and sensor systems. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM in Bremen use various printing methods to produce electronic components and sensors. The tiny resistors, transistors, circuit paths and capacitors are first designed on screen and then deposited directly onto two- and three-dimensional substrates, for instance circuit boards. Instead of the usual paper inks, the scientists use what are known as "functional inks" -- electronic materials in liquid or paste form. The range of potential uses for printed electronics is wide -- from the electronic circuits in digital thermometers to flexible sheets of solar cells and smart packaging with built-in sensors.
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- 2014-10-08 Atomically thin material opens door for integrated nanophotonic circuits
A new combination of materials can efficiently guide electricity and light along the same tiny wire, a finding that could be a step towards building computer chips capable of transporting digital information at the speed of light.
Reporting today in The Optical Society's (OSA) journal Optica, optical and material scientists at the University of Rochester and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich describe a basic model circuit consisting of a silver nanowire and a single-layer flake of molybendum disulfide (MoS2).
Using a laser to excite electromagnetic waves called plasmons at the surface of the wire, the researchers found that the MoS2 flake at the far end of the wire generated strong light emission. Going in the other direction, as the excited electrons relaxed, they were collected by the wire and converted back into plasmons, which emitted light of the same wavelength.
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- 2014-10-08 Researchers advance scheme to design seamless integrated circuits etched on graphene
Researchers in electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara have introduced and modeled an integrated circuit design scheme in which transistors and interconnects are monolithically patterned seamlessly on a sheet of graphene, a 2-dimensional plane of carbon atoms. The demonstration offers possibilities for ultra energy-efficient, flexible, and transparent electronics.
Bulk materials commonly used to make CMOS transitors and interconnects pose fundamental challenges in continuous shrinking of their feature-sizes and suffer from increasing "contact resistance" between them, both of which lead to degrading performance and rising energy consumption. Graphene-based transistors and interconnects are a promising nanoscale technology that could potentially address issues of traditional silicon-based transistors and metal interconnects.
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- 2014-10-07 Chips that listen to bacteria: CMOS technology provides new insights into how biofilms form
- In a study published today in Nature Communications, a research team led by Ken Shepard, professor of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, and Lars Dietrich, assistant professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, has demonstrated that integrated circuit technology, the basis of modern computers and communications devices, can be used for a most unusual application -- the study of signaling in bacterial colonies. They have developed a chip based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology that enables them to electrochemically image the signaling molecules from these colonies spatially and temporally. In effect, they have developed chips that "listen" to bacteria.
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- 2014-10-07 Circuits capable of functioning at temperatures greater than 350 degrees Celsius
Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have designed integrated circuits that can survive at temperatures greater than 350 degrees Celsius -- or roughly 660 degrees Fahrenheit. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation, will improve the functioning of processors, drivers, controllers and other analog and digital circuits used in power electronics, automobiles and aerospace equipment -- all of which must perform at high and often extreme temperatures.
"This ruggedness allows these circuits to be placed in locations where standard silicon-based parts can't survive," said Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor. "The circuit blocks we designed contributed to superior performance of signal processing, controllers and driver circuitry. We are extremely excited about the results so far."
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- 2014-10-07 Foldable And Stretchable, Silicon Circuits Conform To Many Shapes
Scientists have developed a new form of stretchable silicon integrated circuit that can wrap around complex shapes such as spheres, body parts and aircraft wings, and can operate during stretching, compressing, folding and other types of extreme mechanical deformations, without a reduction in electrical performance.
"The notion that silicon cannot be used in such applications because it is intrinsically brittle and rigid has been tossed out the window," said John Rogers, a Founder Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois.
"Through carefully optimized mechanical layouts and structural configurations, we can use silicon in integrated circuits that are fully foldable and stretchable," said Rogers, who is a corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in the journal Science, and posted on its Science Express Web site.
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- 2014-10-07 Integrated Receiver For High Frequency Applications On A Tiny Chip
Researchers at Chalmers University in Sweden have succeeded in combining a receiver for high frequencies with an antenna on a small chip.
The receiver is just a few square millimetre and is suitable for new safety systems, image sensors, and radio communication for high bitrates. The receiver is an electronic circuit including antenna, low noise amplifier, and frequency converter monolithically integrated on gallium arsenide.
"This is a breakthrough in our research. Our result opens the possibility to manufacture systems for very high frequencies within the so called 'THZ-electronics' area, to a relatively low cost. In the next phase of this project even more functions can be integrated on the same chip", according to Herbert Zirath, professor at the department of Microwave Electronics.
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- 2014-10-07 Nanotechnology circuits for wireless devices: First wafer-scale graphene integrated circuit smaller than a pinhead
IBM Research scientists have announced that they have achieved a milestone in creating a building block for the future of wireless devices. In a paper published in the journal Science, IBM researchers announced the first integrated circuit fabricated from wafer-size graphene, and demonstrated a broadband frequency mixer operating at frequencies up to 10 gigahertz (10 billion cycles/second).
Designed for wireless communications, this graphene-based analog integrated circuit could improve today's wireless devices and points to the potential for a new set of applications. At today's conventional frequencies, cell phone and transceiver signals could be improved, potentially allowing phones to work where they can't today while, at much higher frequencies, military and medical personnel could see concealed weapons or conduct medical imaging without the same radiation dangers of X-rays.
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- 2014-10-07 Josephson Synthesizer Circuit Demonstrated
NIST researchers recently demonstrated sine-wave synthesis on three superconducting integrated circuit chips using palladium-gold barrier junctions. The demonstration chips were used to make comparisons with conventional alternating current (AC) voltage standards at the part-per-million level, and provided 0.1 volt and 5 megahertz sine-wave outputs.
This is a major step toward the goal of developing a waveform synthesizer—using Josephson junctions—which would provide precisely defined output voltages (up to one volt), frequencies (up to one gigahertz) and waveforms of any arbitrary shape. Such a system would have practical application as an AC voltage standard source and for calibrating high-performance test and measurement instruments.
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- 2014-10-07 Toward Next-generation Integrated Circuits Made From Carbon Nanotubes
Scientists in Israel are reporting the first simple and inexpensive method for building the large-scale networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) needed for using these microscopic wisps in a future generation of faster, smaller, and more powerful computers and portable electronic devices.
In a study scheduled for the Sept. 12 issue of ACS' Nano Letters Yael Hanein and colleagues point out that no assembly method has solved all of the key problems involved in fabrication of large networks. Those problems range from aligning SWCNTs in a preset pattern to integrating carbon nanotube circuits into an integrated circuit environment similar to those at the heart of conventional microprocessors.
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- 2014-10-07 Barrier to faster integrated circuits may be mere speed bump, scientists say
Integrated circuits, which enable virtually every electronics gadget you use on a daily basis, are constantly being pushed by the semiconductor industry to become smaller, faster, and cheaper. As has happened many times in the past and will continue in the future, integrated circuit scaling is perpetually in danger of hitting a wall that must be maneuvered around.
According to Maxime Darnon, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in order to continue increasing the speed of integrated circuits, interconnect insulators will require an upgrade to porous, low-dielectric constant materials. Darnon and colleagues discuss the details in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
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- 2014-10-07 World's smallest on-chip low-pass filter developed
A research team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has successfully designed the world's smallest on-chip low-pass filter which is 1,000 times smaller than existing off-chip filters.
A low-pass filter is a circuit that allows low-frequency signals to pass through while reducing unwanted high-frequency signals from passing through. Compared to existing off-chip filters, which are discrete and bulky components, on-chip filters occupy a small area on integrated circuit chips, which can be found in portable devices such as mobile phones, laptops, vehicle-mounted radars, as well as speed guns used in traffic monitoring.
The successful completion of this research project was announced at the official opening of VIRTUS, the new Integrated Circuit Design Centre of Excellence, which was launched by NTU and the Economic Development Board just 10 months ago.
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- 2014-05-08 Atmel to Present at Three Investor Conferences During the Second Quarter
- On May 13, Steve Skaggs, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will present at the Wedbush Transformational Technologies Conference at Le Parker Meridien Hotel in New York at 8 a.m. Eastern Time.
- On May 28, Peter Schuman, Senior Director Investor Relations, will meet with investors at the Craig-Hallum Institutional Investor Conference which will feature one-on-one meetings at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center Hotel.
- On June 4, Steve Laub, President and Chief Executive Officer, will present at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2014 Global Technology Conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco at 2:50 p.m. Pacific Time.
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