文章资讯
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- 2015-06-09 Researchers develop technique for integrating 'III-V' materials onto silicon wafers
- A team of IBM researchers in Zurich, Switzerland with support from colleagues in Yorktown Heights, New York has developed a relatively simple, robust and versatile process for growing crystals made from compound semiconductor materials that will allow them be integrated onto silicon wafers—an important step toward making future computer chips that will allow integrated circuits to continue shrinking in size and cost even as they increase in performance.
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- 2015-06-08 VCs bet big on Silicon Valley biotech
- Companies searching for cures for cancer and testing treatments for crippling genetic diseases are capturing the interest of venture capitalists - and their money - more than at any time in the last seven years.
The biotech boom in Silicon Valley and nationwide has led to enormous VC investments into the industry and a flurry of initial public offerings, more startups promising gene therapy breakthroughs or cures for deadly fungal infections getting off the ground, and more technology to diagnose and treat previously untreatable diseases popping up in hospitals. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 After security scandal, a tech firm says it's changing focus
- A Silicon Valley startup says it's shutting down operations and shifting to a new business model after it was blamed earlier this year for turning unwitting computer users into targets for annoying web ads—and hackers.
Facing lawsuits and an industry crackdown, Superfish co-founder Adi Pinhas said he wants to find new uses for the company's powerful "visual search" software, which can recognize a picture and search for similar images without relying on text labels. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 Woman tosses Apple computer that turns out to be worth $200K
- Her electronic waste is someone else's treasure.
A recycling center in the Silicon Valley is looking for a woman who dropped off an old Apple computer that turned out to be a collectible item worth $200,000.
The computer was inside boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her garage after her husband died, said Victor Gichun, the vice president of Clean Bay Area. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 Rare Apple computer dumped for recycling
- A Silicon Valley recycling company on Monday was searching for a woman who dropped off a rare Apple computer subsequently snapped up by a collector for $200,000.
The woman didn't leave her name or ask for a receipt when she dropped off a box of unwanted gadgets, including a first-generation Apple I computer considered a coveted collectable by computer history buffs, according to US media reports. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 Tesla Motors co-founder wants to electrify commercial trucks
- Twelve years ago, Ian Wright and some fellow engineers launched Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that has helped jumpstart the market for electric cars.
Now, the Tesla co-founder wants to electrify noisy, gas-guzzling trucks that deliver packages, haul garbage and make frequent stops on city streets. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 New heterogeneous wavelength tunable laser diode for high-frequency efficiency
- Researchers at Tohoku University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, have developed a novel ultra-compact heterogeneous wavelength tunable laser diode. The heterogeneous laser diode was realized through a combination of silicon photonics and quantum-dot (QD) technology, and demonstrates a wide-range tuning-operation.
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- 2015-06-08 Pinholes be gone
- Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have eliminated problematic pinholes in the top layer of next-generation solar cells in development. At the same time, they have significantly improved the lifetime of the solar cell and made it thinner. The findings were recently published inScientific Reports.
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- 2015-06-08 Massive chip consolidation wave is changing semiconductor industry
- A wave of mergers and acquisitions is reshaping Silicon Valley's semiconductor industry as companies join forces to shoulder the soaring technology costs required to stay competitive.
Half a dozen chipmakers in Silicon Valley, including a few storied names, have changed hands in less than two years in nearly $12 billion in mergers and acquisitions affecting thousands of employees and costing some their jobs. In one merger 1,600 people are being laid off. - See Details
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- 2015-06-08 Solar cell sets world record with a stabilized efficiency of 13.6%
- In a new study, scientists have reported a world record stabilized efficiency of 13.6% for a triple-junction thin-film silicon solar cell, which is a newer version of the single-junction thin-film silicon solar cell that has been used in commercial products since the 1970s. This value edges out the previous record of 13.44%, and the researchers expect that a few reasonable improvements will push it above 14%.
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- 2015-06-08 Researchers create solar cells with record energy performance
- Researchers at the Department of Electronic Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) have obtained a record efficiency of 22% with silicon solar cells that incorporate a surface treatment called black silicon on the front of the cell. This technique coats the surface with a dry chemical that results in small conical tips at the nanometric scale.
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- 2015-06-06 Mission possible: This device will self-destruct when heated
- Where do electronics go when they die? Most devices are laid to eternal rest in landfills. But what if they just dissolved away, or broke down to their molecular components so that the material could be recycled?
University of Illinois researchers have developed heat-triggered self-destructingelectronic devices, a step toward greatly reducing electronic waste and boosting sustainability in device manufacturing. They also developed a radio-controlled trigger that could remotely activate self-destruction on demand. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Your smartphone is a target, so make it secure
- Consumers beware: Your smartphone represents a uniquely valuable and vulnerable target for hackers, scam artists and other bad actors.
But don't panic. While the security threats to your smartphone are real and growing, they're nowhere near crisis levels. And you can protect your device and your data from many of the biggest security threats fairly easily. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Researchers first to create a single-molecule diode
- Under the direction of Latha Venkataraman, associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, researchers have designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, they have developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs. Venkataraman's group is the first to develop a single-molecule diode that may have real-world technological applications for nanoscale devices.
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- 2015-06-06 Research could lead to biodegradable computer chips
- Portable electronics - typically made of non-renewable, non-biodegradable and potentially toxic materials - are discarded at an alarming rate in consumers' pursuit of the next best electronic gadget.
In an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has collaborated with researchers in the Madison-based U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) to develop a surprising solution: a semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Light-powered healing of a wearable electrical conductor
- Mechanical failure along a conductive pathway can cause the unexpected shutdown of electronic devices, ultimately limiting device lifetimes. In particular, wearable electronic devices, which inevitably undergo dynamic and vigorous motions (e.g., bending, folding, or twisting), are much more liable to suffer from such conductive failures compared with conventional flat electronic devices. To address this problem, various systems to realize healable electrical conductors have been proposed; however, rapid, noninvasive, and on-demand healing, factors that are all synergistically required, especially for wearable device applications, still remains challenging to realize.
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- 2015-06-06 High-temperature superconductivity in atomically thin films
- A research group at Tohoku University has succeeded in fabricating an atomically thin, high-temperature superconductor film with a superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of up to 60 K (-213°C). The team, led by Prof. Takashi Takahashi (WPI-AIMR) and Asst. Prof. Kosuke Nakayama (Dept. of Physics), also established the method to control/tune the Tc.
This finding not only provides an ideal platform for investigating the mechanism ofsuperconductivity in the two-dimensional system, but also paves the way for the development of next-generation nano-scale superconducting devices. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Nanoengineers develop basis for electronics that stretch at the molecular level
- Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego are asking what might be possible if semiconductor materials were flexible and stretchable without sacrificing electronic function?
Today's flexible electronics are already enabling a new generation of wearable sensors and other mobile electronic devices. But these flexible electronics, in which very thin semiconductor materials are applied to a thin, flexible substrate in wavy patterns and then applied to a deformable surface such as skin or fabric, are still built around hard composite materials that limit their elasticity. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Flexible all-carbon electronics integrated onto plants, insects, and more
- Carbon-based electronics are being widely explored due to their attractive electrical and mechanical properties, but synthesizing them in large quantities at low cost is still a challenge.
Now in a new study, researchers have developed a new method for synthesizing entire integrated all-carbon electronic devices, including transistors, electrodes, interconnects, and sensors, in a single step, greatly simplifying their formation. The inexpensive electronic devices can then be attached to a wide variety of surfaces, including plants, insects, paper, clothes, and human skin. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Galaxy Round: Samsung to debut smartphone with curved display
- Samsung Electronics said it will release a smartphone with a curved display—and a $1,000 price tag.
The Galaxy Round has a curved 5.7-inch (14.5 cm) screen using advanced display technology called organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, technology. The Korean company said such a curved screen smartphone is the first in the world.
Samsung said the curve will make it easier to grip. The high-end gizmo has some features that make use of the display's curve, such as playing the next song in a music playlist by tilting the phone to the left or to the right. - See Details
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- 2015-06-06 Several top websites use device fingerprinting to secretly track users
- A new study by KU Leuven-iMinds researchers has uncovered that 145 of the Internet's 10,000 top websites track users without their knowledge or consent. The websites use hidden scripts to extract a device fingerprint from users' browsers. Device fingerprinting circumvents legal restrictions imposed on the use of cookies and ignores the Do Not Track HTTP header. The findings suggest that secret tracking is more widespread than previously thought.
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- 2015-06-05 Super-thin membranes clear the way for chip-sized pumps
- The ability to shrink laboratory-scale processes to automated chip-sized systems would revolutionize biotechnology and medicine. For example, inexpensive and highly portable devices that process blood samples to detect biological agents such as anthrax are needed by the U.S. military and for homeland security efforts. One of the challenges of "lab-on-a-chip" technology is the need for miniaturized pumps to move solutions through micro-channels.
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- 2015-06-05 Go ahead, dunk your cell phone in salt water: Barrier films by atomic layer deposition
- Barrier films, used in everything from food and drug packaging to consumer electronics and solar cells, help prevent your food from spoiling, help to preserve medication, and protect your electronics from damage due to exposure to air or a splash of water. Now a group of researchers in Georgia have developed a new way to produce better films using atomic layer deposition.
These are not the flimsy films of plastic that may seal a package of cookies. High-end barrier films that safeguard your phone's high-tech organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display from every whiff of oxygen or molecule of water vapor require higher performance transparent materials such as metal oxides. - See Details
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- 2015-06-05 More power to you: Marines boost energy, lighten load
- In an effort to move toward increased energy independence in the field, Marines used a wearable solar-powered system to extend the battery life of crucial electronic devices during a recent field exercise, officials announced Oct. 30.
Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and assembled at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, the Marine Austere Patrolling System (MAPS) combines solar power and an individual water purifier to help lighten the load of Marines conducting lengthy missions in remote locations with few or no options for resupply. - See Details
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- 2015-06-05 US eases rules on electronic devices on planes (Update 3)
- Passengers on American airlines won't have to "turn off all electronic devices" anymore—they'll be able to read, work, play games, watch movies and listen to music from gate to gate under new guidelines from the Federal Aviation Administration. But they still can't talk on their phones through the flight.
Don't expect the changes to happen immediately, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said Thursday at a news conference announcing new rules. How fast will vary by airline. - See Details
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- 2015-06-05 Spinoff to introduce ultrasonic gesture recognition for small devices (w/ Video)
- A group of research engineers at the University of California has been working on new technology to allow electronic devices to recognize hand gestures, similar to Microsoft's Kinect—with a major difference. Instead of using light, the new technology is based on sound waves. The group is currently forming a spinoff company to develop and market the technology, called Chirp Microsystems (the technology itself is called simply Chirp).
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- 2015-06-05 Researchers develop stretchable wire-shaped supercapacitor
- Advances in flexible and stretchable electronics have prompted researchers to explore ways to create stretchable supercapacitors—robust energy storage devices—to power these and other devices.
Supercapacitors offer significant advantages over common batteries, including the ability to recharge in seconds, exceptionally long life span and high reliability, leading to their incorporation in portable consumer electronics, memory backup devices, hybrid vehicles and even large industrial scale power and energy management systems. - See Details
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- 2015-06-05 Organic lights and solar cells straight from the printer
- Flickering façades, curved monitors, flashing clothing, fluorescent wallpaper, flexible solar cells – and all printable. This is no make-believe vision of the future; it will soon be possible using a new printing process for organic light-emitting diodes.
Time is slowly running out for bulky television sets, boxy neon signs and the square-edged backlit displays we all know from shops and airports. It won't be long before families gathering together to watch television at home will be calling out: "Unroll the screen, dear, the film's about to start!" And members of the public may soon encounter screens everywhere they go, as almost any surface can be made into a display. - See Details
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- 2015-06-05 Neck tattoo patent filing from Motorola targets improved sound
- Motorola's vision of wearables extends beyond watches and spectacles into new consumer territory that would involve people wearing tattoos on their skin as supportive communication tools with their devices to improve sound. In this instance, according to a patent filing, Motorola is thinking in terms of a tattoo that is worn on the person's throat.
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- 2015-06-05 EU follows US in allowing portable electronics in-flight
- The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said Wednesday it will allow passengers to use a range of mobile electronic devices in flight with very few restrictions.
Just two weeks after the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States said it would similarly relax its rules, EASA said that personal electronic devices such as tablets, smartphones, e-readers and mp3 players could be used in all phases of flight in the near future. - See Details