Research

Ferroelectric capacitors can be made as thin as 30nm to add memory between the metallisation layers of ICs, according to Institute of Science Tokyo. It “demonstrates strong electric polarisation despite being just 30nm thick including top and bottom electrodes, making it suitable for high-density electronics,” according to the Institute. “This demonstrates good compatibility with semiconductor devices combining logic circuits and ...

Researchers at Virginia Tech have combined liquid metal and a heat-activated adhesive to create an electrically conductive patch that bonds to fabric when heated with a hot iron. “E-textiles and wearable electronics can enable diverse applications from health care and environmental monitoring to robotics and human-machine interfaces,” said Virginia Tech engineer Michael Bartlett. “Our work advances this by creating iron-on ...

University of California San Diego engineers have better understood aluminium-lithium metal as a negative electrodes for solid-state batteries. They studied how lithium ions move through two phases of the material: lithium-rich ‘beta’ and lithium-poor ‘alpha’. Increasing levels of beta phase provided pathways for lithium ion diffuse “up to ten billion times faster than through the alpha phase”, according to the ...

Topticlock is an atomic clock that relies on a single Yb+ ion for its ~10-17 accuracy. It “sets a new benchmark for commercial atomic clocks and frequency standards”, according to its maker Toptica, which worked with German metrology institute PBT. “Such performance in an industrial form-factor marks an important milestone towards redefinition of the SI-second based on optical transitions.” Consisting ...

Drones are to be evaluated in the UK for delivering defibrillators to people experiencing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). The University of Surrey is running the study, with Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex (‘KSS’), and South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust. “With survival rates for OHCA in the UK currently below 10%, a key challenge is the delay ...

Researchers in Tokyo have created a spinel sulphide LED material that can can be tuned to emit light at wavelengths between orange and blue, and has photovoltaic properties. Spinel is a type of cubic crystal structure, available to certain chemicals of the form AB2X4. The type identified is (Zn,Mg)Sc2S4, where the balance of zinc and magnesium sets the bandgap and ...

Aiming to reduce losses in 6G infrastructure, researchers from Japan have developed a family of low dielectric constant and low dissipation factor insulating polymers. “Based on our previous research on high refractive index polymers, we hypothesised that replacing oxygen with sulphur in certain polymers such as PPO, could significantly reduce the dissipation factor,” said Waseda University chemist Professor Kenichi Oyaizu. ...

TDK and Hokkaido University are to demonstrate real-time learning in a ‘reservoir’ analogue AI chip that mimics the cerebellum at CEATEC in Japan. Reservoir computing is not deep-learning, where there is an input layer, multiple hidden layers and an output layer, usually implemented in digital logic that executes many, sometime trillions, of multiply and add operations. “Reservoir computing consists of an ...

A single structure built in the metal layers of an IC can implement both machine learning and analogue AI inferencing, according to a French team led by Grenoble lab CEA-Leti – and the CMOS below can also be used for processing. Made between two metal interconnect layers, the structure has four layers: TiN at the bottom, Si-doped HfO2, a Ti ...

Researchers at East China Normal University have created a mid-infra-red camera with a deep depth of field by creating a virtual pin-hole in an optically-active crystal. The lens-free system not only focuses, but changes the image wavelength to suit a silicon-based sensor. Key to the proof-of-concept camera is a custom non-linear crystal with a chirped-period structure. To create the pin-hole, ...