Category Technology/Electronics

In today’s digital age, computational tasks have become increasingly complex. This, in turn, has led to an exponential growth in the power consumed by digital computers. Thus, it is necessary to develop hardware resources that can perform large-scale computing in a fast and energy-efficient way.

In this regard, optical computers, which use light instead of electricity to perform computations, are promising. They can potentially provide lower latency and reduced power consumption, benefiting from the parallelism that optical systems have. As a result, researchers have explored various optical computing designs.

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As semiconductor devices become ever smaller, researchers are exploring two-dimensional (2D) materials for potential applications in transistors and optoelectronics. Controlling the flow of electricity and heat through these materials is key to their functionality, but first we need to understand the details of those behaviors at atomic scales.

Now, researchers have discovered that electrons play a surprising role in how energy is transferred between layers of 2D semiconductor m...

A new method can produce a hundredfold increase in light emissions from a type of electron-photon coupling, which is key to electron microscopes and other technologies.

Researchers have found a way to create much stronger interactions between photons and electrons, in the process producing a hundredfold increase in the emission of light from a phenomenon called Smith-Purcell radiation. The finding has potential implications for both commercial applications and fundamental scientific research.

The way electrons interact w...

Creating smart sensors to embed in our everyday objects and environments for the Internet of Things (IoT) would vastly improve daily life — but requires trillions of such small devices. Simon Fraser University professor Vincenzo Pecunia believes that emerging alternative semiconductors that are printable, low-cost and eco-friendly could lead the way to a cheaper and more sustainable IoT.

Leading a multinational team of top experts in various areas of printable electronics, Pecunia has identified key priorities and promising avenues for printable electronics to enable self-powered, eco-friendly smart sensors. His forward-looking insights are outlined in his paper published on Dec. 28 in Nature Electronics.

“Equipping everyday objects and envir...