Category Technology/Electronics

Sophisticated antenna arrays paired with high-frequency wireless chips act like superpowers for modern electronics, boosting everything from sensing to security to data processing. In his lab at Princeton, Kaushik Sengupta is working to expand those powers even further.

In recent years, Sengupta’s lab has designed antenna arrays that help engineers make strides toward peering through matter, boosting communications in canyons of skyscrapers, putting a medical lab on a smart phone, and encrypting critical data with electromagnetic waves instead of software.

In a new article in Advanced Science, Sengupta’s research team presented a new type of antenna arra...

Room temperature quantum magnets switch states trillions of times per second. A class of nonvolatile memory devices, called MRAM, based on quantum magnetic materials, can offer a thousandfold performance beyond current state-of-the-art memory devices. The materials known as antiferromagnets were previously demonstrated to store stable memory states, but were difficult to read from. This new study paves an efficient way for reading the memory states, with the potential to do so incredibly quickly too.

You can probably blink...

Their technique could allow chip manufacturers to produce next generation transistors based on materials other than silicon. Engineers fabricated 2D materials that could lead to next-generation transistors and electronic films.

True to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled every year since the 1960s...

Scientists said Monday they have used a laser beam to guide lightning for the first time, hoping the technique will help protect against deadly bolts—and one day maybe even trigger them.

Lightning strikes between 40-120 times a second worldwide, killing more than 4,000 people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage every year.

Yet the main protection against these bolts from above is still the humble lightning rod, which was first conceived by American polymath Benjamin Franklin in 1749.

A team of scientists from six research institutions have been working for years to use the same idea but replace the simple metal pole with a far more sophisticated and precise laser.

Now, in a study published in the journal Nature Photonics, they describe using a laser beam—shot...