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    Category Technology/Electronics

    Fully 3D-printed, Flexible OLED Display

    January 12, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    The fully 3D-printed flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display prototype is about 1.5 inches on each side and has 64 pixels. Every pixel works and displays light. The 3D-printed display is also flexible, which could make it useful for a wide variety of applications, such as foldable smartphone displays. Credit: McAlpine Group, University of Minnesota

    Technology opens door to ubiquitous, more easily fabricated electronic screens. In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities used a customized printer to fully 3D print a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display...

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    Novel Memory Technology based on Compound Semiconductors

    January 10, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    ULTRARAM device concept. a) Schematic cross-section of a device with corresponding material layers. The floating gate (FG), triple-barrier resonant-tunneling structure (TBRT), and readout channel are highlighted. Arrows indicate the direction of electron flow during program/erase operations. b) Scanning electron micrograph of a fabricated device of 10 µm gate length. c,d) Nonequilibrium Green’s functions (NEGF) calculations of density of states alongside conduction band diagrams for no applied bias (i.e., retention) and program-cycle bias respectively. B1, B2, and B3 are the AlSb barrier layers. QW1 and QW2 are the InAs quantum wells in the TBRT. Credit: DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202101103

    A pioneering type of patented computer memory known as ULTRARAM has been demonstrated on silicon wafers ...

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    Windows that Outsmart the Elements

    January 7, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    New research takes energy efficient windows a step further by proposing a new “smart window” design that would harvest the sun’s energy in the winter to warm the house and reflect it in the summer to keep it cool.

    Homeowners know that the type of windows in a house contribute greatly to heating and cooling efficiency. And that’s a big deal — maintaining indoor temperatures consumes great amounts of energy and accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the national energy budgets in developed countries. The work was recently published in the journal ACS Photonics and funded as part of the EPSRC Wearable and Flexible Technologies Collaboration.

    “The major innovation is that these windows can change according to seasonal needs,” explained Nathan Youngblood, assistant professor of electrical ...

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    The First Topological Acoustic Transistor

    January 6, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    To turn ‘on’ an acoustic transistor, ultrasound arriving at the ‘gate’ input heats and expands the base plate, changing the spacing in two lattices of slightly-different-sized pillars, and inducing a topological transition that guides sound along the interface. (Credit: Hoffman Lab/Harvard SEAS)

    Sound waves may pave the way for topological electronic transistors. Researchers have designed and simulated the first topological acoustic transistors — with sound waves instead of electrons — and proposed a connection architecture to form a universal logic gate that can switch the flow of sound on and off.

    Topological materials move electrons along their surface and edges without any loss, making them promising materials for dissipationless, high-efficiency electronics...

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