Category Technology/Electronics

New research from physicists at the University of Sussex will ‘significantly advance’ the new technology area of liquid electronics, enhancing the functionality and sustainability of potential applications in printed electronics, wearable health monitors and even batteries.

In their research paper published in ACS Nano, the Sussex scientists have built on their previous work to wrap emulsion droplets with graphene and other 2D materials by reducing the coatings down to atomically-thin nanosheet layers. In doing so they were able to create electrically-conducting liquid emulsions that are the lowest-loading graphene networks ever reported — just 0.001 vol%.

This means that ...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in developing a simple hydrocarbon molecule with a logic gate function, similar to that in transistors, in a single molecule. The discovery could make electric components on a molecular scale possible in the future. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Manufacturing very small components is an important challenge in both research and development. One example is transistors – the smaller they are, the faster and more energy efficient our computers become...

Displayed over roof tops and in solar farms, silicon-based solar cells are, so far, one of the most efficient systems in generating electricity from sunlight, but their fabrication can be expensive and energy demanding, aside from being heavy and bulky. The alternative solution of lower-cost thin film solar cells also brings the caveat of being mainly composed of toxic elements such as lead or cadmium, or containing scarce elements such as indium or tellurium.

In the search for new technologies for thin photovoltaic systems, solar cells based on AgBiS2 nanocrystals have emerged as a star player in the game, consisting of nontoxic, earth-abundant elements, p...

Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory have recently designed an integrated circuit (IC) that integrates silicon quantum dots with conventional readout electronics. This chip, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on a 40-nm cryogenic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology that is readily and commercially available.

“Our recent paper builds on the expertise of the two groups involved,” Andrea Ruffino, one of the researchers at EPFL who carried out the study, told TechXplore...