Category Technology/Electronics

Researchers at North Carolina State University have made what is believed to be the smallest state-of-the-art RFID chip which should drive down the cost of RFID tags. In addition, the chip’s design makes it possible to embed RFID tags into high value chips, such as computer chips, boosting supply chain security for high-end technologies.

“As far as we can tell, it’s the world’s smallest Gen2-compatible RFID chip,” says Paul Franzon, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Cirrus Logic Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State.

Gen2 RFID chips are state of the art and are already in widespread use. One of the things that sets these new RFID chips apart is their size. They measure 125 by 245 micrometers.

Manufacturers were able to make s...

The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits. When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.

But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond...

Michigan State researchers are building tougher circuits to help withstand the grueling demands of energy production, space exploration and more. Tomorrow’s cutting-edge technology will need electronics that can tolerate extreme conditions. That’s why a group of researchers led by Michigan State University’s Jason Nicholas is building stronger circuits today.

Nicholas and his team have developed more heat resilient silver circuitry with an assist from nickel...

The ability to turn on and off a physical process with just one photon is a fundamental building block for quantum photonic technologies. Realizing this in a chip-scale architecture is important for scalability, which amplifies a breakthrough by City College of New York researchers led by physicist Vinod Menon. They’ve demonstrated for the first time the use of “Rydberg states” in solid state materials (previously shown in cold atom gases) to enhance nonlinear optical interactions to unprecedented levels in solid state systems. This feat is a first step towards realizing chip-scale scalable single photon switches.

In solid state systems, exciton-polaritons, half-light half-matter quasiparticles, which result from the hybridization of electronic excitations (excitons) and photons, a...