Category Technology/Electronics

Aluminum nitride transistor advances next-gen RF electronics

Aluminum nitride transistor advances next-gen RF electronics
A tale of three substrates for nitride HEMTs. Credit: Advanced Electronic Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202500393

Cornell researchers have developed a new transistor architecture that could reshape how high-power wireless electronics are engineered, while also addressing supply chain vulnerabilities for a critical semiconductor material.

The device, called an XHEMT, includes an ultra-thin layer of gallium nitride built on bulk single-crystal aluminum nitride, a semiconductor material with low defect densities and an ultrawide bandgap—properties that allow it to withstand higher temperatures and voltages while reducing electrical losses.

The device was detailed in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials and the research was co-led by Huili Grace Xing, the William L...

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Engineers develop thin film to make AI chips faster and more energy efficient

UH engineers making AI faster, reducing power consumption
This is the two-dimensional thin film electric insulator designed in the University of Houston lab of Alamgir Karim to make AI faster and reduce power consumption. Credit: University of Houston

Addressing the staggering power and energy demands of artificial intelligence, engineers at the University of Houston have developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.

The breakthrough, detailed in the journal ACS Nano, introduces a specialized two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric—or an electric insulator—designed to replace traditional, heat generating components in integrated circuit chips...

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LLMs choose friends and colleagues like people, researchers find

When large language models (LLMs) make decisions about networking and friendship, the models tend to act like people, across both synthetic simulations and real-world network contexts.

Marios Papachristou and Yuan Yuan developed a framework to study network formation behaviors of multiple LLM agents and compared these behaviors against human behaviors. The paper is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

How LLMs form network connections
The authors conducted simulations using several large language models placed in a network, which were asked to choose which other nodes to connect with, given their number of connections, common neighbors, and shared attributes, like arbitrarily assigned “hobbies” or “location.”

The authors varied the network context, including simulations of fri...

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Physicists create ‘quantum wire’ where mass and energy flow without friction or loss

When quantum gases refuse to follow the rules
The Atom Chip with the atoms trapped and levitated below. Credit: TU Wien

In physical systems, transport takes many forms, such as electric current through a wire, heat through metal, or even water through a pipe. Each of these flows can be described by how easily the underlying quantity—charge, energy, or mass—moves through a material.

Normally, collisions and friction lead to resistance causing these flows to slow down or fade away. But in a new experiment at TU Wien, scientists have observed a system where that doesn’t happen at all.

By confining thousands of rubidium atoms to move along a single line using magnetic and optical fields, they created an ultracold quantum gas in which energy and mass move with perfect efficiency...

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