Category Technology/Electronics

A new fundamental understanding of polymeric relaxor ferroelectric behavior could lead to advances in flexible electronics, actuators and transducers, energy storage, piezoelectric sensors and electrocaloric cooling, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and North Carolina State.

Researchers have debated the theory behind the mechanism of relaxor ferroelectrics for more than 50 years, said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. While relaxor ferroelectrics are well-recognized, fundamentally fascinating and technologically useful materials, a Nature article commented in 2006 that they were heterogeneous, hopeless messes.

Without a funda...

Indium nitride is a promising material for use in electronics, but difficult to manufacture. Scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a new molecule that can be used to create high-quality indium nitride, making it possible to use it in, for example, high-frequency electronics.

The bandwidth we currently use for wireless data transfer will soon be full. If we are to continue transmitting ever-increasing amounts of data, the available bandwidth must be increased by bringing further frequencies into use. Indium nitride may be part of the solution.
“Since electrons move through indium n...

By making use of the ‘spooky’ laws behind quantum entanglement physicists think have found a way to make information leap between a pair of electrons separated by distance.

Teleporting fundamental states between photons – massless particles of light – is quickly becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications technology.

But what the latest research has achieved is quantum teleportation between particles of matter – electrons –something that could help connect quantum computing with the more traditional electronic kind.

“We provide evidence for ‘entanglement swapping,’ in which we create entanglement between two electrons even thou...

Neuromorphic computing entails building architectures inspired by elements of the human brain, such as neural organization and synapses. These architectures have proved to be highly promising and advantageous for a number of applications, as they can have both memory and learning functions.

Most current neuromorphic architectures artificially recreate the plasticity (i.e., ability to be easily shaped over time) of synapses, which are junctions between nerve cells that enable the propagation of impulses across brain regions...