Category Technology/Electronics

First All-Optical, Stealth Encryption Technology developed

Concept Optical Encryption Technology
“Basically, the innovative breakthrough is that if you can’t detect it, you can’t steal it.” — Prof. Dan Sadot, Director of the Optical Communications Research Laboratory

Optical end-to-end solution includes encryption, transmission, decryption, and detection. BGN Technologies, the technology-transfer company of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, is introducing the first all-optical “stealth” encryption technology that will be significantly more secure and private for highly sensitive cloud-computing and data center network transmission. The new all-optical encryption innovation will be introduced at the Cybertech Global Tel Aviv conference taking place January 28-30, 2020 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

“Today, information is still encrypted using digital techniques...

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Self-Learning Heat­ing Control system Saves Energy

The “Urban Mining and Recycling” unit in the NEST research building has two student rooms. One of them was equipped with a self-learning heating and cooling control system. Image: Zooey Braun, Stuttgart

Can buildings learn to save all by themselves? Researchers think so. In their experiments, they fed a new self-learning heat­ing control system with temperature data from the previous year and the current weather forecast. The ‘smart’ control system was then able to assess the building’s behavior and act with good anticipation. The result: greater comfort, lower energy costs.

Factory halls, airport terminals and high-rise office buildings are often equipped with automated “anticipatory” heating systems...

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Wearable Health Tech gets Efficiency Upgrade

Photo of flexible, wearable device.
NC State’s improved theromoelectric generator demonstrates efficiency and flexibility. Photo courtesy of Mehmet Ozturk, NC State University.

North Carolina State University engineers have demonstrated a flexible device that harvests the heat energy from the human body to monitor health. The device surpasses all other flexible harvesters that use body heat as the sole energy source.

In a paper published in Applied Energy, the NC State researchers report significant enhancements to the flexible body heat harvester they first reported in 2017. The harvesters use heat energy from the human body to power wearable technologies – think of smart watches that measure your heart rate, blood oxygen, glucose and other health parameters – that never need to have their batteries recharged...

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Method Detects Defects in 2D Materials for future Electronics, Sensors

A yellow laser beam shines on a chip and reveals a grain boundary defect
A laser beam (yellow) reflects off a 2D material (orange) highlighting a grain boundary defect in the atomic lattice.
 IMAGE: MRI/PENN STATE

To further shrink electronic devices and to lower energy consumption, the semiconductor industry is interested in using 2D materials, but manufacturers need a quick and accurate method for detecting defects in these materials to determine if the material is suitable for device manufacture. Now a team of researchers has developed a technique to quickly and sensitively characterize defects in 2D materials.

Two-dimensional materials are atomically thin, the most well-known being graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms.

“People have struggled to make these 2D materials without defects,” said Mauricio Terrones, Verne M...

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