Category Technology/Electronics

A microlaser comprised of a cylinder of indium gallium arsenide phosphide (red) on silicon (blue) could enable integrated optical circuits. Credit: © 2016 A*STAR Data Storage Institute

Combining silicon with a light-producing semiconductor may help develop micrometer-scale lasers, shows Doris Keh-Ting Ng and her colleagues from A*STAR Data Storage Institute. Silicon has revolutionized the manufacture of electrical devices. Electronic engineers would like to further expand the functionality of these integrated circuits by enabling them to create, manipulate and detect light. These optoelectronic devices could speed up processing of digital information, and lead to micrometer-scale lasers, for use in barcode scanners for example.

The problem, however, is that silicon is not an efficient lig...

The structure of super-flexible LC device is created by ultra-thin plastic substrates bonded by polymer wall spacers.

Researchers at Tohoku University have developed a super flexible liquid crystal (LC) device, in which 2 ultra-thin plastic substrates are firmly bonded by polymer wall spacers. The team, led by Professor Hideo Fujikake and Associate Professor Takahiro Ishinabe of the School of Engineering, hopes the new organic materials will help make electronic displays and devices more flexible, increasing their portability and all round versatility. New usage concepts with flexibility and high quality display could offer endless possibilities in near-future information services.

Previous attempts to create a flexible display using an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) device with a th...

This foldable keyboard, created by Michigan State University engineer Nelson Sepulveda and his research team, operates by touch; no battery is needed. Sepulveda developed a new way to harvest energy from human motion using a pioneering device called a biocompatible ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG. Credit: Image courtesy of Michigan State University

The day of charging cellphones with finger swipes and powering Bluetooth headsets simply by walking is now much closer. Michigan State University engineering researchers have created a new way to harvest energy from human motion, using a film-like device that actually can be folded to create more power...

Illustration of the filtering of unwanted quasiparticles (red spheres) from a stream of superconducting electron pairs (blue spheres) using a microwave-driven pump. Credit: Copyright Philip Krantz, Krantz NanoArt

An international team has succeeded in making further improvements to the lifetime of superconducting quantum circuits. An important prerequisite for the realization of high-performance quantum computers is that the stored data should remain intact for as long as possible. Researchers have developed and tested a technique that removes unpaired electrons from the circuits. These are known to shorten the qubit lifetime (to be published online by the journal Science today.

Superconducting circuits belong to the most promising candidates for implementing quantum bits, ie qubits, with ...