Category Technology/Electronics

Schematic of a transistor with a molybdenum disulfide channel and 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate. Credit: Sujay Desai/UC Berkeley

Research breaks major barrier in transistor size by creating gate only 1nm long. For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5nm threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about 1/4 the size of high-end 20nm-gate transistors now on the market.

“We made the smallest transistor reported to date,” said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor...

This image shows a new efficient and low-cost method for hydrogenation of graphene with visible light. Credit: Joakim Bergman, AstraZeneca

“The reaction is convenient and cheap, and hydrogenated graphene may be applied within areas such as hydrogen storage. Additionally, upon functionalization of graphene one can open a bandgap and this fact is of high relevance for electronics applications,” says Prof. Henrik Ottosson.

Graphene reacts with formic acid in a water solution upon irradiation with visible light. In the reaction, formic acid acts as masked hydrogen and a material is produced where hydrogen extensively has been added to graphene. One says that graphene has been hydrogenated. Yet, graphene research is a side-project in Henrik Ottosson’s group...

This is an artist view of the shape of an electron in a high-temperature superconductor, which was measured in the work by Dalla Torre et al. The blue and red spheres represent Copper and Oxygen atoms, and the colored surface the positive (blue) and negative (red) parts of the wave describing the electron. Credit: Mario Sermoneta

A recent discovery provides an innovative technique for calculating the shapes of electrons. This finding will help scientists gain a better, faster understanding of the properties of complex materials. Dr. Emanuele Dalla Torre et al used holographic logic to compile an algorithm for visualizing the shape of an electron in a superconducting material...

MIT researchers outfitted their cube robot with shock-absorbing “skins” (left) that transfer less than half of the energy that would normally be transferred to the ground. Credit: Image courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Anyone who’s watched drone videos or “BattleBots” knows that robots can break – often because they don’t have the proper padding. But this week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present 3D printing soft materials that make robots safer and more precise in their movements – and that could be used to improve the durability of drones, phones, shoes, helmets, and more...