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South Korean researchers have recently made a flexible nonvolatile memory based on memristors—fundamental electronic circuit elements discovered in 2008—using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate—they could be printed on rolls of plastic sheets and used in plastic RFID tags or in the wearable electronics of the future. "We think graphene oxide can be a good candidate for next-generation memory," says Sung-Yool Choi, who leads flexible devices research at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Choi and his colleagues reported their device last week in Nano Letters.

One of the biggest commercial applications of spintronics in computing to date has been the use of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), the material phenomenon that makes possible the huge storage capacity of today’s hard disk drives. In the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, GMR was cited as the first big commercial application for nanotechnology. But extending the commercial application of spintronic-enabled systems beyond read heads for HDDs has proven to be a difficult task. One need only look at the seemingly endless travails of NVE Corporation, which in its financial results still shows it greatest revenue growth in contract research as opposed to product sales. While recent research from a team of researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany may not turn around the fortunes of spintronics in the short term, it does provide a way to better characterize the spin of electrons and thereby promises better ways of exploiting it for electronics applications. The researchers are reporting in Nature Nanotechnology that they have for the first time been able to create images of the spin direction of electrons.

Ever since graphene was first produced in a lab at the University of Manchester in 2004, researchers around the world have been fascinated with its potential in electronics applications. Graphene possessed all the benefits of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), namely its charged-carrier mobility, but it didn’t have any of the down sides, such as CNTs’ need for different processing techniques than silicon and the intrinsic difficulty of creating interconnects for CNTs. But all was not easy for applying graphene to electronics applications. One of the fundamental problems for graphene was its lack of a band gap, which left it with a very low on-off ratio measured at about 10 as compared to in the 100s for silicon. Now this fundamental hurdle has been overcome. Based on research led by Phaedon Avouris at IBM’s IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, IBM is reporting that they have created a significant band gap in graphene.

Tiny semiconductor dots could lead to a new type of circuit based on magnetism rather than current flow. At least that’s the hope of researchers who’ve made the dots and are hoping to build them into a workable device. ”We want to make it into a so-called nonvolatile transistor,” says Kang Wang, head of the Device Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Such a ”spintronic” transistor would retain its logic state in the absence of current and require less power to switch a bit, reducing the electrical power required by a computer chip by as much as 99 percent. Wang’s research, supported in part by Intel, was published in March in the online version of Nature Materials. Where electronic transistors rely on the presence or absence of current to register the ones and zeros of digital logic, spintronic transistors depend on ”spin,” a quantum characteristic of the electron. Picture the electron as a rotating globe. When the north pole is pointing upward, that’s spin up; when pointing the other way, it’s spin down. When the spins of most electrons are aligned, the material is magnetic. When their spins are random, the material isn’t. An applied current can align or randomize the spins, allowing for spin-based switches.

An all-optical integrator, or lightwave capacitor, is a fundamental building block equivalent to those used in multi-functional electronic circuits. Associate Professor David Moss, a senior researcher within the Institute for Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS), leads an international team which has developed the optical integrator on a CMOS compatible silicon chip. The device, a photonic chip compatible with electronic technology (CMOS), will be a key enabler of next generation fully-integrated ultrafast optical data processing technologies for many applications including ultra-fast optical information-processing, optical memory, measurement, computing systems, and real-time differential equation computing units.

bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power. The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.

25 March 2010—Nowadays, a phone that doesn’t know where it is or where it’s going can’t really call itself ”smart.” To orient themselves properly, smartphones require not just GPS capability but also an electronic compass, an accelerometer, and increasingly, digital gyroscopes. The point of a gyroscope is to sense any change in an object’s axis of rotation. Up until now, gyroscopes measured movement around the three axes with three sensors—one for pitch, one for yaw, and another for roll. At most, two of these sensors would be combined on a single die. The best you could do was, say, match up a 3- by 5- by 1-millimeter yaw sensor with a 4- by 5- by 1-mm sensor that would detect pitch and roll. But on 15 February, STMicroelectronics unveiled  a 4- by 4- by 1-mm gyroscope whose single sensing structure tracks all three angular motions. It’s a triumph of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering.

People have been using pens to jot down their thoughts for thousands of years but now engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that allows users to jot down electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces. Looking just like a regular ballpoint pen, the pen's ink consists of a solution of real silver that dries to leave electrically conductive silver pathways. These pathways maintain their conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling users to personally fabricate low-cost, flexible and disposable electronic devices. While metallic inks have been used to manufacture electronic devices using inkjet printing technology, the silver pen offers users the freedom and flexibility to construct electronic devices on the fly, says Jennifer Lewis, the Hans Thurnauer professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois who led the research team along with Jennifer Bernhard, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

This article discusses the requirements, constraints and challenges in creating high-quality musical instruments using electronic components (both analog and digital) available today.

Here is the agenda for today’s seminar. We will recall the principles of controlling a brushless DC motor. Secondly we will discuss the back EMF sensing method used in this sensorless technique. We will also cover the principles of digital filter and the so called majority function. Last section of this seminar discusses the motor start up sequence and the sensorless operation.

Researchers at Purdue University have developed a new design employing carbon nanotubes and small copper spheres that wicks water passively towards hot electronics that could meet the challenges brought on by increasing frequency speeds in chips. The problem of overheating electronics is well-documented and in the past the issue has been addressed with bigger and bigger fans. But with chip features shrinking below 50 nanometers the fan solution is just not cutting it. The Purdue researchers, led by Suresh V. Garimella, came up with a design that uses water as the coolant liquid and transfers the water to an ultrathin thermal ground plane. The design naturally pushes the water through obviating the need for a pump and through the use of microfluidic design is able to boil the water fully, which allows the wicking away of more heat.

Usually developers consider Java as a programming language, but Java is a complete operating enviornment including some parts belong to OS. If you have experience of porting Java runtime to embedded system. You will find that RTOS is not a necessary requirement for porting Java.

Most multiprocessing systems can be classified as either symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP). AMP involves the use of interprocessor communication to combine the efforts of multiple processors, each with its own local operating system and hardware resources. Also, AMP involves less OS overhead for each individual processor and a more traditional execution environment for applications. AMP seems like distributed system. The number of peripherals that are supported in today's multicore processors is quickly increasing. Symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) software is expected to be quickly available to support these peripherals. Basically any OS can be ported to a SMP platform, but the developers must take care of following issues for SMP OS. - Handling of task priority or implicit synchronization - Spinlocks and synchronization - Synchronization between tasks sharing memory - Synchronization between tasks and ISRs sharing memory - Synchronization between ISRs sharing memory

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based thin film transistors (TFTs) could be at the core of next-generation flexible electronics – displays, electronic circuits, sensors, memory chips, and other applications that are transitioning from rigid substrates, such as silicon and glass, to flexible substrates. What's holding back commercial applications is that industrial-type manufacturing of large scale SWCNT-based nanoelectronic devices isn't practical yet because controlling the morphology of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still causing headaches for materials engineers.

It’s 2020, and it’s sunny outside. In fact, it’s so bright in your kitchen that you have to squint to see your grapefruit. You flip on your e-reader and the most recent e-issue of IEEE Spectrum pops up on-screen, the colors and text sharp and brilliant in the sunlight. There’s e-mail to answer, but you want to make the early commuter bus, so you roll up your e-reader and stuff it in your jacket pocket.

Anyone can bake a cake, but while some chefs bake dry, uninspired bricks of dough, there are other chefs who make cakes we would die for. The ingredients may be the same, but the outcomes are so very different. This is also the case between average electronic products and world-class, market-changing products. One of the most recent technical sensations is the capacitive touch screen. But what makes some touch screen-based products amazing, while others get such poor reviews?

Analog Devices, Inc., has introduced a pair of Class-D audio amplifiers for smart phones, GPS units and other handheld electronics where premium sound quality offers a major competitive advantage. The SSM2375 and SSM2380 amplifiers provide audio system designers with the option of fixed or programmable gain settings combined with low noise and superior audio performance. The SSM2380 low-power, stereo Class-D amplifier is the first in its class to incorporate an I²C interface, which allows gain stages to be set from 1 dB to 24 dB (plus mute) in 47 distinct steps with no other external components required. The programmable interface also enables independent L/R channel shutdown, a variable low-EMI (electro-magnetic interference) emission control mode, and programmable ALC (automatic level control) functions for speaker protection. The SSM2380 achieves a 100-dB SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and extends battery life by achieving 93 percent power efficiency at 5 V while running at 1.4 W into an 8-ohm speaker.

Chemicals giant Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany) and Plastic Logic GmbH (Dresden, Germany), the developer of the Que e-reader, have announced plans to develop, test and commercialize novel lisicon-type organic semiconductors from Merck in Plastic Logic's displays. The introduction and production of the materials is planned for 2011. Having shown the Que e-reader at the Consumer Electronics Show in January Plastic Logic was originally expected to ship the e-reader in April 2010 but that launch has now slipped to June, it is reported. Merck recently invested in the expansion of its Chilworth Technical Center chemicals research site in Southampton, England, by adding laboratories to intensify and accelerate display material developments based on plastic electronics.

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.