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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.

Harmonic balance (hB) analysis is a method used to calculate the nonlinear, steady-state frequency response of electrical circuits. It is extremely well-suited for designs in which transient simulation methods prove acceptable, such as dispersive transmission lines in which circuit time constants are large compared to the period of the simulation frequency, as well as for circuits that have a large number of reactive components. In particular, harmonic balance analysis works extremely well for microwave circuits that are excited with sinusoidal signals, such as mixers and power amplifiers...

Opus is Octasic's high-performing, ultra low-power, asynchronous DSP technology optimized for basestations, video processing and media gateway solutions. Asynchronous designs deliver similar computing performance to synchronous designs, but use less silicon and less power. No clock tree No state-elements Less sensitive to process and temperature variations

The potential for the QTC material to transition from an insulator to a conductor (i.e. change its electrical property) is influenced by how much deformation the material is experiencing as a result of the applied mechanical pressure. QTC can be used to produce low profile, low cost, pressure activated switches or sensors that display variable resistance with applied force and return to a quiescent state when the force is removed. The difference between a QTC switch and a QTC sensor is arguably only the speed and amount of physical input required to achieve the required switching point or resistance range.

Three-dimensional microchip designs are making their way to market to help pack more transistors on a chip as traditional scaling slows down. By stacking logic chips on top of one another other or combining logic chips with memory or RF with logic, chipmakers hope to sidestep Moore's Law, increasing the functionality of smartphones and other gadgets not by shrinking a chip's transistors but the distance between them. "There's a big demand for smaller packages in the consumer market, especially for the footprint of a mobile phone, or for improving the memory bandwidth of your GPU," says Pol Marchal, a principal scientist of 3-D integration at European microelectronics R&D center Imec. On 9 February, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), in San Francisco, Imec engineers presented some key design challenges facing 3-D chips made by stacking layers of silicon circuits using vertical copper interconnects called through-silicon vias (TSVs). These design constraints will have to be dealt with before TSVs can be widely used in advanced microchip architectures, Marchal says.

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?

Related to the strong demands for virtualization technology, network I/O virtualization has recently become a hot topic and is one of the key topics being discussed at the upcoming Multicore Expo @ ESC. In fact, analyst firm IDC, in a recent white paper titled "Optimizing I/O Virtualization: Preparing the Data Center for Next-Generation Applications", stated that "If I/O is not sufficient, then it could limit all the gains brought about by the virtualization process."

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.

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.