A recent discovery by a team at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland suggests that it is possible to create conductive pathways several atoms wide in a material, move them around at will and make them disappear. The approach – called adaptable electronics – is generating interest b...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have controlled the structure of a material to simultaneously generate both magnetisation and electrical polarisation. The team says the development has potential applications in information storage and processing.Making a single material demonstrating magnetisation and electrical polarisation is said t...

PragmatIC Printing, a leading flexible electronics company, has completed a £5.4million funding round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) with support from ARM Holdings and existing shareholders.Scott White, chief executive officer, said: " We have become accustomed to silicon chips being incorporated into high value documents...

Nick Gibb, secretary of state for education, has officially opened a new design and engineering centre at John Warner School, an 11 to 18 comprehensive school in Hoddesdon. The new block will support students at the school in a range of topics, including electronics, robotics and design.Gibb said: "The secretary of state Nicky Morgan is de...

IT researchers working at the University of Twente say they have developed a programming language which could make the cost of designing hardware more manageable.For the last 20 years, chip manufacturers have been using the same chip design techniques in which extensive testing is required after each design step. The newly developed functional...

Although graphene based devices have shown outstanding electrical and optical performance, they are sensitive to environmental factors, such as humidity or gas composition. This, says a research team, has made reproducible operation in a normal atmosphere impossible.Generally, adsorbates from the ambient (such as moisture or oxygen) and resid...

In a move intended to boost adoption of the Cortex-R5 processor in safety critical applications, ARM has delivered a comprehensive safety document set that will allow semiconductor companies to demonstrate their chips are compliant with new functional safety standards.Richard York, vice president of embedded marketing, noted: "As long as 2...

The top 10 consumer electronics companies bought $125.6billion worth of semiconductors in 2014, equivalent to 37% of all semiconductor purchases and 9.4% more than in 2013, according to a report from market analyst Gartner.Together, Samsung Electronics and Apple bought $57.9bn of semiconductors in 2014, $3.9bn more than in 2013 and equivalent t...

Scientists from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have unveiled a technique that will allow more powerful, more energy efficient and low-cost pulsed lasers to be developed.The approach is said to have a fundamentally different principle to that of existing pulsed lasers, relying upon the coherent comb...

Lasers, displays and other light emitting depend upon the electrically controlled modulation of photons. But, says a research team, electrical control of the light emission pathways opens up the possibility of novel types of nano photonics devices, based on active plasmonics.Scientists from ICFO, MIT, CNRS, CNISM and Graphenea have demonstrated...