Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed an energy storage device which is said to be significantly more cost-effective over the entire life cycle of a battery than previous approaches.Batteries for electric vehicles are, in general, monolithic blocks accommodating individual cells and the necessary technology. While all cells sho...

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers claim to have used optical microscopes emitting tiny fractions of the wavelength of light to measure chip features that are approaching 10nm.Using a microscope that combines standard through-the-lens viewing with a technique called scatterfield imaging, the NIST team accurately m...

The Rice University researchers who pioneered the development of laser-induced graphene have formed it into flexible, solid-state microsupercapacitors that are claimed to charge 50 times faster than batteries, discharge more slowly than traditional capacitors and match commercial supercapacitors for both the amount of energy stored and power delive...

Cadence Design Systems and Spreadtrum have developed a virtual reference design kit specific to Spreadtrum’s SC9830A quad-core system-on-chip (SoC) platform requirements. The kit is claimed to enable designers to accelerate their product and application design cycles by up to 12 weeks, including time spent on schematic design, PCB design and...

Researchers at Linköping University’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics have developed ‘power paper’. The material consists of nanocellulose and a conductive polymer and has the ability to store energy.The researchers claim that one sheet, 15cm in diameter and a few tenths of a millimetre thick can store as much as 1farad...

A team of scientists, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Russian Quantum Centre, claim to have demonstrated a method of exciting magnetic vortices using less current.Controlling magnetic vortices, through spin or otherwise, is what scientists are researching as a foundation for the electronics of the future, call...

Engineers at Oregon State University claim to have made a breakthrough in understanding the physics of photonic ‘sintering’, which could lead to advances in solar cells, flexible electronics, sensors and other high-tech products printed onto something as simple as a sheet of paper or plastic.Sintering is the fusing of nanoparticles...

In a move which gives its customers access to one of the most popular real time operating systems, EnSilica has ported Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS to its eSi-RISC family of embedded processor cores.“While some eSi-RISC customers often choose an open-source RTOS, others believe that a commercially supported RTOS is more preferable f...

A development platform for use in designing low-power wearable devices has been launched by Lattice Semiconductor. Based on the iCE40 Ultra FPGA, the platform features a large number of sensors and peripherals.“One of the more popular applications to emerge from the growing Internet of Things market is wearable devices,” said produc...

Renesas Electronics has unveiled the third generation of R-Car, an automotive SoC targeted at safety and in vehicle infotainment systems. The device, which features ARM Cortex-A57 and A53 cores, boasts a processing performance of 40,000 DMIPS. It also integrates Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR GX6650 GPU and the IMP-X5 parallel programmable...