It’s no surprise that humans the world over use more water, by volume, than any other material. But in second place, at over 17 billion tons consumed each year, comes concrete made with Portland cement. Portland cement provides the essential binder for strong, versatile concrete; its basic materials are found in many places around the [...]
A U.S. patent for self-driving cars has been awarded to Google. The intellectual property rights relate to a method to switch a vehicle from a human-controlled mode into the state where it takes charge of the wheel. It explains how the car would know when to take control, where it is located and which direction [...]
The sensitive measurement of electrical signals is at the heart of modern technology. According to the principles of quantum mechanics, any detector or amplifier necessarily adds a certain amount of noise to the signal, equal to at least the noise added by quantum fluctuations. This quantum limit of added noise has nearly been reached in [...]
There is currently substantial interest in creating bioelectronic devices that can be implanted in and attached to humans for sensing and control of organs and internal systems in order to prolong and improve the quality of life. Herein we report a new type of implantable bioelectronic device that is operated by laser irradiation from outside [...]
A broad class of disordered materials including foams, glassy molecular systems, colloids and granular materials can form jammed states. A jammed system can resist small stresses without deforming irreversibly, whereas unjammed systems flow under any applied stresses. The broad applicability of the Liu–Nagel jamming concept has attracted intensive theoretical and modelling interest but has prompted [...]
We describe a method to fabricate clean suspended single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) transistors hosting a single quantum dot ranging in length from a few 10s of nm down to ≈3 nm. We first align narrow gold bow-tie junctions on top of individual SWCNTs and suspend the devices. We then use a feedback-controlled electromigration to break [...]
A large effort is devoted to the research of new computing paradigms associated to innovative nanotechnologies that should complement and/or propose alternative solutions to the classical Von Neumann/CMOS association. Among various propositions, Spiking Neural Network (SNN) seems a valid candidate. In terms of functions, SNN using relative spike timing for information coding are deemed to [...]
Resistance Random Access Memory (RRAMTM) device, with its electrically induced nanoscale resistive switching capacity, has been gaining considerable attention as future non-volatile memory device. Here, we propose a mechanism of switching based on oxygen vacancy migration-driven change in electronic properties of the transition metal oxide film stimulated by set pulse voltages. We used density-functional-theory-based calculations [...]
High frequency operation of tunneling real-space transfer transistor (TRSTT) in the negative differential resistance (NDR) regime is assessed by calculating the device common source unity current gain frequency (fT) range with a small signal equivalent circuit model including tunneling. Our circuit model is based on an In0.2Ga0.8As and delta-doped GaAs dual channel structure with various [...]
Current advances in neuromorphic engineering have made it possible to emulate complex neuronal ion channel and intracellular ionic dynamics in real time using highly compact and power-efficient complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) analog very-large-scale-integrated circuit technology. Recently, there has been growing interest in the neuromorphic emulation of the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) Hebbian learning rule by phenomenological modeling [...]