Engineers in California have made an important advance in a technique that could help chipmakers create denser and cheaper integrated circuits.  It might also extend the life of the traditional lithography process.  With a method called directed self-assembly, the engineers were able to pattern contact holes for transistors in memory and logic circuits.  [IEEE Spectrum, [...]

Imagine if there were electronics able to prevent epileptic seizures before they happen.  Or electronics that could be placed on the surface of a beating heart to monitor its functions.  The problem is that such devices are a tough fit.  Body tissue is soft and pliable while conventional circuits can be hard and brittle — [...]

We walk about with thousands of songs, photos, and videos in our pockets, but we won’t be able to keep cramming more and more onto our memory cards forever.  While last week’s news that a single bit of digital information has been stored on just 12 atoms was remarkable, at some point we are going [...]

The rapid developments in information technology make it hard to predict what chip-scale information processing systems will look like in future, but we can offer a few preliminary thoughts based on our observations of current technical trends.  First, photons will continue to play a growing role as information carriers, thanks to the enormous bandwidth and [...]

Flexible electronics and displays have attracted attention due to merits such as light weight, thin profiles, portability, and the ability to form conformable shapes, all of which allow novel applications.  Lightweight, bendable thin-film transistors (TFTs) are a must for the circuitry that drives such displays.  Emerging TFT technology based on oxide semiconductors is promising for [...]

A novel vacuum lamination approach to fabrication of high-performance single-crystal organic field-effect transistors has been developed.  The non-destructive nature of this method allows a direct comparison of field-effect mobilities achieved with various gate dielectrics using the same single-crystal sample.  The method also allows gating delicate systems, such as n -type crystals and SAM-coated surfaces, without [...]

We report the experimental verification of metamaterial cloaking for a 3D object in free space. We apply the plasmonic cloaking technique, based on scattering cancellation, to suppress microwave scattering from a finite-length dielectric cylinder. We verify that scattering suppression is obtained all around the object in the near- and far-field and for different incidence angles, [...]

The biggest challenge with hydrogen-powered fuel cells lies in the storage of hydrogen: how to store enough of it, in a safe and cost-effective manner, to power a vehicle for 300 miles?  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is aiming to solve this problem by synthesizing novel materials with high hydrogen adsorption capacities.  “We’re working on materials [...]

The driving bass rhythm of rap music can be harnessed to power a new type of miniature medical sensor designed to be implanted in the body.  Acoustic waves from music, particularly rap, were found to effectively recharge the pressure sensor.  Such a device might ultimately help to treat people stricken with aneurisms or incontinence due [...]

A passive optical diode effect would be useful for on-chip optical information processing but has been difficult to achieve.  Using a method based on optical nonlinearity, we demonstrate a forward-backward transmission ratio of up to 28 decibels within telecommunication wavelengths.  Our device, which uses two silicon rings 5 micrometers in radius, is passive yet maintains [...]