Fresh Electronics News

Have you ever needed to write a message but just couldn’t, because your hands were too occupied, or you were driving? Two Duke University scientists (Ionut Constandache and Sandip Agrawal) have developed a piece of  software that makes use of the phone’s accelerometers (it’s probably an iPhone) to let you just draw the letters in the air with the phone and write your text message.

Neat, isn’t it? Still, I don’t think this will work in an accelerating car, unless they filter out that information, too (it has to be on the 2-dimensional vertical scale).

Just yesterday I was saying to my fiance that I’m all gadgetized: phone, PDA, GPS, laptop, MP3 player. What could I possibly want more? I never thought, though, that all my gadgets are using good-old batteries, that that they need recharging once (or many times) a day.

Information released by Nokia reveals that they will take another step towards energy-independent cell phones, besides embedded solar cells: they’ll make the phone charge itself from the radio waves that surround us in excess. Experiments until now show that they can harvest about 3-5 mW of power, enough to juice up a phone with a depleted battery. The frequency range will be between 500 megahertz and 10 gigahertz – so there’s plenty of band to catch.

The technology will be improved, and other low-consumption devices that will profit from this will be the MP3 players. There’s still one question: what if I go to the countryside, where emitting antennas are far, and there’s where I would need the power most? Do satellites count in?

Graphene is the two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, whose extraordinary electron mobility and other unique features hold great promise for nanoscale electronics and photonics. But there’s a catch: graphene has no bandgap.

“Having no bandgap greatly limits graphene’s uses in electronics,” says Feng Wang of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he is a member of the Materials Sciences Division. “For one thing, you can build field-effect transistors with graphene, but if there’s no bandgap you can’t turn them off! If you could achieve a graphene bandgap, however, you should be able to make very good transistors.”

Wang, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has achieved just that. He and his colleagues have engineered a bandgap in bilayer graphene that can be precisely controlled from 0 to 250 milli-electron volts (250 meV, or .25 eV).

Using infrared beamline 1.4 at the ALS, under the direction of ALS physicist Michael Martin and Zhao Hao of the Earth Sciences Division, Wang and his colleagues were able to send a tight beam of synchrotron light, focused on the graphene layers, right through the device. As the researchers tuned the electrical fields by precisely varying the voltage of the gate electrodes, they were able to measure variations in the light absorbed by the gated graphene layers. The absorption peak in each spectrum provided a direct measurement of the bandgap at each gate voltage.

“In principle we could have used a tunable laser to measure the optical transmission, but the 1.4 beamline is very bright and can be focused down to the diffraction limit – an important consideration when the graphene-flake target is so small,” Wang says. “Also, compared to a laser, the beamline provides a wider range of frequencies all at once, so we don’t have to painstakingly tune to each absorption frequency we’re trying to measure.”

What these researchers basically did was to create a material that could replace semiconductors one day with a cheap and simple structure, allowing multicolour LEDs to be fabricated. They could be printed on virtually anything, and unleash a whole new set of displaying possibilities.

The next time you worry about your family photos, or some geeky drunk college-fest you took part in, you should really consider where you’re saving your memories, because in a few years you’ll have data storage meant to last. Really – millions of years from now.

Besides lasting that long, the new data storage method invented by scientists can also hold huge amounts of information, because of the nano-scale elements that constitute the material’s basic structure. The group of researchers describes the new storage technique as of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Just like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted inside the carbon nanotubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a “1″ or a “0″ in the binary language of computers. “Nothing could be easier, electronically speaking,” says physicist and co-author Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley.

As time goes by, nanotechnology finds its place in our lives more and more, but there’s also a limit to that – it remains to be seen which. You can see a demo of how bits are “moving” in the video below:

The price of electronics has been reflecting the work necessary to make them, since they were invented. Silicon-based transistors broke many barriers when they have been invented several decades ago, making the transition from lamps to a whole new universe of possibilities.

Now, scientists are studying technologies that could change even the once all-mighty silicon transistors, by making them from organic materials. Physicists from Umeå University, Sweden, have invented electronic circuits that can be made from a chemical solution. “This makes it possible to paint thin films of electronic materials on flexible surfaces like paper or plastic,” explains Ludvig Edman. Continue reading »

Graphene is a one-layer carbon material, discovered relatively recent, in 2004. It features a lot of interesting properties, and it can be used in power-saving electronic devices, fact that gives it green credits.

MIT researchers discovered another use to graphene. They discovered that it can successfully be used in frequency multiplying applications. Frequency multiplying is the phenomenon that takes place in every cell phone, TV set or radio device. The problems with frequency multiplying until now were the noise that appeared when you got over a certain threshold, and the complexity of the device doing that. Continue reading »

Carbon nanotubes are getting green credits lately, because of their ever new interesting properties. Besides those credits, scientists have discovered other phenomena that could boost wireless communications, also with a green twist.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati have discovered new uses of spinning carbon nanotubes into longer fibers with additional useful properties. Vesselin Shanov and Mark Schultz created the powerful nanotubes, that are stronger than steel at a much lower density. Continue reading »

Ever wondered why you have so many gadgets near you, each one of them serving to something unique and totally useful? When you have to use your phone, you have to keep it near, if you use the remote, you have to occupy the other hand, and so on. I know, it may sound natural doing all this, but haven’t you ever thought of a universal remote control with phone, video camera and who knows what other device in it? Sounds interesting, huh? Continue reading »

Real-world applications of electronics such as voice and image transmission rarely need the accuracy that the binary system gives them. The miniaturization of electronics brings more and more complication in today’s microchips, that slowly but surely reach their physical limits. Continue reading »

The scientists’ research demonstrates a marriage of two emerging fields of research – nanophotonics and nanomechanics, which makes possible the extreme miniaturization of optics and mechanics on a silicon chip.

The energy of light has been harnessed and used in many ways. The “force” of light is different – it is a push or a pull action that causes something to move.

“While the force of light is far too weak for us to feel in everyday life, we have found that it can be harnessed and used at the nanoscale,” said team leader Hong Tang, assistant professor at Yale. “Our work demonstrates the advantage of using nano-objects as “targets” for the force of light — using devices that are a billion-billion times smaller than a space sail, and that match the size of today’s typical transistors.” Continue reading »