IEEE Spectrum October 2, 2018 Through-silicon vias (TSVs) are the standard way to stack chips. To make TSV smart chip, researchers in Germany have designed through-silicon via field effect transistor (TSVFET) in which the drain and source were at the top and bottom of the hole. When voltage was applied to the gate, current flowed from top to bottom through the area surrounding the hole. Just by applying a voltage or taking it off, it is possible to activate a chip or deactivate it completely. TSVFETs can be linked up to form elementary circuits. By adding some control electronics, the […]
Tag Archives: S&T Germany
Plasmonic Antenna Shines a Light on Terahertz Processors
IEEE Spectrum August 6, 2018 To combine the advantages of ultrafast femtosecond nano-optics with an on-chip communication scheme, optical signals with a frequency of several hundreds of THz need to be down-converted to coherent electronic signals propagating on-chip. Researchers in Germany have demonstrated that 14 fs optical pulses in the near-infrared can drive electronic on-chip circuits with a prospective bandwidth up to 10 THz. The corresponding electronic pulses propagate in macroscopic striplines on a millimeter scale. They exploit femtosecond photoswitches based on asymmetric, nanoscale metal junctions to drive the pulses. The non-linear ultrafast response is based on a plasmonically enhanced, multiphoton […]
Scientists Have Invented a Software That Can ‘See’ Several Minutes Into The Future
Science Alert June 14, 2018 Researchers in Germany wanted to see if a program could list a sequence of actions up to five minutes into the future based on watching the first few steps of an activity. They trained software to guess what a chef would do next by showing it a number of videos of people making breakfast or a salad. They then showed the program a completely new video of another person preparing a similar meal, and watched how it guessed upcoming steps and their respective duration. One approach anticipated future actions and reflected before anticipating again, and […]
The Unhackable Envelope
IEEE Spectrum May 3, 2018 Researchers in Germany have developed an envelope called B-Trepid to protect high-security computer. It replaces the stored key with one that is generated by the structure of the envelope itself. Instead of relying on resistances in the envelope’s mesh, B-Trepid calculates the capacitances between the mesh’s wires which vary from envelope to envelope in unpredictable ways. When B-Trepid is attached to its computer network and turned on, the external mesh generates a unique key that is used to encrypt all the data within the system. When it’s off, there’s no key and therefore nothing to […]
3D Nanoprinting facilitates communication with light
Nanowerk April 20, 2018 Researchers in Germany have developed a new solution for the coupling of optical microchips to each other or to optical fibers. They use tiny beam-shaping elements that are printed directly onto the facets of optical components by a high-precision 3D printing process. These elements can be produced with nearly any three-dimensional shape and enable low-loss coupling of various optical components with a high positioning tolerance. They produced beam-shaping elements of various designs and tested them on a variety of chip and fiber facets and reached coupling efficiencies of up to 88% between an indium phosphide laser […]
Energy conversion: Optical ‘overtones’ for solar cells
Science Daily April 19, 2018 In solar cells the spectral position of the window of light that can be efficiently converted is strongly related to its band-gap. Researchers in Germany measured the charge carrier density created by the absorption of multiple photons in perovskite nanocrystals. The efficiency of this process becomes drastically enhanced when the frequency of the primary light oscillation and frequency of the exciton at the band-gap become equal. The observation of this novel resonance phenomenon for optical excitations in excitonic semiconductors could pave the way for solar cells to more efficiently convert long-wavelength light into usable electric […]
Chaos that will keep you warm: Researchers improve heat insulation using deliberate chaos
Science Daily March 31, 2018 Thermal conductivity of well-ordered crystal structure is low. Researchers in Germany produced nanoparticles which exhibit a thermal conductivity that is even much lower. These materials are mixtures in powder form: crystalline order is thus replaced with chaos. They found that the highest insulation effect is reached by mixing a very large number of small particles with fewer large particles and the difference in size between the two types of particles also plays a crucial role. The discovery will help to conceive improved device layouts with more reliable heat dissipation or conservation properties in the future… […]
MIALinx connects machines
Fraunhofer Research April 3, 2018 Researchers in Germany have developed MIALinx, a web-based application that connects machines, sensors and data to an agile network. Building on a previous project called Sense&Act, this latest advance brings a great measure of adaptability to plants and, as an added perk, optimizes machine maintenance. MIALinx even interfaces with old lathes and milling machines. It can respond to events and act on if-then rules. Even older machines can be readily integrated. It can be handled and configured intuitively via a graphical user interface – without a lot of time spent getting acquainted and without programming […]
Sunlight funnel collects light from all directions
Physorg March 1, 2018 Researchers in Germany modeled the new light-harvesting funnels on nature’s design. The devices consist of many randomly oriented “donor” pigments that can absorb light from nearly all incident angles and funnel it onto a smaller number of “acceptor” molecules that are all oriented in a single direction to direct the light onto a photoconversion device. This concept can reduce the intrinsic losses of previous solar concentrators to below 10%. In tests the solar concentrator absorbed approximately 99% of the incident light, with minimal losses due to reabsorption and reflection. The device also has a light redirection […]
Light controls two-atom quantum computation
Nanowerk February 7, 2018 In the new concept for quantum gate demonstrated by researchers in Germany, photons impinging on an optical cavity mediate an interaction between two atoms trapped inside. This interaction is the basis for performing characteristic gate operations between the atoms. The gate operations take place within microseconds and the gate mechanism can be applied to other experimental platforms, and the two-atom gate can serve as a building block in a quantum repeater… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE