Nanowerk July 16, 2018 To efficiently transport light on small scales, researchers in Singapore have developed a more efficient method that involves a string of cylindrical silicon nanoparticles. The first nanoparticle is excited using light and then measured the light that reaches another nanoparticle further down the line. They found the fall in the light intensity to be low. The nanoparticles are not in direct contact with each other. Instead, light is transferred to the next particle through magnetic-field resonances. Although each particle is a resonant scatterer when they are lined up they work as a single waveguide without leaking […]
Tag Archives: S&T Singapore
Light-bending nano-patterns for LEDs
Nanowerk June 8, 2018 Researchers in Singapore designed and experimentally realized high efficiency beam deflecting and polarization beam splitting metasurfaces consisting of GaN nanostructures etched on the GaN epitaxial substrate itself. They demonstrated a polarization insensitive beam deflecting metasurface with 64% and 90% absolute and relative efficiencies, and the broad functionality that can be realized on this platform. The broadband response in the blue wavelength range of 430–470 nm. The nanophotonic platform of GaN shows the way to off- and on-chip nonlinear and quantum photonic devices working efficiently at blue emission wavelengths common to many atomic quantum emitters such as Ca+ […]
Researchers develop electronic skins that wirelessly activate fully soft robots
Phys.org June 01, 2018 Skin-like electronic system proposed by researchers in South Korea consists of two-part electronic skins (e-skins) that are designed to perform wireless inter-skin communication for untethered, reversible assembly of driving capability. The physical design of each e-skin features minimized inherent hardness in terms of thickness, weight, and fragmented circuit configuration. The e-skin pair can be softly integrated into separate soft body frames (robot and human), wirelessly interact with each other, and then activate and control the robot. The design is highly compact and shows that the embedded e-skin can equally share the fine soft motions of the […]
Topic-adjusted visibility metric for scientific articles
Phys.org May 10, 2018 As different academic disciplines have different research behaviours and citation practices, a comparison of research quality across different disciplines based on raw citation counts would not reflect accurately the research merit. An international team of researchers (USA – Columbia University, Singapore) has developed an article-level metric, called “topic-adjusted visibility metric”, which is able to automatically account for the variation in citation activities among different research fields by using a complex network containing attributes belonging to the selected article. Each article need not belong to a single field but can belong to multiple fields with varying degrees. […]
Engineers invent smart microchip that can self-start and operate when battery runs out
Science Daily May 3, 2018 Researchers in Singapore have designed a microchip called BATLESS that switches to the minimum-power mode and operates with a tiny power consumption of about half a nanoWatt when the battery is exhausted. The power management technique enables operations to be self-started, while being powered directly by the tiny on-chip solar cell, with no battery assistance. The chip’s ability to switch between minimum energy and minimum power mode translates into aggressive miniaturisation of batteries from centimetres down to a few millimetres… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Singapore bets big on synthetic biology
Nature April 25, 2018 The government is pouring money into a new research programme and is encouraging scientists to make synthetic microorganisms, or redesign natural ones, that can be used to produce food, electronics, medicine and energy. The national synthetic-biology strategy prioritizes three areas: developing synthetic cannabinoids, producing rare fatty acids and developing new strains of microorganisms that can be used to create products for industry… read more.
Faster data transfer through plasmons
Nanowerk February 22, 2018 Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) function like photonic elements, carrying information at high speeds. Researchers in Singapore designed transducers comprising aluminum and gold electrodes, separated by a two nanometer-thick layer of aluminum oxide that acts as an insulating ‘quantum tunneling’ barrier. Electrons that make the quantum leap across this gap will either generate or detect SPPs. By joining two transducers with a plasmonic waveguide, so that one acted as a source and another as detector they observed about 1 in 7 of the tunneling electrons coupling to a SPP. The invention has potential applications in three-dimensional integrated […]
Engineers invent tiny vision processing chip for ultra-small smart vision systems and IoT applications
Physorg January 19, 2018 In energy-quality scaling, the trade-off between energy consumption and quality in the extraction of features is adjusted. It mimics the dynamic change in the level of attention with which humans observe the visual scene, processing it with different levels of detail and quality depending on the task at hand. Researchers in Singapore used this concept to develop EQSCALE, a microchip that can perform continuous feature extraction at 0.2 milliwatts. This translates into a major advancement in the level of miniaturization for smart vision systems. It paves the way for cost-effective IoT applications… read more.
Fully screen-printed monoPoly silicon solar cell technology
Source: Phys.org, December 14, 2017 The technology developed by researchers in Singapore is applicable on both p-type and n-type silicon wafers, features homogenous junctions and standard fire-thorough screen-printed metal contacts with grids on both sides, resulting in a high-efficiency bifacial solar cell. It uses an advanced tunnel oxide and doped silicon layers, enabling excellent surface passivation in the non-contact cell regions along with very low-resistance and low-recombination screen-printed contacts. Using commercially available large-area Cz-Si wafers they recorded an average cell efficiency of 21.5%… read more.