Bionic batteries - [electronics power]

Things don?t change quickly in battery design. The choice of materials to make better batteries is pretty limited and the core material ? lithium ? has been a feature of batteries with high energy densities for a long time already. The first lithium battery appeared in the early 1970s, although they were not rechargeable systems.     

Pils promise - [electronics biotech]

In the 1980s, advertisements for Holsten Pils claimed the pale lager was better because "most of the sugar turns to alcohol". Whether that did much for the flavour was a matter for debate, but for Amyris biotechnologies, it's pretty much the philosophy to getting fuel made by bugs onto the market. The article discusses the effort and challenges of Amyris biotechnologies in getting cheap biofuel out of microbes.     

Ethics and synthetics - [electronics biotech]

It never takes long for discussions about synthetic biology to get onto Frankenstein. For a branch of science that merges engineering with biology, that?s no surprise. The question is: which Frankenstein? Are we talking about James Whale?s movie, with a monster assembled from body parts, or Mary Shelley?s book, with a creature fashioned from inanimate material but imbued with life?     

Painting with light - [electronics imaging]

THE RECENT RISE of digital imaging has brought photography back to the masses, and given amateurs access to picturemaking tools that would have been beyond their grasp five or ten years ago. The latest Nikon professional camera packs a 21million pixel sensor and has been hailed by some as the greatest camera yet ? although Canon users might disagree. But there?s still plenty of work to be done.     

The wrong answers - [electronics nanoscale]

`Garbage-in, garbage-out?. It?s the one constant of the computing business. The computer never gets things wrong: it delivers the right answers ? always. But give it the wrong question or data, and the result is rubbish. When you get a gas bill for a complete stranger, the computer gets the blame ? but we all know someone omitted a semi-colon somewhere or forgot to add one. Garbage-in, garbage-out.     

Solar flying grows wings - [electronics aviation]

The Solar Impulse environmentally friendly aeroplane project has entered its final test phase after the unveiling of its first prototype. Nick Smith flies (on a fossil-fuel-powered plane) to Switzerland to find out more.     

Running into the buffers - [electronics silicon]

Exponentials never last forever. Sooner or later, silicon transistors are going to stop getting smaller, if only because it's tough to make one with less than an atom of silicon in it. The reality is that conventional silicon transistors will stop shrinking sometime before that happens. But how much sooner? The end of the scaling of complementary metal-on- semiconductor (CMOS) silicon transistors could come as soon as a few generations from now.     

Evolution's war on design - [electronics biotech]

?I think I may have been one of the first people to have their picture taken with fecal matter,? jokes Professor Andrew Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin. Ellington was not the model for a piece of concept art or an undergraduate prank but the willing model for an experiment that set out to demonstrate how living organisms could be made to behave like photographic film. They developed the image on a glass plate full of bacteria, reprogrammed by adding extra DNA to them.     

Breaking up is hard to do - [electronics business]

Chip design has never been that easy, no matter how certain eras or process nodes might appear in retrospect. There has always been a tension between what physics could offer at any one time and what the tools, intellectual property (IP) and engineers could do to exploit it. If there is a way in which the challenges facing present-day semiconductor development differ from the past, it is in the level, breadth and thereby the complexity of the integration. A system-on-chip is a sensitive combination of different hardware blocks, processor cores interconnect and embedded software. Pulling all this together is, quite simply, horrible. The other thing you can be sure of on that list is that something has been missed out.     

Temperature control [electronics space]

This paper presents the development of electronic devices that can withstand huge variations in temperature when extreme conditions occur in space exploration.     

Density drive [electronics IEDM]

CHIPMAKERS VIED for the prize of densest process at the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco in mid-December, using last-minute switches to put forward their best results and demonstrate that even as far as 22nm conventional transistor structures can still work.     

Save big, don't go small - [electronics chip design]

Custom chip design just gets more expensive. It's not good news in our cash-strapped times. But there are other options. By Chris Edwards     

The crystal method [electronics silicon]

Chipmakers are going back to the beginning of the integrated-circuit (IC) industry to find techniques that can boost performance in chips as transistors scale into the nanometer generation. New processing techniques and a better understanding of the quantum-mechanical behaviour of highly scaled devices are helping to re-open avenues that were closed off in the late 1960s, as researchers revealed at the International Electron Devices Meeting last December.     

RF/microwaves [medical applications]

Radio frequency (RF) and microwaves have been used in many new applications in medicine, in the field of cardiology, microwaves are used to treat arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) and blocked coronary arteries. Urologists use similar systems to treat obstruction of urine flow due to an enlarged prostate. RF is being used by ear-nose-and-throat specialists to treat airflow obstructions responsible for snoring and sleep apnea. In the future, surgeons may use microwave energy to assist in liposuction procedures and perform tissue welding. New applications are constantly under development. This article reviews how heat generated by RF/microwave energy is utilized to modify a variety of biological tissues     

Design freedom gets the brush-off [electronics design]

Various techniques have been used to push processes this far past the point where diffraction effects kick in. These have included using phase-shift masking to turn diffraction to the designers' advantage, and optical proximity correction (OPC) techniques, such as adding 'ears' to the corners of layout elements so that they are printed as right angles. The problem is that chipmakers are applying ever more Byzantine combinations of these techniques to keep up with shrinking process dimensions, and getting diminishing returns. Device characteristics are varying wildly as more aggressive OPC techniques are pressed into action. The chip equipment industry has been working to solve this for years, but couldn't persuade its customers that moving to 157nm illumination sources was worth the development costs given the marginal advantages it would bring over 193nm light. Unfortunately, the development of EUV lithography is fraught with difficulties. The solution to the 65 nm and 45 nm design for manufacture is new DFM routers. As they are DFM-aware they can run the rule-based checks and ensure that around 80 percent of the DFM problems are avoided. The layout team can then use model- based DFM to take care of the remaining 20 percent.