Memristive Logic‐in‐Memory Integrated Circuits for Energy‐Efficient Flexible Electronics

A memristive nonvolatile logic‐in‐memory circuit can provide a novel energy‐efficient computing architecture for battery‐powered flexible electronics. However, the cell‐to‐cell interference existing in the memristor crossbar array impedes both the reading process and parallel computing. Here, it is demonstrated that integration of an amorphous In‐Zn‐Sn‐O (a‐IZTO) semiconductor‐based selector (1S) device and a poly(1,3,5‐trivinyl‐1,3,5‐trimethyl cyclotrisiloxane) (pV3D3)‐based memristor (1M) on a flexible substrate can overcome these problems. The developed a‐IZTO‐based selector device, having a Pd/a‐IZTO/Pd structure, exhibits nonlinear current–voltage (I–V) characteristics with outstanding stability against electrical and mechanical stresses. Its underlying conduction mechanism is systematically determined via the temperature‐dependent I–V characteristics. The flexible one‐selector?one‐memristor (1S–1M) array exhibits reliable electrical characteristics and significant leakage current suppression. Furthermore, single‐instruction multiple‐data (SIMD), the foundation of parallel computing, is successfully implemented by performing NOT and NOR gates over multiple rows within the 1S–1M array. The results presented here will pave the way for development of a flexible nonvolatile logic‐in‐memory circuit for energy‐efficient flexible electronics.     

Multifunctional Three‐Dimensional T‐Junction Graphene Micro‐Wells: Energy‐Efficient,Plasma‐Enabled Growth and Instant Water‐Based Transfer for Flexible Device Applications

The “third‐generation” 3D graphene structures, T‐junction graphene micro‐wells (T‐GMWs) are produced on cheap polycrystalline Cu foils in a single‐step, low‐temperature (270 °C), energy‐efficient, and environment‐friendly dry plasma‐enabled process. T‐GMWs comprise vertical graphene (VG) petal‐like sheets that seemlessly integrate with each other and the underlying horizontal graphene sheets by forming T‐junctions. The microwells have the pico‐to‐femto‐liter storage capacity and precipitate compartmentalized PBS crystals. The T‐GMW films are transferred from the Cu substrates, without damage to the both, in de‐ionized or tap water, at room temperature, and without commonly used sacrificial materials or hazardous chemicals. The Cu substrates are then re‐used to produce similar‐quality T‐GMWs after a simple plasma conditioning. The isolated T‐GMW films are transferred to diverse substrates and devices and show remarkable recovery of their electrical, optical, and hazardous NO₂ gas sensing properties upon repeated bending (down to 1 mm radius) and release of flexible trasparent display plastic substrates. The plasma‐enabled mechanism of T‐GMW isolation in water is proposed and supported by the Cu plasma surface modification analysis. Our GMWs are suitable for various optoelectronic, sesning, energy, and biomedical applications while the growth approach is potentially scalable for future pilot‐scale industrial production.     

Growth of Large‐Area SnS Films with Oriented 2D SnS Layers for Energy‐Efficient Broadband Optoelectronics

The anisotropic properties of 2D orthorhombic SnS (tin monosulfide, p‐type) layers can be utilized in energy‐efficient optoelectronics by growing 2D SnS layers with a preferred orientation. To meet such a need, a strategy for growing SnS layers with the control of structural parameters such as orientation and thickness is highly desired. This report demonstrates a simple procedure for growing a large‐area SnS thin film composed of nanoscale SnS platelets with a controlled orientation relative to the surface via a single‐step process involving in situ sulfur depletion and phase structural transition of the sputter‐deposited SnS₂ particles. The synthesized SnS films show good optoelectronic performances such as high signal‐to‐noise ratios, linear dynamic range, and high response speeds. In addition, the orientation of the SnS platelets is found to control the optoelectronic properties such as the electronic junction formation and the optical reflectance. The orientation‐controlled SnS layers on Si substrate operate as a good photosensor with a good zero‐bias photoresponse over a wide range of wavelengths including ultraviolet, visible, and near‐infrared. The device performances evaluated from the transient photovoltage, photocurrent, Mott–Schottky characteristics, and impedance spectroscopy are all well correlated with the geometric orientation of the 2D SnS layers within the film.     

Energy‐Efficient Quorum‐Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of sensor networks is generally dependent on the battery power of the sensor nodes that it employs; hence it is crucial for the sensor nodes to efficiently use their battery resources. This research paper presents a method to increase the reliability of sensor nodes by constructing a connected dominating tree (CDT), which is a subnetwork of wireless sensor networks. It detects the minimum number of dominatees, dominators, forwarder sensor nodes, and aggregates, as well as transmitting data to the sink. A new medium access control (MAC) protocol, called Homogenous Quorum‐Based Medium Access Control (HQMAC), is also introduced, which is an adaptive, homogenous, asynchronous quorum‐based MAC protocol. In this protocol, certain sensor nodes belonging to a network will be allowed to tune their wake‐up and sleep intervals, based on their own traffic load. A new quorum system, named BiQuorum, is used by HQMAC to provide a low duty cycle, low network sensibility, and a high number of rendezvous points when compared with other quorum systems such as grid and dygrid. Both the theoretical results and the simulation results proved that the proposed HQMAC (when applied to a CDT) facilitates low transmission latency, high delivery ratio, and low energy consumption, thus extending the lifetime of the network it serves.     

Copper Iodide Based Hybrid Phosphors for Energy‐Efficient General Lighting Technologies

Solid‐state‐lighting (SSL) is a new lighting technology that is rapidly replacing conventional lighting sources because it is much more energy efficient, longer lasting, and contributes significantly to environmental protection. A main branch of SSL technology is light‐emitting diodes (LEDs), and white‐light LEDs (WLEDs) are in the greatest demand for general lighting and illumination applications. Current WLED devices rely heavily on rare‐earth elements (REEs), which will likely suffer from cost and supply risks and environmental consequences in the near future. Crystalline inorganic–organic hybrid materials based on I–VII binary semiconductors represent a promising material class as REE‐free phosphor alternatives. This article provides a brief overview of recent advancement on this material family, with a focus on the rational design, energy‐efficient and low‐cost synthesis, systematic modification, and optimization of their electronic, optical, and thermal properties. A particular emphasis will be made on our own progress over the past several years in developing four classes of CuI(L) structures with substantially improved performance as energy‐saving lighting phosphors. General strategies for structural design, synthesis, and property optimization of these materials will also be discussed.     

MHP: Master‐Handoff Protocol for Fast and Energy‐Efficient Data Transfer over SPI in Wireless Sensing Systems

Serial peripheral interface (SPI) has been identified as a bottleneck in many wireless sensing systems today. SPI is used almost universally as the physical connection between the microcontroller unit (MCU) and radios, storage devices, and many types of sensors. Virtually all wireless sensor nodes today perform up to twice as many bus transactions as necessary to transfer a given piece of data, as an MCU must serve as the bus master in all transactions. To eliminate this bottleneck, we propose the master‐handoff protocol. After the MCU initiates reading from the source slave device and writing to the sink slave device, the MCU as a master becomes a slave, and either the source or the sink slave becomes the temporary master. Experiment results show that this master‐handoff technique not only cuts the data transfer time in half, but, more importantly, also enables a superlinear energy reduction.     

Energy‐Efficient Approximate Speech Signal Processing for Wearable Devices

As wearable devices are powered by batteries, they need to consume as little energy as possible. To address this challenge, in this article, we propose a synergistic technique for energy‐efficient approximate speech signal processing (ASSP) for wearable devices. More specifically, to enable the efficient trade‐off between energy consumption and sound quality, we synergistically integrate an approximate multiplier and a successive approximate register analog‐to‐digital converter using our enhanced conversion algorithm. The proposed ASSP technique provides ~40% lower energy consumption with ~5% higher sound quality than a traditional one that optimizes only the bit width of SSP.     

Energy‐efficient multi‐level and distance‐aware clustering mechanism for WSNs

Most sensor networks are deployed at hostile environments to sense and gather specific information. As sensor nodes have battery constraints, therefore, the research community is trying to propose energy‐efficient solutions for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to prolong the lifetime of the network. In this paper, we propose an energy‐efficient multi‐level and distance‐aware clustering (EEMDC) mechanism for WSNs. In this mechanism, the area of the network is divided into three logical layers, which depends upon the hop‐count‐based distance from the base station. The simulation outcomes show that EEMDC is more energy efficient than other existing conventional approaches. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self‐Healing Materials for Energy‐Storage Devices

The booming development of electronics, electric vehicles, and grid storage stations has led to a high demand for advanced energy‐storage devices (ESDs) and accompanied attention to their reliability under various circumstances. Self‐healing is the ability of an organism to repair damage and restore function through its own internal vitality. Inspired by this, brilliant designs have emerged in recent years using self‐healing materials to significantly improve the lifespan, durability, and safety of ESDs. Extrinsic and intrinsic self‐healing materials and their working principles are first introduced. Then, the application of self‐healing materials in ESDs according to their self‐healing chemistry, including hydrogen bonds, electrostatic interactions, and borate ester bonds, are described in detail. Based on these, critical challenges and important future directions of self‐healing ESDs are discussed.     

A Genetic‐Algorithm‐Based Optimized Clustering for Energy‐Efficient Routing in MWSN

With the increasing demands for mobile wireless sensor networks in recent years, designing an energy‐efficient clustering and routing protocol has become very important. This paper provides an analytical model to evaluate the power consumption of a mobile sensor node. Based on this, a clustering algorithm is designed to optimize the energy efficiency during cluster head formation. A genetic algorithm technique is employed to find the near‐optimal threshold for residual energy below which a node has to give up its role of being the cluster head. This clustering algorithm along with a hybrid routing concept is applied as the near‐optimal energy‐efficient routing technique to increase the overall efficiency of the network. Compared to the mobile low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy protocol, the simulation studies reveal that the energy‐efficient routing technique produces a longer network lifetime and achieves better energy efficiency.     

Energy‐aware cross‐layer resource allocation in mobile cloud

This paper proposed an energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach. In this paper, a hybrid cloud architecture is adopted for provisioning mobile service to mobile device users, which include nearby local cloud and remote public cloud. The computation‐intensive tasks can be processed by the remote public cloud, while the delay‐sensitive computation can be processed by the nearby local cloud. On the basis of the system context and mobile user preferences, the energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach can optimize the consumption of cloud resource and system performance. The cooperation and collaboration among local cloud agent, public cloud supplier, and mobile cloud user are regulated through the economic approach. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation is performed on the local cloud level and the public cloud level, which comprehensively considers the benefits of all participants. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation algorithm is proposed, which is evaluated in the experiment environment, and comparison results and analysis are discussed.     

Energy‐efficient power control for uplink spectrum‐sharing heterogeneous networks

This article considers energy‐efficient power control schemes for interference management in uplink spectrum‐sharing heterogeneous networks that maximize the energy efficiency of users, protect the macro base station, and support users with QoS consideration. In the first scenario, we define the objective function as the weighted sum of the energy efficiencies and develop an efficient global optimization algorithm with global linear and local quadratic rate of convergence to solve the considered problem. To ensure fairness among individual user equipments (UEs) in terms of energy efficiency, we consider the max‐min problem, where the objective is defined as the weighted minimum of the energy efficiencies, and a fractional programming theory and the dual decomposition method are jointly used to solve the problem and investigate an iterative algorithm. As by‐products, we further discuss the global energy efficiency problem and consider near‐optimal schemes. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed algorithms over existing interference management schemes.     

An Energy‐Dense Solvent‐Free Dual‐Ion Battery

Ever‐increasing energy demands call for alternative energy storage technologies with balanced performance and cost characteristics to meet current and emerging applications. Dual‐ion batteries (DIBs) are considered particularly attractive owing to the potentially high specific energy, a rich variety of charge carrier combinations, and the applicability of metal‐free cathode and earth‐abundant anode materials. However, their performance falls far below expectations because of a large excess of solvent needed to dissolve electroactive species that induces side reactions and contributes parasitic weight, which penalizes the reversible capacity and cell‐level energy density. Herein, a solvent‐free DIB utilizing a binary alkali metal molten salt based on bis(fluorosulfonyl)amide as the electrolyte to solve these issues is demonstrated. The cell (NaK‐DIB) operates in a temperature range of 90–120 °C and exhibits high theoretical energy densities of 246 Wh kg^?1 and 533 Wh L^?1 based on active materials and capacity‐matched electrolyte, far surpassing those of reported DIBs. Further improvements could realize affordable grid‐scale energy storage.     

Energy‐Efficiency Power Allocation for Cognitive Radio MIMO‐OFDM Systems

This paper studies energy‐efficiency (EE) power allocation for cognitive radio MIMO‐OFDM systems. Our aim is to minimize energy efficiency, measured by “Joule per bit” metric, while maintaining the minimal rate requirement of a secondary user under a total power constraint and mutual interference power constraints. However, since the formulated EE problem in this paper is non‐convex, it is difficult to solve directly in general. To make it solvable, firstly we transform the original problem into an equivalent convex optimization problem via fractional programming. Then, the equivalent convex optimization problem is solved by a sequential quadratic programming algorithm. Finally, a new iterative energy‐ efficiency power allocation algorithm is presented. Numerical results show that the proposed method can obtain better EE performance than the maximizing capacity algorithm.     

Voltage‐Induced Coercivity Reduction in Nanoporous Alloy Films: A Boost toward Energy‐Efficient Magnetic Actuation

Magnetic data storage and magnetically actuated devices are conventionally controlled by magnetic fields generated using electric currents. This involves significant power dissipation by Joule heating effect. To optimize energy efficiency, manipulation of magnetic information with lower magnetic fields (i.e., lower electric currents) is desirable. This can be accomplished by reducing the coercivity of the actuated material. Here, a drastic reduction of coercivity is observed at room temperature in thick (≈600 nm), nanoporous, electrodeposited Cu–Ni films by simply subjecting them to the action of an electric field. The effect is due to voltage‐induced changes in the magnetic anisotropy. The large surface‐area‐to‐volume ratio and the ultranarrow pore walls of the system allow the whole film, and not only the topmost surface, to effectively contribute to the observed magnetoelectric effect. This waives the stringent “ultrathin‐film requirement” from previous studies, where small voltage‐driven coercivity variations were reported. This observation expands the already wide range of applications of nanoporous materials (hitherto in areas like energy storage or catalysis) and it opens new paradigms in the fields of spintronics, computation, and magnetic actuation in general.     

Energy‐efficient cluster division for multi‐cell joint transmission technology

Coordinated Multi‐Point (CoMP) is an effective way to improve user performance in next‐generation wireless cellular networks, such as 3GPP LTE‐Advanced(LTE‐A). The base station cooperation can reduce interference, and increase the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) of cell‐edge users and improve the system capacity. However, the base station cooperation also adds additional power consumption for signal processing and sharing information through back‐haul links between cooperative base stations. As such, CoMP may potentially consume more energy. This paper studies such energy consumption issue in CoMP, presents a semi‐dynamic CoMP cluster division algorithm based on energy efficiency (SCCD‐EE) that can effectively adapt to users' real‐time interference, and employs the idea of Maximal Independent Set (MIS) to solve the problem of cluster overlapping. To verify the feasibility of the proposed algorithm, this paper performs comprehensive evaluations in terms of energy efficiency and system capacity. The simulation results show that the proposed semi‐dynamic cluster division algorithm can not only improve the system capacity and the quality of service (QoS) of cell‐edge users, but also achieve higher network energy efficiency compared with static cluster methods and Non‐CoMP approaches. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emerging Thermal‐Responsive Materials and Integrated Techniques Targeting the Energy‐Efficient Smart Window Application

Architectural windows that smartly regulate indoor solar radiation by changing their optical transmittance in response to thermostimuli are developed as a promising solution toward reducing the energy consumption of buildings. Recently, energy‐efficient smart window technology has attracted increasing scientific interest, with the exploration of energy‐efficient novel materials as well as integration with practical techniques to generate various desired multifunctionalities. This review systematically summarizes emerging thermoresponsive materials for smart window applications, including hydrogels, ionic liquids, perovskites, metamaterials, and liquid crystals. These are compared with vanadium dioxide (VO₂), a conventional and extensively studied material for thermochromic smart window applications. In addition, recent progress on cutting‐edge integrated techniques for smart windows is covered, including electrothermal techniques, self‐cleaning, wettability, and also integration with solar cells for bifunctional energy conservation and generation. Finally, opportunities and challenges relating to thermochromic smart windows and prospects for future development are discussed.