Research

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are investigating phase-change as a way to improve heat-sinking in space. Earth-bound heatsinks loose most of their heat by convection – a luxury not available to heatsinks on satellites which can only use radiation. And spacecraft heatsinks cannot be heavy. The research project is looking into situations were heat is not generated continuously, ...

IQE and Quinas Technology say they have successfully completed their £1.1m UltraRAM industrialisation project. This involved developing a scalable gallium antimonide (GaSb) epitaxy for memory devices. In July 2024 they were awarded the year’s funding by Innovate UK to take UltraRAM further towards mass production. Quinas Technology is the startup founded by IQE and the universities of Lancaster and Cardiff. ...

Institute of Science Tokyo revealed advances to its BBCube 3D integration process at ECTC, the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference. “These new technologies can help in addressing the demands of high-performance computing applications which require high memory bandwidth and low power consumption with reduced power supply noise,” according to the Institute. BBCube stacks a processor on top of a ...

University of British Columbia researchers are aiming at long-distance entangled quantum networks with a coherent microwave-to-optical photon converter, that can theoretically be fabricated on a silicon wafer. Such a network would have fibre optic long-distance communication, possibly many km long, connecting microwave qubits. “The technology could serve as a translator for quantum computers, enabling them to talk to each other ...

Imec has developed a GaN MOSHEMT on silicon that achieves both record efficiency and output power for an enhancement-mode (E-mode) device operating at low supply voltage. In parallel, imec also demonstrated a record-low contact resistance of 0.024Ω· mm which is essential to further boost output power in future designs. The results mark a crucial step toward integrating GaN technology into ...

Alice & Bob, the French quantum computing developers who are integrating their  quantum simulation libraries Dynamiqs with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q platform, have found that the combination accelerates the simulation of complex quantum dynamics by up to 75x. CUDA-Q is NVIDIA’s open-source quantum development platform for hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing. Dynamiqs is Alice & Bob’s  quantum simulation libraries which enable high-speed simulation of ...

F-Tac is a robot hand that can sense touch with 100μm resolution across 70% of its grasping surface, and can grasp using that touch feedback. “The spatial resolution combined with the enormous coverage are truly novel and were not possible previously,” claimed team member Professor Kaspar Althoefer (pictured), director of the Centre of Excellence Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary University, ...

The Photonics Research Group and IDlab, two imec research  groups at Ghent University, and imec, have demo-ed a fully-integrated single-chip microwave photonics system, combining optical and microwave signal processing on a single chip. The chip integrates high-speed modulators, optical filters, photodetectors, as well as transfer-printed lasers, making it a compact, self-contained and programmable solution for high-frequency signal processing. This  can ...

Imec has fabbed Ruthenium (Ru) lines at 16nm pitch with average resistance as low as 656Ω/µm. The 16nm pitch metal lines were fabricated using a semi-damascene integration flow optimized for cost-effective manufacturability, making it an attractive approach for fabricating the first local interconnect metal layer of the A7 and beyond technology nodes. Ruthenium (Ru) semi-damascene has been originally proposed by ...

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a more accurate model with which to design ‘thermally activated delayed fluorescence’ (TADF) OLED materials. Emission from OLEDs occurs when excited electrons drop to their regular energy state and emit energy in the form of fluorescence. Excitons to not have to go into the fluorescing singlet (S1) state, but can go into a triplet ...