University Electronics

The Government is to put £4.7m towards photonics manufacturing research at the University of Southampton. Delivered through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the centre will be one of three, the others being: for regenerative medicine Loughborough University, and metal recycling at Brunel University.

Dr David Fyfe, CEO of Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), has today awarded the Institute of Physics' Business and Innovation Medal together with Professor Sir Richard Friend of Cambridge University for "guiding the company CDT to a pre-eminent position in the development of light-emitting polymers and in the development of the technology for flat-panel displays and lighting."

The University of Washington has developed a photo-stitching algorithm that produced a 3D model of Rome in under a day, from 150,000 tourist photos. The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the university, and in this used photos tagged either Rome or Roma from Flickr.

The University of Michigan has used air and planar process fabrication to implement programmable control logic and memory with pneumatics. The air chip came out of a need to reduce the amount of macroscopic equipment surrounding microfluidic chips used in medical analysis.

The University of Southampton is developing a blood cell analyser based on microfluidics and cell-by-cell impedance analysis. The fluid passages and electrodes are inside a stamp-sized glass-epoxy assembly that could one day be part of a hand-held analyser, replacing lab-based tests.

The result could be improved capacitors. "These materials are made of crystals that are separate, but all lined up," Manchester chemist Professor Paul O'Brien told Electronics Weekly. "Crystals in ceramic capacitors are similar, but random."

A hand-held blood cell analysis device for doctors' surgeries is being developed by the University of Southampton.

The University of Southampton has won Synopsys' £25,000 Charles Babbage Grant, the first university outside the US to do so. Also part of the Grant, the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will receive licenses of Synopsys' EDA software and intellectual property for two years.

Georgia Tech is claiming 100MA/cm2 current densities for graphene interconnect. Graphene, a single layer of graphite molecules discovered at the University of Manchester, is being touted both for future on-chip interconnect and super-fast semiconductors.

The University of Surrey and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have signed an agreement to collaborate in a £10m programme to realise the full potential of research into areas such as signal processing and nanotechnology.