nanowires

New 'smart skin' so sensitive it rivals the real thing

Using what they are calling "mechanical agitation," researchers out of the Georgia Institute of Technology say they've developed arrays that can sense touch with the same level of sensitivity as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics.

The transparent and flexible arrays use about 8,000 taxels, which are touch-sensitive transistors that can generate piezoelectric signals independently -- meaning they emit electricity when mechanically agitated. As the researchers report this week in the journal Science, each of those thousands of transistors comprises a bundle of some 1,500 zinc oxide nanowires, which connect … Read more

Harvard, Mitre cook up programmable nanoprocessor

Researchers at Harvard University and Mitre have detailed the architecture for a programmable nanoprocessor built out of ultra-small nanowires.

The nanoprocessor, outlined in a Nature article published this week, is formed of 496 non-volatile field effect transistor (FET) nodes arranged in a 960-micrometer-square area, overlaid with semiconductor materials.

"This work represents a quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up," said Harvard's Charles Lieber, who led the research, in a statement. "[The work] demonstrates that this bottom-up paradigm, which is distinct from the way commercial circuits are built today, … Read more

New IBM memory promises faster, higher-capacity devices

A new kind of memory from IBM Labs is promising to revolutionize how much data we can store and how fast we can access it on our mobile and desktop devices.

After spending six years as a theoretical concept, the memory, dubbed Racetrack, finally is a huge step closer to reality. Researchers at IBM have recently confirmed that their theories of the physics behind Racetrack are valid and can be used to develop and manufacture this new type of memory.

This revolutionary type of memory could open up a whole new world for laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Users would be able to store as much as 100 more times data on their portable gadgets, perhaps keeping as many as 500,000 songs or 3,500 full-length movies on one mobile device. And since Racetrack would use considerably less power, a single battery charge could power a device for weeks rather than days or hours.

The new memory is also expected to play a role in desktop computers and servers, allowing them to access more data much faster. In some ways, Racetrack combines the best elements of flash memory and magnetic storage and could prove to be the one technology to someday replace current RAM, Flash RAM, and even conventional disk drives.… Read more

Could nanowire skin help robots do the dishes?

The dream of having a robot do the dishes may get a step closer with a touch-sensitive electronic skin made of flexible sensors, according to engineers at University of California at Berkeley. And presumably, it wouldn't get dishpan hands.

In a letter published by Nature Materials, the researchers describe a low-power but robust material that would have some of the properties of human skin, such as the ability to feel and touch. Such artificial skin might also help restore limb feeling to amputees.

The e-skin is based on inorganic single crystalline semiconductors. The engineers including Ali Javey and Kuniharu Takei grew germanium/silicon nanowires on a cylinder and then rolled them onto a polyimide film substrate, depositing the wires in a pattern.

The result was a shiny, thin, and flexible electronic material organized into a matrix of transistors, each of which with hundreds of semiconductor nanowires.

A pressure-sensitive rubber was added to the surface of the matrix for sensing. It has the ability to detect pressure from 0 to 15 kilopascals, equivalent to the force needed to grasp light objects. A robot with e-skin hands could handle wine glasses without breaking them.

To show how it can detect pressure, a rubber mold in the shape of the letter C (for "Cal") was placed over the matrix, and about 15 kilopascals of pressure was applied. As seen in the study, the matrix pixels imaged the pressure profile into a blurry but recognizable C.

E-skin for robot applications is under development by other groups, including an MIT-Peratech partnership working on spiky metallic nanoparticles. DARPA, which helped sponsor the Berkeley research, has a Revolutionizing Prosthetics program that is investigating the creation of synthetic skin to improve artificial limbs. … Read more

One step closer to age of nanowire transistors?

Moore's Law may get a new lease on life thanks to a discovery jointly announced Friday by researchers at IBM and Purdue University.

Named after Gordon Moore, former Intel co-founder and chairman, the well-known predict posits that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. But while Moore's Law has held true for the last 43 years, scientists say the computer industry is bound to bump up against limits to the shrinkage of conventional silicon transistor dimensions sometime in the next decade.

But that may no longer be true. IBM and Purdue researchers say … Read more