Items Tagged With Electronics

Engineers at Purdue University have developed a technique to grow individual carbon nanotubes vertically on top of a silicon wafer, a step toward making advanced electronics, wireless devices and sensors using nanotubes by stacking circuits and components in layers. The technique might help develop a method for creating “vertically oriented” nanoelectronic devices, the electronic equivalent of a skyscraper, said Timothy S. Fisher, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the work with Timothy D. Sands, the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering.

IMEC has demonstrated the growth of low-sheet-resistivity AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) on 150mm silicon (Si) wafers. The process paves the way to low-cost GaN power devices for high-efficiency/high-power systems beyond the silicon limits. The high-quality AlGaN and GaN layers were grown in IMEC’s new 150mm metal-organic chemical vapour-phase epitaxy (MOVPE) system. This infrastructure extension allows IMEC to offer access to its AlGaN/GaN epiwafers in a service mode to laboratories and partner companies.

At five volumes and approximately, 2500 pages, University of California, Riverside Electrical Engineering Professor Alexander Balandin’s handbook on nanotechnology is a big book about the tiniest of things. But the explosive growth in the field of nanotechnology—where things happen at the molecular level—needed some kind of comprehensive source document that tackled the fundamental principles of, say, quantum dots, or nanowires.

Engineers and applied scientists from Harvard University have demonstrated a new photonic device with a wide range of potential commercial applications, including dramatically higher capacity for optical data storage. Termed a plasmonic laser antenna, the design consists of a metallic nanostructure, known as an optical antenna, integrated onto the facet of a commercial semiconductor laser.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have discovered what limits our ability to reduce the size of capacitors, often the largest components in integrated circuits, down to the nanoscale. They have answered a 45-year old question: why is the capacitance in thin-film capacitors so much smaller than expected?