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Category: electronics

The body’s cells respond to stress—toxins, mutations, starvation or other assaults—by pausing normal functions to focus on conserving energy, repairing damaged components and boosting defenses.

If the stress is manageable, cells resume normal activity; if not, they self-destruct.

Scientists have believed for decades this response happens as a linear chain of events: sensors in the cell “sound an alarm” and modify a key protein, which then changes a second protein that slows or shuts down the cell’s normal function.

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Dense three-dimensional integration of photonics and electronics results in a high-speed (800 Gb s−1) data interface for semiconductor chips that features 80 communication channels and consumes only tens of femtojoules per transmitted bit.

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Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process.

One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics onto it, and then wiring it up to create a working device.

If the prototype fails, the maker will likely have no choice but to discard it and go back to the drawing board.

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Ask almost any physicist what the most frustrating problem is in modern-day physics, and they will likely say the discrepancy between general relativity and quantum mechanics. That discrepancy has been a thorn in the side of the physics community for decades.

While there has been some progress on potential theories that could rectify the two, there has been scant experimental evidence to support those theories. That is where Selim Shahriar from Northwestern University, Evanston, comes in. He plans to work on a concept called the Space-borne Ultra-Precise Measurement of the Equivalent Principle Signature of Quantum Gravity (SUPREME-GQ), which he hopes will help collect some accurate experimental data on the subject once and for all.

To put it bluntly, the experiment is complicated. At its heart, it uses a space-based platform carrying a quantum-entangled sensor and some precise positioning systems. But understanding why it is useful to test quantum gravity first requires some explanation. Let’s first look at one of the most famous tenets of General Relativity—the Equivalence Principle.

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Optoelectronics are promising devices that combine optical components, which operate leveraging light, with electronics, which leverage electrical current. Optoelectronic systems could transmit data faster than conventional electronics, thus opening new possibilities for the development of high-speed communication technology.

Despite their potential, the deployment of optoelectronics has so far been limited, in part due to reported difficulties in synchronizing optically generated signals with those of traditional electronic clocks. These signals are difficult to synchronize as optical and electronic components typically operate at different frequencies.

The frequencies of optical signals (i.e., generally hundreds of gigahertz) are generally significantly higher than those of , which range from megahertz to a few gigahertz. This mismatch in frequencies makes aligning the frequencies of the two types of components challenging, which in turn adversely impacts the reliability and efficiency of optoelectronics.

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A collaboration of researchers in Austria and China has built a universal inverse-design magnonic device that can efficiently produce new electronic components based solely on a definition of the desired performance, and do the job in minutes or hours. They published the result in Nature Electronics.

Designing an electronic component usually requires extensive manual design and simulation to achieve a desired functionality. Inverse design eliminates these steps. It is a two-step process: First, the developers divide a design area into an array of smaller, programmable elements. Then, they deploy iterative feedback-loop optimization to tune these elements to achieve a predefined functionality.

This new device manipulates magnons, the quasiparticle quanta of magnetic spin waves. There have been magnonic devices and inverse-design devices, but this is the first universal magnonic inverse design device. Hypothetically, this kind of device can duplicate the performance of anything from a diode to a neuromorphic circuit.

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