Research

At ISSCC this in San Francisco this week, the National Taiwan University revealed a processor custom designed to crunch the vast amount of data that emerges as hundreds of millions of short DNA segments are analysed en-route to producing a three billion nucleotides gene sequence. The biological detective work flow includes four steps: short-read mapping, haplotype calling, variant calling and ...

Perovskite materials show much promise in solar cells as they are as efficient as silicon, but are deposited as thin films that can be coated on glass. However, their lifetime is nothing like as good as silicon, and many research projects are under way to increase durability. This week, the University of Toledo has reported on a project that passivated ...

Oxford University spin-out Lumai has secured a £1.1m Innovate UK Smart Grant to commercialise its all-optical artificial intelligence processing technology. The money was awarded in conjunction with The University of Oxford, and follows funding from IP Group and Runa Capital. Its intellectual property covers optical matrix multiplication, electro-optic neural network training and all-optical neural network training. “Optics is a promising ...

A German consortium is looking into short-distance optical quantum key distribution for secure data communication. “Previous research has focused on long-distance secure data communication for applications in the global data infrastructure, for networking government or military facilities, or for information exchange with satellites,” according to research lab Fraunhofer IPMS. “However, the connections to the end user on the last kilometre ...

In what might be the lowest power data transmission scheme ever, researchers at the University of Washington have sent data using the Johnson noise of a 50Ω resistor – or more accurately, the difference in Johnson noise between a 50Ω resistor and an open-circuit. One of the prototypes 5bit/s was sent over ~7.3m with a bit error rate of 0.15%, ...

Harwin, the interconnects specialist, is helping study the build-up of microplastics in UK waters via this year’s GB Row Challenge, which has an ecological angle. The Hampshire-based company is one of the sponsors of the event and it has also been working with the University of Portsmouth to develop the pumps for the microplastic sampling systems fitted to competing boats. ...

Winner University of Bristol   Bristol has created a 3D-printed fingertip that produces signals that appear to mimic human touch. It can produce artificial nerve signals that look like recordings from real, tactile neurons. This is an exciting development in soft robotics; it helps uncover how the complex internal structure of human skin creates our human sense of touch. On ...

Two advances that increase the life of perovskite cells were published in Science this week, both involving Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and its solar cell guru Michael Grätzel (pictured). One of them was the discovery that promoting (111) crystal facets at the surface of perovskite thin films makes them more stable in the face of heat, light and ...

Graphene FETs could make designer electronic noses, following research at Tokyo Tech. This kind of transistor has a channel made from the 2D material graphene, which has high electron mobility that can be modulated in various ways. The channel’s sensitivity to being gated by outside influences has led GFETs, as they are known, to be used in various types of ...

The UK Government has announced the companies that will be funded to develop vehicle-to-anything (V2X) energy transfer projects. Funded is via the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Innovate-UK. Malvern-based bi-directional EV charger company Indra is in two of the winning consortia: in Next Generation V2X Power Module to improve its charger, and in V2X Inflexion with ...