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Tag Archives: silicon
Graphene transistor: Two layers may be better than one
One of the characteristics of clever science is to look at a new material from every which way. So it is with graphene. Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms, in a layer one atom thick, arranged in the pattern of a honeycomb. It sounds simple, and is anything but. Its super-thinness in this precise [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Also tagged band gap, bandgap, bilayer, electronics, graphene, graphene transistor, NIST, semiconductor Leave a comment
A new use for nanowires: E-skin (electronic skin)
What’s in a word? Call it a membrane and most people associate it with something scientific. Call it skin and there are definite human associations. So when the engineers at the University of California Berkeley (USA) developed a pressure sensitive electronic material made of nanowires, is it a membrane or skin? They’d like to call [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Also tagged e-skin, electronic skin, germanium, inorganic, nanowire, organic, touch sensitive, transistor Leave a comment
The PETE process: Solar heat + light = more electricity
Using the light from the Sun to generate electricity is commonplace. So is generating electricity through heat, as in steam turbines. Combining solar light and solar heat to generate energy is an obvious juxtaposition, but until now undemonstrated as a feasible technology. That’s why the proof of concept testing on a concept called PETE (photon [...]
Posted in News: Alternative Energy Also tagged alternative energy, cesium, gallium arsenide, PETE, solar energy, thermal energy Leave a comment
Nanoscale stealth probe for living cells
You’ve seen this: A guy goes up to a wall and slaps a probe onto it. Then he connects earphones to the probe and starts listening. Picture something like this happening to the wall of a living cell. It’s become almost routine for nanotechnology to come up with astonishing things. This qualifies: A probe 600 [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Also tagged cell membrane, hydrophilic, hydrophobic, nanoprobe, protein channel, stealth probe Leave a comment
Fixing the band gap with graphene nanomesh
A band gap in semiconductor terminology is not the difference between two rock groups. Semiconductors – like the silicon of computer chips – are structured in bands of energy where electrons flow along the bands but may or may not be able to move between bands. Two such bands are the valence band (the highest [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Also tagged bandwidth gap, biosensors, graphene, nanomesh, on-off ratio, semiconductor, spintronics Leave a comment
High volume production for graphene
Graphene is – potentially – the new wonder-nanotech-material for the semiconductor industry (that’s the ‘chip’ business for computers and everything else digital). In the form of a pure carbon sheet with many interesting electrical properties, graphene is an upgrade for the old reliable silicon. [SciTechStory: Big news for nanoscale graphene] However, despite the many research [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Also tagged graphene, manufacturing, nanotechnology, semiconductor Leave a comment
Less silicon, better solar cell
Along the many trails to better solar cells, some paths may be better than others. (If they don’t turn out to be dead-ends.) Here’s an approach to solar (photovoltaic) cells from a research team at the California Institute of Technology (USA). It uses long silicon wires (microscale threads) embedded in a polymer sheet, and has [...]
Posted in News: Alternative Energy Also tagged photovoltaic, polymer substrate, solar array, solar cells Leave a comment
Graphene transistors
Start with the fact that digital computers run on transistors; transistors are key. Next, consider graphene, the nanotechnology cousin of graphite, a versatile material that has hit the news many times in the past several years. Finally, with regard to transistors and computers, graphene has already been dubbed the ‘successor to silicon’; now it looks [...]
Posted in News: Computer Power Also tagged epitaxial layers, graphene, IBM, teraherz, transistor, wafer 3 Comments
Energy density: Improving the lithium-ion battery