Recently in R&D Category

IBM scientists have stored a memory bit on 12 atoms of magnetic material at low temperature. They have also fabricated a device utilising eight 12 atom bits to make a memory byte.

Barrier layers are a bugger. Ten years ago I asked the CEO of Cambridge Display Technologies when we were going to get a roll-up display and he said I could have one now if they could only find a barrier layer to protect the display from the water in the atmosphere.

Micro-springs and tilted micro-cantilevers less than ten microns wide are a couple of structures made from 3D-structured carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in a methodology developed by Imec and Michigan University.

Silicon solar cells can achieve a better than 20% efficiency using a technology called IBC (interdigitated back-contact). A group led by Imec have demonstrated 23.3% efficiency on a small-area cell.

Imec sees the $4.4 billion investment by the State of New York in collaboration with TSMC, Globalfoundries, IBM, Intel and Samsung in the College of Nanotechnology at Albany as a complementary initiative to Imec's work on 450mm rather than as a rival group.

It's entertaining to watch your betters struggling to understand something which they can't quite grasp, and so it was at the Plastic Electronics session in the Semicon Europa conference earlier this week.

The Fraunhofer Institute has developed a robot goalkeeper who cannot be beaten, even from the penalty spot.

IBM has made prototype neural network chips - again.

ARM seems unfazed by Intel's intended move, later this year, to production on 22nm finfet-based process technology.

Is graphene the replacement for silicon? Well some people don't think so. "The prospect (of it replacing silicon) is so far beyond the horizon that we cannot even assess it properly," says Professor Andre Geim who won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year for discovering graphene.

One of the prime candidates for post-silicon electronics could be more suitable for quantum effect devices than field-effect devices, according to Georgia Tech.

A 1mm³ sized camera, about the same size as a grain of salt and costing a Euro or two, could be a tool in doctors' surgeries next year.

When the European global positioning satellite system gets up and running next year it will be so precise that it will be able to locate avalanche victims to within a few centimetres, says the Fraunhofer Institute.

Cambridge's optical plastics start-ups have not met with unqualified success, so the progress of Eight19 will be watched with interest.

Europractice, the only way European universities, researchers and small businesses can get chip designs put into silicon, is under threat from a gap in its EC funding arrangements.

Why on earth should the European taxpayer pay for 450mm development? Only six companies: TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Toshiba, GloFo and IBM can afford a 450mm fab - and they are all foreigners.