Semiconductors & ICs

A new type of device called a "lab-on-a-chip" could result in a future generation of instant home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases. But today these portable, efficient tools are often stuck in the lab themselves. Specifically, in the labs of researchers who know how to make them from scratch. University of...

Researchers from the University of Florida and Texas Instruments have developed a high-frequency circuit made with a common CMOS transistor. The circuit is expected to find its way into environmental monitoring equipment to detect pollution, noxious gases or bioterrorism agents. It can also be used in medical equipment...

Error-detecting counters have been proposed as parts of fault-tolerant finite state machines that could be implemented in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits that perform sequential logic functions. The use of error-detecting counters would...

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), IBM, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have pushed the measurement of thin films to the edge to produce the first data on how the edges of metallic thin films contribute to their magnetic properties. The results may impact the...

&A synthesis route has been developed for the commercial manufacture of single- source precursors of chalcopyrite semiconductor absorber layers of thin-film solar photovoltaic cells. The semiconductors in question are denoted by the general formula CuInxGa1–xSySe2–y, where 0 ≤ x...