Nanotechnology and Emerging Technologies - Nanoscience News from Nanowerk

Flexible silicon-on-polymer sub-20 nm FinFETs without performance loss

Flexible electronics is a rising field in terms of research and potential application opportunities to obtain similar characteristics than today's prevailing rigid electronics components. In new work, researchers have demonstrated the semiconductor industry's most advanced device architecture - FinFET, a new generation of device architecture which Intel has adopted in 2011 in their microprocessors; these field effect transistors...

Posted: Mar 11, 2014

Self-healing carbon nanotube supercapacitors

If you ever had problems with the (non-removable) battery in your iPhone or iPad then you well know that the energy storage or power source is a key component in a tightly integrated electronic device. Any damage to the power source will usually result in the breakdown of the entire device, generating at best inconvenience and cost and in the worst case a safety hazard and your latest contribution to the mountains of electronic...

Posted: Mar 10, 2014

Graphene yarns facilitate energy storage textiles

Researchers report the fabrication of flexible, durable, and self-assembled graphene textile electrodes for supercapacitors using a novel wet-spinning approach of ultra large graphene oxide liquid crystals followed by heat-treatment to obtain graphene fibers. The key to producing such fibers and yarns is to preserve the large sheet size even after the reduction of GO while simultaneously maintaining a high interlayer spacing...

Posted: Mar 07, 2014

AFM and Raman spectroscopy-correlated imaging and tip enhanced Raman scattering

The desire to identify materials and their properties to understand complex systems and better engineer their functions has been driving scanning probe microscopies since their inception. Both atomic force microscopy (AFM) and Raman spectroscopy are techniques used to gather information about the surface properties and chemical information of a sample. There are many reasons to combine these two technologies, and this application...

Posted: Mar 06, 2014

A Google Glass app for instant medical diagnostics (w/video)

The integration of consumer electronics with advanced imaging and analytical platforms holds great promises for medical point-of-care diagnostics and environmental rapid field testing for pollutants and viruses. A recent example is a Google Glass application and a server platform for instant, wireless diagnostic testing of a variety of health conditions and diseases. This technology allows Google Glass wearers to use the hands-free...

Posted: Mar 04, 2014

Ingenuity the key to a promising new oral influenza vaccine

More serious than the common cold, influenza viral infection has been responsible for major epidemics and pandemic respiratory disease in communities around the world. These epidemics come with substantial morbidity and mortality, accounting for 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide deaths each year and are particularly dangerous for vulnerable and elderly populations with statistics showing that 90% of those who succumb to the severe...

Posted: Mar 03, 2014

Conductive nanomaterials for printed electronics applications

The term printed electronics refers to the application of printing technologies for the fabrication of electronic circuits and devices, increasingly on flexible plastic or paper substrates. Traditionally, electronic devices are mainly manufactured by photolithography, vacuum deposition, and electroless plating processes. In contrast to these multistaged, expensive, and wasteful methods, inkjet printing offers a rapid and cheap...

Posted: Feb 27, 2014

Origami foldable solar cells (w/video)

Inspired by a particular folding technique called rigid origami, researchers have demonstrated foldable silicon solar cells. The fabrication process utilizes mainstream high-temperature processes to fabricate high-performance stretchable electronics. In this approach, high-performance functional devices are fabricated on rigid surfaces and do not experience large strain during deformation, and these rigid surfaces are joined...

Posted: Feb 26, 2014