Imec has made hollow, out-of-plane microneedles with a height of 1540 µm and an aspect ratio exceeding 100. The needles are made from a polymer (SU-8) and the process is repeatable.

According to a report from CIR, US market analysts, the market for 40/100 GigE transceivers will reach $640 million in revenue by 2014, with about two-thirds coming from 40 GigE products.

Britain’s first nearshore wave energy converter has moved another step closer to generating clean, green energy.

For the designer tasked with the development of a telematics platform or any other GPS-based application, there are many detailed options to evaluate. Also for management, there are important longer-term strategic and financial implications to carefully consider.

One of the most remarkable and novel discoveries in the last 400 years has been electricity. One may ask, “Has electricity been around that long?” The answer is yes, and perhaps much longer, but the practical use of electricity has only been at our disposal since the mid- to late-1800s and, at first, in a limited way.

A technology for stacking several layers of microprocesssors, which is being developed at EPFL in collaboration with ETHZ and IBM Research, could boost the performance of computer chips by a factor 10.

The ultra-small revolution is claimed to have begun with the invention of a laser that allows light to be used on a computer chip.

Converting sunlight to electricity might no longer mean large panels of photovoltaic cells atop flat surfaces like roofs.

Telecoms, healthcare and display technology will be the major beneficiaries of a new generation of semiconductor lasers developed in a massive European research effort. Better cancer treatment, wider bandwidth and smaller, better displays could be on their way.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in cooperation with the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative, have released, for beta testing, a computer-based tool to help the world’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities evaluate and improve their energy efficiency.

One unfortunate side-effect of technological advancements is that they often force end users to accept an 'all-or-nothing' choice between a major investment in enhanced speed and capability, or live with less-than-optimum performance to protect the investment in an installed technology base.

In the megawatt range, high-power electronics applications need powerful semiconductors. However, even the largest semiconductors available today are still not strong enough for some applications. It is therefore necessary to connect them in parallel. The parallel connection of semiconductor devices in a traditional power electronics circuit is very common.

The continuation of Moore’s law by conventional CMOS scaling is becoming more and more challenging, requiring huge capital investments. 3D packaging with 3D TSV interconnects provides another path towards the 'More than Moore', with relatively smaller capital investments.

A voltage controlled oscillator circuit can be modelled as the combination of an amplifier with gain and a frequency dependent feedback loop as illustrated in Figure 1.

RF transformers are widely used in electronic circuits for impedance matching to achieve maximum power transfer and to suppress undesired signal reflection, voltage or current step-up or step-down, DC isolation between circuits while providing efficient AC transmission and interfacing between balanced and unbalanced circuits such as amplifiers.