After six years of effort, scientists are reporting development of the first commercially viable nanogenerator, a flexible chip that can use body movements - a finger pinch now en route to a pulse beat in the future - to generate electricity.

Accurate measurements are central to virtually every scientific and engineering discipline, but all too often measurement science gets little attention in the undergraduate curriculum. Even those who received a thorough grounding in measurement fundamentals as undergraduates can be forgiven if they’ve forgotten some of the details.

To make solar energy generation cost-effective, the PV industry has to reduce its manufacturing costs well below 1 euro/Wp. This holds for all PV technologies.

As microprocessors get increasingly more powerful, so does the appetite for additional software functionalities. Size of embedded systems software increases every year, bringing new types of problems.

Researchers have created what is claimed to be the first electronic circuit to merge traditional inorganic semiconductors with organic ‘spintronics’ - devices that use the spin of electrons to read, write and manipulate data.

Intel has announced what it calls a significant breakthrough in the evolution of the transistor, the microscopic building block of modern electronics.

A battery is a corrosive device that begins to fade the moment it comes off the assembly line. The stubborn and unpredictable behaviour of a battery has left many users in awkward situations.

This might sound somewhat overdone but comparing IGBT modules using datasheets is not as easy as it might appear. A rough comparison can, of course, be made using the component blocking voltage (V_CES, eg, 1200) and the nominal current (I_Cnom = 100, 200 A …).

The digital data bus MIL-STD-1553B was designed in the early 1970s to replace analog point-to-point wire bundles between electronic instruments. The latest version of the serial local area network (LAN) for military avionics known as MIL-STD-1553B was issued in 1978. Since then, various notices have been published to update the standard and after 30 years the data bus continues to be the most popular militarised network.

The former ‘green’ theme of energy efficiency has become a household issue in an energy-conscious society. The old filament bulb disappears step by step, and washing machines and dishwashers have become unsaleable without energy-saving programs. But most industrialised societies waste energy on a massive scale by indulging in comfortable ‘standby mode’ in domestic electronics.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have developed a method for using water to tune the band gap of the nanomaterial graphene, opening the door to new graphene-based transistors and nanoelectronics.

Electrical sensors have, for decades, been the standard mechanism for measuring physical and mechanical phenomena. Despite their ubiquity, these sensors have inherent limitations such as transmission loss and susceptibility to electromagnetic interference (noise) that make their usage challenging or impractical in many applications.

High speed, high performance, high power - it used to mean high fossil fuel consumption.

The embedded developer b-plus was looking to migrate its XScale-based visualisation client, which is designed to be the mobile HMI for Zigbee measured data, to an Atom-based platform, to benefit from enhanced graphics and processing performance, easier long-term scalability in performance and openness in software development. One major question needed to be answered: what is the most efficient hardware platform for this application?

Multiple-input multiple-output offers the potential to increase data rates for a single user by using two or four streams of data transmitted with multiple antennas.