Industry News

April 2022
ROHM and Delta Electronics Form a Strategic Partnership to Develop GaN Power Devices

Kazuhide Ino, Managing Executive Officer, CSO, ROHM

­Global semiconductor supplier ROHM Semiconductor and world-class power supply manufacturer Delta Electronics announced that they have entered into a strategic partnership to develop and mass-produce next-generation GaN (gallium nitride) power devices. Combining Delta’s power supply device de
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Date:
04/28/2022
MOL GROUP Launches Green Hydrogen Production Using Plug Electrolyzers

Gabriel Szabó, Executive Vice President of Downstream at MOL Group

­MOL Group, an international, integrated oil, gas, petrochemicals, and consumer retail company, has teamed up with Plug Power Inc. to build one of Europe’s largest-capacity green hydrogen production facilities at MOL’s Danube Refinery in Százhalombatta, Hungary. Green hydrogen will reduce the ca
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Date:
04/28/2022
Yotta Energy to Deploy Solar + Storage Microgrid at Nellis Air Force Base
­As oil and gas prices continue to rise the world needs more alternative energy sources that increase resiliency and decrease dependence on fossil fuels. Yotta Energy has raised an additional $3.5 million, including a strategic investment from inverter OEM partner  APsystems, bringing its total Series A
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Date:
04/26/2022
Flying Taxi Cabs in the Near Future? UIUC Researchers Say, 'Heads up, Everybody'

Professor Naira Hovakimyan from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering (MechSE) at UIUC

­Fans of the 1997 film “The Fifth Element” were undoubtedly drawn to the gravity-defying cars filling the screen, especially the Bruce Willis character’s air taxi. Thanks to a $6M NASA grant, professor Naira Hovakimyan leads the way toward making these flying cabs a reality. And passengers won’t e
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Date:
04/26/2022
Clean Path New York Renewable Energy Project Helps Transform New York's Energy Future

Anne Reynolds, Executive Director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York

­Clean Path NY (CPNY) announced a critical milestone for its nation-leading, “All Renewable, All New York” clean energy and transmission project to deliver reliable, clean energy to New York communities and transform how New York is powered. With contract approval from the New York State Public Service Co
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Date:
04/18/2022
Stopping

Carl Vondrick, assistant professor of computer science, Columbia University

­Ever noticed online ads following you that are eerily close to something you’ve recently talked about with your friends and family? Microphones are embedded into nearly everything today, from our phones, watches, and televisions to voice assistants, and they are always listening to you. Computers are constantly us
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Date:
04/18/2022
Lithium's Narrow Paths Limit Batteries

A phase map of an agglomerated particle in a common lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery electrode shows the charge distribution as it goes from 4% to 86%. FP refers to iron phosphate. Rice University scientists found that the FP phase spreads nonuniformly on an aggregate surface upon charging, rather than the expected even spread of lithium over the surface. The scale bar is 10 microns.

­If you could shrink enough for a fantastic voyage across a lithium battery electrode, you’d see the level of charge at every scale is highly uneven.  This is not good for the battery’s health. Rice University researchers who recognize the problem worked with the Department of Energy to view in g
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Date:
04/18/2022
Seeing More Deeply into Nanomaterials

An artist’s impression of how the researchers used x-ray tomography as a magnifying lens to see into the inner structure of nanomaterials.

­From designing new biomaterials to novel photonic devices, new materials built through a process called bottom-up nanofabrication, or self-assembly, are opening up pathways to new technologies with properties tuned at the nanoscale. However, to fully unlock the potential of these new materials, researchers ne
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Date:
04/14/2022
How to Compete with Robots

Prof. Dario Floreano, Director of EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent System

­When it comes to the future of intelligent robots, the first question people ask is often: how many jobs will they make disappear? Whatever the answer, the second question is likely to be: how can I make sure that my job is not among them? In a study just published in Science Robotics, a team of
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Date:
04/14/2022
A New Heat Engine with no Moving Parts is as Efficient as a Steam Turbine

Engineers at MIT and NREL have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine.

­Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The heat engine is a ther
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Date:
04/14/2022
Using Electricity to Treat Cancer

Kyle Wang, MD

­Electricity has formed the basis of many aspects of the modern world, from providing reliable sources of light to powering home appliances and computers. Now, researchers are studying how electricity can be harnessed as a treatment for certain types of cancer. Kyle Wang, MD, explained that human cells nat
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Date:
04/12/2022
Study of Data from NASA, ESA and Russian Space Agency Explores Effects of Extended Spaceflight on Brain
­Scientists from the U.S., Europe and Russia are part of a team releasing the results of a large collaborative study involving the effects of long duration spaceflight on the brain. It appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that while all of the astronauts and cosmo
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Date:
04/12/2022
On the Edge

Illustration of edge magnetism discovered in CrGeTe3 using nanoscale magnetic microscopy

­Probing the world of the very, very small is a wonderland for physicists.  At this nano-scale, where materials as thin as 100 atoms are studied, totally new and unexpected phenomena are discovered.  Here, nature ceases to behave in a way that is predictable by the macroscopic law of physics, unlike wh
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Date:
04/12/2022
An Efficient Electrochemical Intercalation Method for High-Yield Production of TMD Nanosheets

Schematic illustrations of the electrochemical lithium ion intercalation-based exfoliation process.

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), an emerging class of materials that can be used as semiconductors and insulators, have promising potential in various applications due to their unique properties. But the reliable production of these atomically thin 2D materials has been challenging. A
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Date:
04/07/2022
Airborne Base Stations Enable Life-Saving Communications

Figure 1: The Fukaden tethered drone can be deployed quickly to support natural disaster situations where lives are at risk.

Natural disasters can occur all over the world and restoring communications is essential for first responders to support the time-critical needs of victims and reinstating the supply of essential services such as drinking water, food and electricity. A Japanese engineering company, Fukaden Corporation, is enabli
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Date:
04/07/2022
Electrical, Computer Engineers Uncover Hardware Security Android Phone Vulnerability

Close-up image of male hands using smartphone at night on city shopping street, searching or social networks concept, hipster man typing an sms message to his friends

Could your smartphone be spying on you? Hopefully not, and if so, not for long, thanks to a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. Their recent study found that the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in some Android smartphones could be used to eavesdrop on a user’s cr
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Date:
04/04/2022
Integration Facility Supports Smallsat Development

SwRI’s new 74,000-square-foot Space System Integration Facility will allow rapid response to customers needing to design, assemble and test spacecraft, particularly small satellites for emerging “new space” applications, including support for the commercial and U.S. Department of Defense arenas.

Southwest Research Institute has added a new, 74,000-square-foot Space System Integration Facility to its San Antonio headquarters. The SwRI facility can rapidly respond to customers needing to design, assemble and test spacecraft, particularly small satellites for emerging “new space” applications, including su
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Date:
04/04/2022
Self Powered Autonomous Robot for Powerline Inspection Takes 2nd in EnergyTech University Prize National Finals
A student team from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University was named as a winner in the EnergyTech University Prize, a national competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Technology Transitions in partnership with American-Made Challenges. Teams were charged with identifying an
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Date:
04/01/2022
The Future of 5G+ Infrastructure Could be Built Tile by Tile

Genaro Soto Valle, Manos Tentzeris, Kexin Hu, and Yepu Cui with the fabricated proof-of-concept tile arrays and inkjet-printed tile arrays.

5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G) is the fastest-growing segment and the only significant opportunity for investment growth in the wireless network infrastructure market, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. But currently 5G+ technologies rely on large antenna arrays that are typically bulky and come onl
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Date:
04/01/2022
Solving the Challenges of Robotic Pizza-Making

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have created a framework that could enable a robot to effectively complete complex manipulation tasks with deformable objects, like dough or cloth, that require many tools and take a long time to complete.

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is tricky because the shape of dough
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Date:
04/01/2022
Could Quantum Technology be New Mexico's Next Economic Boon?

Quantum technologies, like this quantum computer at Sandia National Laboratories, might be a source of future jobs in New Mexico’s tech sector.

Science, education and economic development leaders across New Mexico have formed a coalition to bring future quantum computing jobs to the state. Sandia National Laboratories, The University of New Mexico and Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the new coalition today at UNM during the Quantum New Mexic
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Date:
04/01/2022
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