Notable & Newsworthy
August 2014
Transphorm announced that it is partnering with Tata Power Solar to introduce what will be India’s most efficient solar inverter using Transphorm’s patented EZ-GaN technology. This collaboration enhances Tata Power Solar’s position as a solar solutions and technology leader, by launching inverters based on
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Date:
08/26/2014
Zamzee' activity monitor for children
Ultra low power (ULP) RF specialist Nordic Semiconductor announced that U.S.-based non-profit research organization, HopeLab, has specified Nordic nRF8001 Connectivity ICs to provide the Bluetooth® Smart (previously known as Bluetooth low energy) wireless link in the latest wireless version of its 'Zamzee' acti
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Date:
08/26/2014
FIA Formula E Championship course cars will be fitted with Qualcomm Halo wireless charging tech
The all-electric FIA Formula E Championship has confirmed that its course cars for the inaugural season will be fitted with Qualcomm Halo™ wireless charging technology – an inductive charging system which allows the car’s battery to be charged without the use of cables.
With the final specification of car se
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Date:
08/22/2014
University of Michigan spin-off Sakti3 announced that it has produced a battery cell on fully scalable equipment with over 1100 Watt hours per liter (Wh/l) in volumetric energy density. This translates to more than double the usage time in a wearable device like a smartwatch, from 3.5 h to more than 9 h.
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Date:
08/21/2014
Google-owned Nest Labs envisions a ‘conscious home'
The “smart home” has been a dream for decades but too expensive for the average household. Not anymore. Now that the costs for creating a connected home are dropping, device makers, utilities, telecoms and other companies are gearing up for what’s being called the battle beyond the living room. The latest ev
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Date:
08/19/2014
The Renovo Coupe
Renovo Motors, makers of a high-performance all-electric supercar, announced the official debut of the Renovo Coupe at the 2014 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. The all-electric supercar rockets from 0-60 mph in just 3.4 seconds. After four years of secret engineering and development, Renovo is ready to reveal it
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Date:
08/18/2014
We’ve all seen Armageddon, but just how real is the threat to humanity from asteroids or other near-Earth objects (NEOs)? According to scientists, it’s very real. So real, in fact, that the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space recently created a special action team dedicated to gathering an
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Date:
08/14/2014
Coinciding with Cobham’s 80th anniversary celebrations, the developers of the renowned Opera electromagnetic simulation software are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Vector Fields Software business unit. Initially focused on making the design of particle accelerator magnets practical, their software to
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Date:
08/13/2014
The arrival of Google’s Android TV platform could well disrupt the landscape for streaming media players now dominated by Roku and Apple TV, potentially roiling a rapidly expanding market that sells tens of millions of units every year, according to research from IHS Technology. The worldwide installed base fo
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Date:
08/12/2014
This multi-hop transmission system uses a series of resonators to move the power where it needs to go
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just carry around a smartphone or laptop and have power available anywhere in a room? True wireless power is a dream many engineers have been chasing after for years, but progress has been excruciatingly slow. Now a research group from the University of Tokyo has created a pr
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Date:
08/11/2014
uBeam uses ultrasonic frequencies to trasmit power
Wireless charging has existed for years now, but it has been slow to take off. That probably has to do with the only nominally wireless nature of it. Charging a phone wirelessly usually means placing it on a surface, or at the most a few inches above it. A technology being developed by a company called uBeam co
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Date:
08/08/2014
Stanford Professor Yi Cui
Engineers across the globe have been racing to design smaller, cheaper and more efficient rechargeable batteries to meet the power storage needs of everything from handheld gadgets to electric cars.
In a paper published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers at Stanford University report th
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Date:
08/07/2014
Wi-Fi backscatter uses radio frequency signals as a power source and reuses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure
Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it—all without requiring batteries. Or, battery-free sensors embedded around your home could track minute-by-minute temperature ch
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Date:
08/07/2014
Panasonic and Tesla Motors have signed an agreement that lays out their cooperation on the construction of a large-scale battery manufacturing plant in the United States, known as the Gigafactory.
According to the agreement, Tesla will prepare, provide and manage the land, buildings and utilities. Panasonic
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Date:
08/06/2014
Spray-on technology currently achieves up to 11% efficiency
As is true of many technologies right now, the development of viable solar power is at an upward inflection point. Materials science in everything from mining to graphene production is furnishing researchers with better and better physical substrates for collection, while increasingly sophisticated electronics an
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Date:
08/04/2014
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