About: Ibrar Ayyub

An alliance led by IBM Research, together with New York academic institution SUNY Polytech and with Samsung and GlobalFoundries, has produced 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. Continuing semiconductor scaling down to feature sizes of 7 nm is expected to yield further gains in performance, and lower power levels, but in IBM’s words, […]

Menlo Park, Calif. — In a study that could improve the safety of next-generation batteries, researchers discovered that adding two chemicals to the electrolyte of a lithium metal battery prevents the formation of dendrites – “fingers” of lithium that pierce the barrier between the battery’s halves, causing it to short out, overheat and sometimes burst […]

Texas Instruments says it is making, “high-accuracy measurement more attainable with the first current-sense amplifier to integrate a high-precision, low-drift 2 mΩ shunt resistor,” – the device can cut calibration effort, system cost, and footprint for test and measurement, communications load monitoring, and power supplies. For highly accurate measurements over a wide temperature range, TI’s […]

Introduction Optocouplers, also known as opto-isolators, are components that transfer electrical signals between two isolated circuits by using infrared light. As an isolator, an optocoupler can prevent high voltages from affecting the side of the circuit receiving the signal. Transferring signals over a light barrier by using an infrared light-emitting diode and a light-sensitive product, […]

An implantable, microchip-based device may soon replace the injections and pills now needed to treat chronic diseases: Earlier this month, MIT spinout Microchips Biotech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to commercialize its wirelessly controlled, implantable, microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over many years. Invented by Microchips Biotech co-founders Michael Cima, the […]

Summary The solar energy collection is not that easy compared to the different types of power generation system because it has the lowest capacity factor. It has 5 out of 24 hours in a day that it can generate electricity from its solar collection. The only solution to this is by optimizing the 5 hours […]

The ATMega168 is a great general purpose 8-bit AVR microcontroller from Atmel. It has 23 GPIO pins, but sometimes (as I have found) you can run out of I/O pins as your design grows. This happened to me recently when, of the 23 GPIO pins available, 2 were taken up by an external ceramic resonator, […]

a) A low-magnification tunneling electron microscope (TEM) image of Gr–Si nanoparticle (NP). (b) A higher-magnification image for the same Gr–Si NP from the white box in a. (Insets) The line profiles from the two red boxes indicate that the interlayer spacing between graphene layers is ~3.4 Å, in good agreement with that of typical graphene layers […]

First Impressions Bench power supplies aren’t really pieces of kit that get your pulse racing, they just sit there doing their job, in some cases giving gentle background heating to keep the lab warm in the winter and providing enough ballast to stop your bench wobbling about too much. The traditional bench top power supply […]

Summary This circuit is designed for dedicated graphic display applications. It shows the basic configuration of personal computer hardware and functions. It is a generic type of a processing unit that handles display and improves image quality. It also manages data transfer from flash drives and other serial devices such as computer mouse and keyboard. […]