Researchers are increasing their efforts to improve the performance of batteries, particularly those intended for use in consumer electronics devices, with a number of teams reporting ‘significant’ developments.Now, scientists from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) say the addition of a ‘pinch of something new&...

Dialog Semiconductor has launched the DA14586, said by the company to be its first standalone device qualified to support the latest Bluetooth 5.0 specification.A derivative of the SmartBond DA14580, the DA14586 is said to offer greater flexibility in creating applications with small footprints and power budgets. Other enhancements include a po...

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin – led by 94 year-old Professor John Goodenough, pictured, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery – have developed solid state battery cells which they say could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries.“Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and...

A research team from Rice University has modelled a nanoscale sandwich in which two slices of graphene surround nanoclusters of magnesium oxide. According to the team, the sandwich should result in a ‘super strong conductive material’ with expanded optoelectronic properties.Rice materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari and his colleag...

Cadence has launched Protium S1, an FPGA based prototyping platform said to incorporates innovative implementation algorithms to boost engineering productivity.Using Xilinx Virtex UltraScale FPGAs, the platform is said to have six times the design capacity and twice the performance of previous platforms.According to the company, benefits of...

Embedded developer Hipperos has upgraded its real time operating system with new features, including hardware acceleration, fast multicore IPC and mixed criticality scheduling. The new features – said to make the RTOS suitable for use in such applications as drone navigation, medical imaging and ADAS – are included in version 17.02, whi...

Cell phones and other devices could soon be controlled with touchless gestures and charge themselves using ambient light, according to researchers at the University of Illinois and Dow Electronic Materials.Made of nanorods arranged in a thin film, LEDs arrays that can both emit and detect light could enable new interactive functions and mul...

To resolve the problem of counterfeit wireless chargers - which could cause power surges that fry a device’s circuitry – researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories have built a chip that blocks attempts to wirelessly charge a device’s battery unless the charger first provides cryptographic authentication....

Starting from a few specifications, such as required power or the entry and exit voltages, SmartCtrl – a program developed by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UCM) – is said to provide those designing electronic power converters with a predefined map of solutions.This, say the developers, accelerates design work as engineer...

A low-cost chip developed at the University of Bristol is said to extend battery life in sensors; in some cases, by more than 10 times. The patent pending UB20M voltage detector is a ‘keep-alive’ device which, when combined with a suitable sensor, is said to eliminate standby power by enabling zero-power sensing and listening.The de...