A fundamental scientific breakthrough is poised to fundamentally reshape the nature of light-matter interactions, particularly in silicon, resulting in dramatic enhancement of optical absorption and emission and potentially revolutionizing its applications in various fields.

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The present invention describes a novel method for acid-free pyrolytic synthesis of metal-nitrogen-carbon (M-N-C) catalysts for use in fuel cell/energy conversion applications. This method allows for rapid production of M-N-C catalysts that exhibit high activity and selectivity for CO2 electroreduction without needing harsh acids or bases.

Detection of single ionizing particles at rates approaching the gigahertz (GHz) range per channel has potential for applications in medical imaging and treatment as well as particle and nuclear physics. Current ionizing particle detection systems detect with maximum frame rates of ~500 MHz. As accelerators (e.g. XFELs) are upgraded to deliver trains of pulses at faster rates, detection systems will need to keep pace. Methods and devices that can detect at GHz rates will be required to meet the demands of modern societal needs and equipment.

Currently, thin films of single-crystalline (SC) alloy material are obtained using costly SC substrates made of a material chemically and physically compatible to that of a SC thin film that is deposited on the SC substrate. Formation of SC thin films of alloy materials on SC substrates are typically achieved through fairly expensive processes such as epitaxy. As a result, the use of a thin film of SC alloy materials or respective multiple thin films is contingent upon the availability of an appropriate SC substrate thereby severely limiting its utilization. Thus, there is a need for alternative methods of forming one or more thin films of SC alloy materials on arbitrary substrates. Crystallization of thin film materials by exploiting laser-induced crystallization has been advancing for the past four decades. This unique thin film technique has been predominantly used in processing thin film materials made of a single chemical element, with a significant emphasis on thin film materials comprised of a single chemical element like silicon (Si), used for the development of thin film transistors. While this approach has worked well for thin film materials comprised of a single chemical element like silicon (Si) it is not easily extended for use with thin film materials containing multiple chemical elements (e.g., metal oxides). For certain bulk manufacturing applications, it would be desirable to efficiently form thin structures on non-single-crystalline (NSC) substrates, such as glass, or on SC substrates that are highly-incompatible, such as silicon. For such applications, it is highly desirable that the treated SC alloy layer(s) have chemical compositions not significantly different from those of their original chemical compositions.

Prof. Sheldon Tan and his team have developed a new hierarchical learning-based electro-migration analysis method called HierPINN-EM to solve for multi-segment interconnects in VLSI chips. HierPINN-EM provides much better accuracy, faster training speeds and faster inference speeds compared to current state-of-the-art techniques. 

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There has been a steady rise in interest in utilizing Fin high-electron mobility transistors HEMT devices to reduce the source access resistance and enhance the linearity but this linearity is not accessible at gate voltages beyond those at which the gate Schottky diode turns on (~2 V). All known transistor technologies are intrinsically non-linear. This non-linearity leads to signal distortion and power loss. Non-linearity is embodied in a decrease of the transistor current gain cut-off frequency, fT, and maximum oscillation frequency, fmax, with an increase in the drain current.  In contrast, the patented technology here is one of a new Fin MOS-HEMT device permits flexible engineering of the device threshold voltage in order to attain linearity over a wider VGS range (voltage between transistor gate and source (VGS) in excess of the threshold voltage (Vt) where Vt is defined as the minimum).

With the two-dimensional scaling of silicon field-effect transistors reaching fundamental limits, new functional improvements to transistors, as well as novel computing paradigms and vertical device integration at the architecture-level, are currently under intense study. Gate oxides play a critical role in this endeavor, as it’s a common performance booster for all devices, including silicon, new channel materials with potential for higher performance, and even materials suitable for three-dimensional integrated transistors.With the scaling of lateral dimensions in advanced transistors, an increased gate capacitance is desirable both to retain the control of the gate electrode over the channel and to reduce the operating voltage. To pursue these performance gains, UC Berkeley researchers invented a new heterostructure insulator material where: 1) the material possesses specific ferroic order such as ferroelectricity/anti-ferroelectricity or a mixture of both; 2) the overall dielectric property such as the permittivity is determined by the stacking order of different layers rather than exact volume fraction of the constituents; and 3) the material is composed of one or several repetition of ultra thin superlattice periods ranging from a few angstroms to 3 nm.

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Prof. Nael Ghazaleh and Hodjat Asghari Esfeden from the University of California, Riverside have developed Breathing Operand Windows (BOW), an enhanced GPU pipeline and operand collector technique that supports bypassing register file accesses and instead passes values directly between instructions within the same window. While this baseline design can only bypass register reads, they also introduce an improved design capable of bypassing unnecessary write operations to the RF. Compiler optimizations help guide the write-back destination of operands depending on whether they will be reused to further reduce the write traffic. The BOW microarchitecture reduces RF dynamic energy consumption by 55%, while at the same time increases overall performance by 11%, with a modest overhead of 12KB of additional storage which is ~4% of the RF size. Fig 1: shows the dynamic energy normalized to the baseline GPU for BOW-WR across fifteen different benchmarks. The small segments on top of each bar represent the overheads of the structures added by the idea. Dynamic energy savings in Fig 1 are due to the reduced number of accesses to the register file as BOW-WR shields the RF from unnecessary read and write operations.  

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Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a new class of lasers and amplifiers that uses a CMOS-compatible electronics platform - and can also be applied to nano-amplifiers and nano-lasers applications.

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Prof. Jing Shi and his colleagues from the University of California, Riverside have developed two new applications to utilize spin current in electronic devices. The first is a pure spin current switch that allows for the manipulation of pure spin current in electronic devices by allowing the user to switch between an “on” and “off” state. The device includes a first metal layer, a magnetic insulator layer, and a second metal layer. This technology controls the flow of information by switching the direction of magnetization of the middle layer. Since spin current does not require electricity, the spin current switch holds an innovative promise for the future of the way electronic devices channel current. The second is a non-volatile random access memory (RAM) device capable of using spin current to reduce electricity consumption. The technology can transmit information through electrical insulators, where the flow of information can be switched “off” by applying a magnetic field. The “on” and “off” states are two non-volatile memory states that can be stored as the magnetization direction of the magnetic insulator layer. This technology holds promise for a new generation of RAM technology that is not limited by memory bottleneck.  Fig. 1: A schematic illustration of a spin current valve. Top: The switch in the "on" position. Bottom: The switch in the "off" position.  

UCLA researchers in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have developed a cost-effective method to produce copper-based nanocomposites with excellent mechanical, electrical and thermal properties.

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