US Department of Defense (DoD)

Wireless sensor networks - we are getting there

Suddenly tiny broad band vibration harvesters, transparent film photovoltaics and many other forms of harvesting become sufficient and the 20 year node looks possible.

Wireless Sensor Networks - We Are Getting There

Yet it is only a first step to small devices communicating without human involvement and without those radio masts and their expensive and vulnerable cabling. Remember that...

Web coater built under development contract to Flex Tech Alliance

Web coater built under development contract to Flex Tech Alliance

Department of Defense flexible solar cell Army Natick contract

Ascent Solar Technologies, Inc, a developer of state of the art flexible thin-film solar modules, has announced that Cambrios Technologies Corporation, a firm that has developed innovative, wet-processed, transparent conductive films, has selected Ascent as their research partner to investigate how these films can be applied to lightweight, flexible copper-indium-gallium-selenium (CIGS) photovoltaics.

Integrated energy scavenging and storage system

Aurora Flight Sciences designs and builds robotic aircraft and other advanced aerospace vehicles for scientific and military applications, and has now been selected for an award through the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) to develop an integrated energy scavenging and storage system for portable electronics, unmanned vehicles, and weapons systems.

Cambrios awarded a DOD contract

Cambrios Technologies Corporation have been awarded a DOD contract to produce lightweight, flexible, cost-effective solar energy photovoltaics (PV). Known for its development of ClearOhm™, a transparent, conductive, liquid material used in the manufacture of various electronics, this contract represents Cambrios' first public announcement regarding the feasibility of using this material as the electrode of a photovoltaic cell. Cambrios has selected thin film solar module developer Ascent Solar Technologies, Inc. as its research partner for the duration of the contract.

IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe award winners

IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe award winners

Ocean powered underwater vehicle

NASA, U.S. Navy and university researchers have successfully demonstrated the first robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy.

Less than one week to Printed Electronics Europe 2010

Next week the sixth annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe event takes place in Dresden, Germany on April 13-14. Read about some of the event highlights here.

Nanobased printed RFID will reduce the cost of printing tags

Long checkout lines could be history with a new printable transmitter that can be invisibly embedded in packaging.

The memristor

The memristor "the missing link of electronics" was finally built in 2008, using nothing more than titanium dioxide and metal electrodes in thin films. In 2009 NIST printed them on plastic film. Now a new version involving silicon and silver thin film seems to have advantages.

Reducing the weight of military manpacks with energy harvesting

The US Army has presented at IDTechEx conferences, pointing out that a US warfighter often has to carry more than the ancient Roman soldier. This is despite the fact that the ancient Roman soldier carried prefabricated fort parts and food, with no support staff. A major problem today is the batteries.

Lithium vehicle traction batteries and harvesting

The conference of about 40 people "Lithium Battery Technology and System Development" in London 9 March 2010 was concerned with "breaking barriers for electric vehicles".

The glamorous world of energy harvesting

Energy harvesting is the use of ambient energy to create electricity for small or mobile equipment and it started with such things as the bicycle dynamo and the piezoelectric gas lighter.

Rice researchers make graphene hybrid

Rice University researchers have found a way to stitch graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) into a two-dimensional quilt that offers new paths of exploration for materials scientists.

Highlights from the 2010 Flexible Electronics and Displays Conference

A very interesting array of talks spread over 3 days brought together approximately 400 people interested in printed electronics and related technologies. On the opening day of the conference, Marc Bernstein from the Palo A lot research Center focused his presentation on the lessons learnt from the move from laboratory scale research to real world applications whereas John Pellegrino from the US Army research Labs, although primarily focused on "meeting the technology challenges for the soldier", highlighted efforts to accelerate the adoption of flexible electronics in the intersection of the military and commercial sectors.

Fiber nanogenerators could lead to electric clothing

In research that gives literal meaning to the term "power suit," University of California, Berkeley, engineers have created energy-scavenging nanofibers that could one day be woven into clothing and textiles.

Again - IBM claim world's fastest graphene transistor

IBM believe they have achieved the highest cut-off frequency so far for any graphene device of 100 billion cycles/second (100 GigaHertz).

The FDC and PETEC become associate members to collaborate on OTFTs

The Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University today announced that the Printable Electronics Technology Center (PETEC) has become an Associate Member to collaborate on high-performing organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) for flexible display applications. PETEC joins the FDC with a goal of better understanding the process requirements for OTFT backplane fabrication for both reflective and emissive displays.