Tag: MIT

Inkjets could fix OLED TV manufacturing

Posted on February 12, 2015 by - News

lg-55-inch-oled-tvMIT boffins have developed a method to slash the cost of producing OLED screens by using inkjet printing techniques.

MIT spinout Kateeva has developed an “inkjet printing” system for OLED displays  that could cut manufacturing costs enough to pave the way for mass-producing flexible and large-screen models.

Kateeva co-founder and scientific advisor Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology, who co-invented the technology said it removes the barriers to wider adoption of OLED technology which are all related to the expensive process.

Dubbed YIELDjet, Kateeva’s technology platform is a giant inkjet printer. Large glass or plastic substrate sheets are placed on a long, wide platform. A component with custom nozzles moves rapidly, back and forth, across the substrate, coating it with OLED and other materials — much as a printer drops ink onto paper.

Another tool, which will debut later this year, aims to cut costs and defects associated with patterning OLED materials onto substrates, in order to make producing 55-inch screens easier.

Kateeva co-founder and CEO Conor Madigan claims that by boosting yields, as well as speeding up production, reducing materials, and reducing maintenance time, the system aims to cut manufacturing costs by about 50 percent.

The system is scalable, which is really important as the display industry shifts to larger substrate sizes, he said.

Big data has serious risks

Posted on January 30, 2015 by - News

server-racksScientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said just four pieces of vague information can open the door to crackers and hackers.
The researchers said the dates and locations of just four transactions can identify 90 percent of people in a data set recording three months of credit card transactions by 1.1 million users.
For example, say the MIT scientists, that someone with copies of just three recent receipts, or one receipt, an Instagram photo of you, and a tweet about the phone you just bought will have a 94 percent chance of extracting your credit card records from a million other people.
The implications are serious, because both public and private entities see aggregated digital data as a source of insight.
Big Data, however, holds socially beneficial implications, the researchers said.
They are looking at other ways to protect peoples’ data from being filched.

 

Scientists grab photons on silicon chips

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

MIT building - Wikimedia CommonsResearchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim to have built light detectors that can register individual photons on a silicon chip.
The MIT team said they have increased the accuracy of the detectors and transferred those that work to an optical semiconductor.
The approach gives denser and larger arrays, said the MIT team with 100 times better accuracy than previous arrays.
The researchers first built a silicon optical chip using regular manufacturing processes. Then they grow a flexible film of silicon nitride on a separate silicon chip – and then the superconductor niobium nitride is despised in a pattern that can detect photons.
Gold electrodes are deposited on both ends of the detector.
Dirk Englund, a professor at MIT and part of the team, said the project was aided by IBM and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Previous detectors only managed to pick up 0.2 percent of single photons, but MIT said detectors on its chip reached 20 percent.
We’re still a way away from quantum computing though – because MIT says 90 percent or more is needed for a working quantum circuit.

 

MIT invents new web programming language

Posted on December 24, 2014 by - News

nand-chipsComputer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) think their invention might make life a lot easier if you’re developing web pages.

They’ve just gone and invented a programming language called Ur/Web that they claim will let developers write web apps as self contained program.

The compiler part of the equation auto generates XML code and style sheet specs, and then just goes right ahead and throws Javascript and database code where it should be.

Adam Chlipala, a professor of software tech at MIT claimed Ur/Web makes web pages more secure.

But there’s still some pain for web developers said Chiplala because the compiler doesn’t auto generate style sheets.

Once you’ve typed in your code the compiler takes a long hard look at it and gives a list of CSS classes.

He said that the last thing developers want is for apps to have the ability to read and overwrite passwords.  Web frameworks generally speaking assume every little line of a program has complete access to a database. Ur/Web doesn’t, he claims.

MIT didn’t say how you’ll get your paws on the programming language.

Scientists solve superconductor conundrum

Posted on October 20, 2014 by - News

A building at MITMicroprocessors using superconducting circuits can be 50 to 100 times more energy efficient and faster than Intel chips but obstacles have prevented the dream being realised. Yet.

Now MIT researchers claim to have developed a circuit design that will make superconducting devices cheaper to manufacture using so-called Josephson junctions.  MIT said chips using these junctions clock at 770GHz – that’s pretty fast, folks.

Adam McCaughan and Professor Karl Berggren have dubbed their circuit the nanocryotron.

McCaughan said that the world has seen devices come and go without real world applications.  “We have already applied our device to applications that will be highly relevant to future work in superconducting computing and quantum communications,” he claimed.

The cool thing about superconductors is they don’t have any electrical resistance. When electrons trundle along copper wires or circuits in regular chips, they tend to keep bumping against atoms and that generates energy, that is to say heat.

The good Professor’s lab uses superconducting circuits made from niobium nitride, operating at the rather chilly temperature of minus 257 degrees Celsius.  The scientists are experimenting with liquid helium.  “Superconducting computation would let data centres dispense with the cooling systems they currently use to keep their banks of servers from overheating.”