NanoBlog

Oxford Instruments has posted the Exploring Flatlands: Fabrication Technologies webinar as an archive. The webinar covers the following topics.

• Plasma etching 2D materials
• CVD depostion of h-BN and graphene heterostructures
• ALD dielectrics on graphene

The New Yorker website has posted a detailed history of graphene, its applications, and the difficulties of fabricating devices with the material. The story chronicles the discovery of graphene by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov along with the research activities that have occurred since its discovery in 2004.

The BBC One Show has produced this short interesting video on the merits of graphene. The flexibility of graphene is nicely demonstrated as are some presumably graphene flex touch pads. I really like the presenters enthusiasm for graphene and hope that the difficulties in manufacturing graphene devices are solve relatively soon.

The nanoHUB has a nice Introduction to Semiconductor Devices web page/tool that that covers the following topics:

• Crystal structures and lattices
• Band models and structure
• Bulk semiconductors
• PN junctions
• Bipolar Junction transistors
• MOS capacitors
• MOSFETs

This introduction as part of the Assembly of Basic Applications for Coordinated Understanding of Semiconductors (ABACUS) tool used to integrate lectures, simulators, and labs into a common platform.

Some of the special event and award presentations for the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting are now available on demand. Some of these include:

• David Turnbull Lectureship Award
  • Rodney S. Ruoff, Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology, Synthesis, Structure and Properties of Carbon Nanostructures
• Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureship in Nanoscience
  • Lars Samuelson, Lund University, Nanowires—From Basic Materials Research to Real-World Applications
• Kavli Early Career Award in Nanoscience
  • Julia R. Greer, California Institute of Technology, Three-Dimensional Architected Nanostructured Meta-Materials
• Materials Theory Award
  • Long-Qing Chen, The Pennsylvania State University, Understanding and Manipulating Mesoscale Ferroic Domain Patterns
• MRS Medal Awards
  • Sharon C. Glotzer and Nicholas A. Kotov, University of Michigan, Integration of Computation and Experiment for Discovery and Design of Nanoparticle Self-Assembly
  • Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Northwestern University, Advances in Thermoelectrics: From Single Phases to Hierarchical Nanostructures and Back
• Plenary Session
  • Hyuk Chang, Samsung Electronics, Innovation in Electronic Materials
• Symposium X—Frontiers of Materials Research
  • Henry Snaith, University of Oxford, From Nanstructured to Thin-film Perovskite Solar Cells
  • Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University, 2D Materials Science: Graphene and Beyond
  • Angela Belcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Giving New Life to Materials for Energy, the Environment and Medicine
• Von Hippel Award
  • Marvin L. Cohen, University of California, Berkeley, Explaining and Predicting the Properties of Materials Using Quantum Theory

The IEEE Solid State Circuits Society has posted and archive of the talk Exascale Computing--fact or fiction? by Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar. It was a very good talk and covered the technical challenges that are on the road to exascale computing. This includes compute function, memory, interconnect, resiliency, and software. A teraflop system requires ~1kW of power today, and a exascale system would consume 20 MW so power scaling is a major challenge, for example.

The Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) has a new wiki where users can post their process recipes for the various tools at the facility. The recipes are a great starting point for a fabrication process. The wiki also contains manuals and tutorials on the facilities tools.

Emerald Cloud Lab allows life sciences researchers to run automated experiments in a lab in the cloud. In this system, you can design an experiment, conduct the experiment, exam the data, and analyze the results. Emerald Cloud lab offers about a 40 experiments now and many more coming soon. The system is build around Mathematica so there is a rich set of data analysis functions available. This short video shows the automated operation of the lab in the cloud.

Professor Julia Greer from the California Institute of Technology wins the Kavli Early Career Award at the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting. In this short video, Professor Greer describes her work in nanostructured metamaterial.

MIT Professor Mildred Dresselhaus wins the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The MRS has made her research papers on carbon science available online for free for a limited time.