Sunday, July 22, 2018

A New Type Of Inductor - Last Barrier To Ultra-Miniaturized Electronics Is Broken

For those keeping an eye on the future of electronic surveillance, this is really interesting news. Others may find the story a bit technical and dry. ~Kevin

In the race for ever-improving technology, there are two related technical capabilities that drive our world forward: speed and size...

But at the same time these advances have comes in leaps and bounds, one fundamental circuit element — the inductor — has had its design remain exactly the same...

The breakthrough... a phenomenon known as kinetic inductance...
Click to enlarge.
That’s where the work of Banerjee’s Nanoelectronics Research Lab and their collaborators comes in. By exploiting the phenomenon of kinetic inductance, they were able to, for the first time, demonstrate the effectiveness a fundamentally different kind of inductor that didn’t rely on Faraday’s magnetic inductance.

Instead of using conventional metal inductors, they used graphene — carbon bonded together into an ultra-hard, highly-conductive configuration that also has a large kinetic inductance — to make the highest inductance-density material ever created. more