It may seem a paradox, but in the future tiny computers may dump electronics and return to their mechanical roots. At the macroscale, mechanical computers are fussy and slow, but when your area is ...
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and engineers combed mechanical computing with 3D printing to create “sentient” materials that respond to changes in their surroundings, even in ...
Last week, MIT researchers published a blog post highlighting a paper detailing work on fully 3D printable electronics — namely a simple, semiconductor-free logic gate. The original paper was written ...
When you create logic circuits using ICs or FPGAs, you can’t easily visualize their operation without special tools. But if you’ve ever seen a mechanical computer (like the Computer History Museum’s ...
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science have taken inspiration from these sorts of systems. Using stimuli-responsive materials and geometric ...
Forward-looking: Semiconductors are essential for today's electronics, providing computational capabilities and the ability to control electric signals. They are also highly complex and costly, so ...