Semiconductors

California and Europe are pumping millions into development of electricity-generating roads using piezoelectrics. Piezos will also be useful in self-powered Internet of Things nodes because no one will change or even charge millions of batteries for those nodes let alone the envisaged billions. Without self-powered nodes, the IoT will be nothing more than a footnote in history. The new IDTechEx Research report, "Piezoelectric Harvesting and Sensing 2019-2039" is the first to pull it all together. Milliwatts or megawatts: where will piezoelectric success lie?

The global electric vehicle population reached 3 million units at the end of 2017, which represents approximately 0.23% of the global vehicle population. Electric vehicle producers have responded to consumer's range anxiety by increasing the available range per charge in their vehicles to more than 200 miles. However ultimately the deployment of electric vehicles will depend on the deployment of ubiquitous chargers.

Advances in laser technologies over the past three decades have enabled lasers to progress from specialist scientific instruments to a diverse range of end-user markets. In this article, time periods where data storage and data communication segments dominated the laser diode market are coloured yellow, while the current era of emerging laser diode applications in material processing, sensing and healthcare is indicated by green shading in the charts.

Fiber lasers have a large share of the laser material processing market but are typically limited to aerospace and defence applications in the sensing market segment. That is set to change within the next decade as emerging applications of fiber laser technologies include automotive LiDAR, multi-species gas sensing and structural health monitoring.

This article sets out to show that the assumption that QDs are a stagnant technology would be very wrong, demonstrating that QDs have now entered a time of growth, and crucially, rapid technological change.

Fiber lasers: A versatile technology for lightweighting, battery manufacturing and LiDAR in the automotive industry. Recent advances in fiber laser welding are highly advantageous for lightweighting and battery manufacturing. Fiber lasers are reliable, compact and energy efficient systems that offer the best beam quality for applications where precision is important.

In this article IDTechEx gives a short overview of the topic of wide bandgap semiconductors covering the fundamental material science, the key players, the market potential. The impact on a range of applications will also be discussed, with a focus on renewable energy systems and microgrids.

IDTechEx attended the event last week to meet with key stakeholders including industrial OEMs, power module manufacturers, established semiconductor companies and innovative new GaN (gallium nitride) and SiC (silicon carbide) developers to report back on the current and future trends. The following article is the second of two parts and provides a summary of some of the key GaN related developments and at the event and their impact on various industries and applications.

IDTechEx attended the event last week to meet with key stakeholders including industrial OEMs, power module manufacturers, established semiconductor companies and innovative GaN (gallium nitride and SiC (silicon carbide) developers to report back on the current and future trends.

There is an increasing demand for monitoring environmental air conditions both indoors and outdoors, as poor air quality is a growing threat to the public health.