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A Day in the Half-Life - More Microchips, Moore Problems

More Microchips, Moore Problems

02/09/22 • 48 min

A Day in the Half-Life

A podcast episode about research and development of microelectronics.
The race to make smaller and smaller electronic chips is coming to an end, after many decades of creative engineering. Individual transistors are now just a few nanometers (that’s billionths of a meter) in length, so there’s not much more shrinking to be done. But there is still a lot of room for improvement. The 20th century effort to pack transistors onto tiny silicon wafers transformed clunky, heavy early electronics into the sleek, portable devices we see today. The challenges of the 21st century will be to make these microelectronics energy efficient and to push the boundaries of what’s possible in a world increasingly integrated with technology.
This episode's guests are Sinéad Griffin and Ramamoorthy Ramesh

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A podcast episode about research and development of microelectronics.
The race to make smaller and smaller electronic chips is coming to an end, after many decades of creative engineering. Individual transistors are now just a few nanometers (that’s billionths of a meter) in length, so there’s not much more shrinking to be done. But there is still a lot of room for improvement. The 20th century effort to pack transistors onto tiny silicon wafers transformed clunky, heavy early electronics into the sleek, portable devices we see today. The challenges of the 21st century will be to make these microelectronics energy efficient and to push the boundaries of what’s possible in a world increasingly integrated with technology.
This episode's guests are Sinéad Griffin and Ramamoorthy Ramesh

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Energy storage: Save your electrons for a rainy day

Have you ever wondered how electricity is available all the time? That’s the seemingly magical science of energy storage. In this episode, we speak to a policy leader and a researcher about the history of piggy-banking power to spend it later, and how this field is evolving to help us prevent extreme weather-related blackouts, adopt more renewable energy, and build bigger, better, more environmentally responsible batteries.
Featuring:
Noël Bakhtian, director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center. Noel formerly served as director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies at Idaho National Laboratory and as a senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before her shift into policy and leadership, she was an engineer at NASA Ames Research Center working on Mars landing projects.
Mike Gerhardt, research scientist at SINTEF Industry in Norway helping develop new battery and fuel cell technologies using experimentation and computer modeling. Before moving to SINTEF, he was a postdoc in the Energy Conversion Group at Berkeley Lab.
*Special thanks to The Apples in Stereo for use of their song*
This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by Aliyah Kovner. Art by Jenny Nuss.
Audio samples from Halleck, Joao_Janz, and philtre.

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A Day in the Half-Life - More Microchips, Moore Problems

Transcript

Aliyah

This is A Day in the Half-Life. I'm Aliyah Kovner, and in this episode, we're talking about microelectronics.

Ramesh

What is microelectronics? Uh, every time you use your cell phone or you open up your computer to pay your bills, you're using microelectronics.

Aliyah

That is Ramesh, a professor of physics and material science at UC Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab in the Energy Scien

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