Can advanced semiconductors cut emissions of greenhouse gases enough to make a difference in the struggle to halt climate change? The answer is a resounding yes. Such a change is actually well underway. Starting around 2001, the compound semiconductor gallium nitride fomented a revolution in lighting that has been, by some measures, the fastest technology shift in human history. In just two decades, the share of the global lighting market held by gallium-nitride-based light-emitting diodes h ...read more

The Big Picture features technology through the lens of photographers.Every month, IEEE Spectrum selects the most stunning technology images recently captured by photographers around the world. We choose images that reflect an important advance, or a trend, or that are just mesmerizing to look at. We feature all images on our site, and one also appears on our monthly print edition.Enjoy the latest images, and if you have suggestions, leave a comment below.JUICE BOXFor many years, environmentali ...read more

Last year for Hands On, I gutted a defunct TRS-80 Model 100. The goal was to upgrade its 24 kilobytes of RAM and 2.4-megahertz, 8-bit CPU but keep the notebook computer’s lovely keyboard and LCD screen. That article was almost entirely about figuring out how to drive its squirrely 1980s-era LCD screen. I left the rest, as they say, as an exercise for the reader. After all, sending a stream of data from a new CPU to the Arduino Mega controlling the screen would be a trivial exercise, right? ...read more

Metal detecting can be a fun hobby, or it can be a task to be completed in deadly earnest—if the buried treasure you’re searching for includes land mines and explosive remnants of war. This is an enormous, dangerous problem: Something like 12,000 square kilometers worldwide are essentially useless and uninhabitable because of the threat of buried explosives, and thousands and thousands of people are injured or killed every year.While there are many different ways of detecting mines and expl ...read more

Nvidia says it has found a way to speed up a computation-limited step in the chipmaking process so that it happens 40 times as fast as today’s standard. Called inverse lithography, it’s a key tool that allows chipmakers to print nanometer-scale features using light with a longer wavelength than the size of those features. Inverse lithography’s use has been limited by the massive size of the needed computation. Nvidia’s answer, cuLitho, is a set of algorithms designed for use with GPUs, ...read more

A new sensor could help reduce the number of accidents caused by impaired driving and could protect children left in hot cars. The Wireless Intelligent Sensing millimeter-wave radar system, developed by startup Pontosense, monitors vehicle occupants’ vital signs, and it can detect the presence of passengers in the vehicle and where they are seated. The WISe system measures the driver’s vital signs including heart rate and breathing to detect fatigue and possible medical emergencies. W ...read more

Nvidia says it has found a way speed up a computation-limited step in the chipmaking process so it happens 40 times as fast as today’s standard. Called inverse lithography, it’s a key tool to allow chipmakers to print nanometer-scale features using light with a longer wavelength than the size of those features. Inverse lithography’s use has been limited by the massive size of the needed computation. Nvidia’s answer, cuLitho, is a set of algorithms designed for use with GPUs, that turns ...read more

The Ericsson Technology Review is now available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The monthly magazine provides insights on emerging innovations that are shaping the future of information and communication technology. The publication, which dates back to 1924, is published by Ericsson, a multinational networking and telecommunications company based in Stockholm.An IEEE Xplore subscription is not required to access the freely available research papers.“IEEE is a respected organization, and E ...read more

Metal detecting can be a fun hobby, or it can be a task to be completed in deadly earnest—if the buried treasure you’re searching for includes landmines and explosive remnants of war. This is an enormous, dangerous problem: Something like 12,000 square kilometers worldwide are essentially useless and uninhabitable because of the threat of buried explosives, and thousands and thousands of people are injured or killed every year.While there are many different ways of detecting mines and explo ...read more

In mid-2021, the term “Web3” suddenly exploded into the public consciousness. As people scrambled to figure out what it was—cryptocurrencies? blockchain? nonfungible tokens?—venture capital firms were pouring money into new startups, over US $30 billion before the year was out. Meanwhile, Molly White, a software engineer, started reading up on the tech in case that was the direction her career would be heading in. But she found herself taking a different direction: She launched the webs ...read more