9 ms·
A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
- xupybd 6y agoWhat medium is paid access now? Do they pay the content creators?
- tyingq 6y agoWell, it's a register wall, not a pay wall. Agree it's annoying. The real annoying part to me is that Google seems to treat it the same as freely available no-registration content.
- dsego 6y agoThere is a monthly quota for free access I believe.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoJust block their JS. It is still readable unlike many publishers insisting their site runs like a SPA.
- AHappyCamper 6y agoOh, I just open the link in incognito mode and I can read the full article...
- wbraun 6y agoThe medium article links to a nature article which explains in depth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-017-0010-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-017-0010-z This seems like an interesting development, but the performance gain appears to be limited to low value inductors in the 10's of GHz range. Those inductors are already very small and easily integrated on RF ICs. If you want to miniaturize electronics you need to miniaturize the inductors used in power conversion, which typically operate in the KHz to low MHz range. It's a very different problem.
- AHappyCamper 6y agoBut it's a good start, no? And the theory has been proven as sound. I'm guessing/hoping they'll target the higher ranges soon.
- wbraun 6y agoIts a material that basically gives electrons "inertia" which acts like an inductance derived from magnetic fields. There is a time constant to it, which determines at what frequency range it starts contributing to the inductance value. To make it useful for power electronics they would have to push out this time constant by at least 4 orders of magnitude, I don't believe the theoretical material properties support that. You might see this shaving off a few mm^2 from RF ICs and providing better RF performance. Applications in power electronics, where inductors take up the most volume, seems unlikely.
- rini17 6y agoPerhaps power electronics will move to higher frequencies, too.
- coryrc 6y agoWill have to drive gate and source capacitance down a few orders a magnitude to make that a reasonable trade-off.
- bsder 6y ago> Perhaps power electronics will move to higher frequencies, too. They just did thanks to GaN transistors. The limitations in power electronics generally aren't the inductors.
- superkuh 6y agoOn the flipside, kinetic inductance detectors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector) for astronomy have been around since ~2000 and in the low light single photon regime they have much less noise on readout than photoelectric detectors (CCD/CMOS/etc).
- tyingq 6y agoIt mentions 50 percent greater inductance than a a regular coil. Which is great, but would only reduce the size by a third. I imagine this has some use cases that would merit the higher cost (graphene is expensive, right?). But probably not many.
- andrewjrhill 6y agoTo be fair - a 33% reduction in size is massive for something that has remained largely unchanged for the better part of 2 centuries.
- topspin 6y ago20-30 years really. The introduction of chip inductors, the last really significant reduction in size for commodity discrete inductors, happened in the 90s.
- mNovak 6y agoThe article indicates a 50% reduction in area for a given inductance (last figure). These are planar spiral type inductors found on RFICs, which they're saying take up potentially 50% of the die area. So overall pretty impactful if you can lop off 25% of your die area.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/SKK4v https://archive.is/SKK4v
- im3w1l 6y agoWhat's the big picture here? What are the uses for smaller inductors?
- amelius 6y agoWhat is the typical series resistance of this device?
- ncmncm 6y agoThis will be a bigger deal when they get better effective carrier mass. It reads like intercalating more boron, or maybe a better choice or mix of elements, will yield increasingly better results. 50% is a big enough initial effect to be very encouraging. It is not clear from the article if there is any theoretical upper limit. In the meantime, making the biggest part of a circuit 33% smaller might make the whole circuit almost that much smaller. The value of these things is greatest manipulating signals at very high frequencies, far out of reach of digital signal processing. It is probably not notably useful for power conversion, where the exchange of energy via actual magnetic fields is what does the useful work.
- djmips 6y ago(2018)
- dogber1 6y agoSo many hyperbolic claims that boil down to a moderate 33% area benefit with very little data about mundane things like long-term reliability, or process variation. Every time an article mentions some buzzword like 'graphene', it turns out to be just a load of baloney. Graphene can do everything but leave the lab.
- Qwertious 6y agoGraphene already has left the lab, it's being used in some high-end batteries.
- ineedasername 6y agoI think graphene gets a bad rap because it's had a very slow ramp up time due to chicken/egg problems in production cost/demand curves, but that's been changing drastically over the last decade. It's come down in cost by multiple orders of magnitude [0] While total sales have been modestly increasing, with projections for massive growth [1] and if there's a steady market cap while marginal costs decrease that much, also means orders of magnitude increases in shipped product. It's had a lot of growing pains, but we seem to mostly have passed the inflection point in terms of market viability. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig-12-Comparison-of-the-quality-and-cost-of-graphene-products-manufactured-by_fig6_337018282 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig-12-Comparison-of-the... [1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/graphene-industry https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/graphene...
- dogber1 6y agoNo, that's just some marketing verbiage with no real physical correspondence.
- filterfish 6y ago> hyperbolic That's exactly the word I had in my mind when I was reading the article!
- ineedasername 6y agoIt's definitely a great development, but I don't understand the "trillion dollar" comment at the beginning. Near as I can tell, inductors are about a $4-5 billion dollar market [0] I know it will help miniaturization, but it seems like devices most desirable for miniaturization are already most limited by other conditions like the battery in smart phones and laptops. Larger inductors seem to appear mostly in things like power supplies-- sure we'd like smaller power bricks, but I don't understand how it translates to trillions of dollars. [0]https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/inductor-market-212700102.html https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/inductor-ma...
- notananon 6y ago"With connected devices and the Internet of Things poised to become a multi-trillion dollar enterprise by the mid-2020s, this new type of inductor could be exactly the kind of revolution the burgeoning industry has been hoping for." The "trillion dollar" comment was referring to the potential size of the connected device and IoT market - you seem to have misread it.
- haywirez 6y ago2018
- TimMurnaghan 6y agoDoes this give a better space saving than a gyrator? https://www.sites.google.com/site/roelarits/home/gyrator https://www.sites.google.com/site/roelarits/home/gyrator
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neurostimulant 6y agoWhenever there is a new hyped tech, it's always using graphene. But how close are we to actually deploying graphene-based components to mass market?