Rob Coppinger

Rob Coppinger is a freelance science and engineering journalist. Originally a car industry production engineer, he jumped into journalism and has written about all sorts of technologies from fusion power to quantum computing and military drones. He lives in France.

Researchers cheaply produce thin films of the semiconductor gallium arsenide

Faster flexible electronics and more efficient solar cells are the promise of gallium arsenide as researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) begin to work on photov

Semiconductors | 16-11-2018

Insulating antiferromagnetic spintronics materials could bring cooler computing

Computers that produce far less heat yet compute at higher frequencies than today’s machines are possible with spin waves, signals that propagate due to magnetic fields, not curren

09-11-2018

Implanted biomedical sensors could be powered by body glucose

Electronics that can monitor a person’s physiological and biochemical signals for disease but have no battery because they are powered by the patient’s own glucose have been develo

02-11-2018

DNA nanostructures could be used to build electronic circuits

Building molecular electronics with individual molecules using synthetic Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) origami nanostructures that self-assemble is the goal of researchers at the Mis

25-10-2018

Boron nitride semiconductor could convert power more efficiently than silicon wafer technologies

Boron nitride is a semiconductor that could be used to make electrical equipment able to convert power more efficiently than silicon wafer technologies, up to three to 4% more effi

Semiconductors | 15-10-2018

Low cost silicon microchips for mass production of quantum computers

Quantum computers could be mass produced at low cost with silicon microchips that have large-scale waveguides, optical tracks, for photons, instead of circuits for electrons contro

05-10-2018

Computer cooling could be improved by boron-arsenide defect free semiconductor

A heat sink more than three times better than copper could be commercially available in a couple of years after engineers found a way to make the semiconductor boron-arsenide virtu

Semiconductors | 28-09-2018

Quantum cascade lasers could help transistors become more energy efficient

Quantum cascade lasers could allow the ever-smaller transistors to operate at low power and lower temperatures without the problems associated with conventional designs. Transistor

20-09-2018

Gold assembling virus genetically engineered for nanoscale electronic

Gold and semiconductors are to be assembled into nano-structures using a genetically engineered virus that was originally found in the Escherichia coli bacteria, which is typically

14-09-2018