What's the big picture here? What are the uses for smaller inductors?
A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
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Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#12What medium is paid access now? Do they pay the content creators?
Well, 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.
There is a monthly quota for free access I believe.
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
But 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.
Its 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 t…
Perhaps power electronics will move to higher frequencies, too.
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#14What's the big picture here? What are the uses for smaller inductors?
At the frequencies relevant to the present invention, mostly RF front-ends. Wireless cards, cellphones, radars, etc.
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But 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.
Its 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 t…
On the flipside, kinetic inductance detectors (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).
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#16Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#17It 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.
The 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.
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#18The medium article links to a nature article which explains in depth: 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 pow…
The abstract [1] states that the technique is "purely material-enabled" but that they still laid out their kinetic inductor in a spiral. It would seem to me that a big advantage for these inductors in RF chips would be the lack of coupling to and from external magnetic fields if you used another layout.
One of the major limitations of existing planar spiral inductors is that their external magnetic fields will couple them to other nearby inductors creating a transformer. The big space saving for these could be the ability to lay down snake shaped inductors next to each other with very low coupling. Do they mention this in the article?
[1] I was unable to read the full article.
Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
#19The medium article links to a nature article which explains in depth: 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 pow…
Yes I think the focus is on RFICs where these take up a lot of die area. Potentially that's really important for more exotic processes like InP, GaN, or even diamond, where wafer space comes at a huge premium.