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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)

#41
post #40

So 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.

Graphene already has left the lab, it's being used in some high-end batteries.

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#42
post #40

So 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.

> hyperbolic

That's exactly the word I had in my mind when I was reading the article!

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#43
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#44
post #12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just block their JS. It is still readable unlike many publishers insisting their site runs like a SPA.

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#45
It'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-ma...

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#46
post #40

So 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.

Graphene already has left the lab, it's being used in some high-end batteries.

I 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...

[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/graphene...

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#47
post #3

The 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…

Full text of the article. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41928-017-0010-z

Re: A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)

#48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can shield the magnetic coupling with materials with high permeability.

You can, and that's more bulk, mass, and design complication.
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