Tag: industry news

One of the largest manufacturers of industrial batteries in the world, Saft, recently announced that it would now be offering an extended warranty of up to 15 years for its Li-ion batteries.   The move makes Saft the first Li-ion battery manufacturer in the world to offer such a long warranty.   The confidence isn’t all that surprising considering that

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In what could be a game changer for the solar energy industry, a house in suburban Sydney, Australia has installed the world’s first building integrated solar system that generates electricity and heat. The rooftop array combines thin-film solar photovoltaic (PV) panels with a solar thermal duct system that warms and cools the air. The top layer produces electricity from the

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One of the fundamental challenges of battery technology is that lithium-ion batteries — by far the best general option for energy storage currently in wide commercial use — are intrinsically bulky and heavy. A new research team at the University of Central Florida believes they can challenge that problem by turning copper wires into supercapacitors, then embedding those wires into

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There’s one business Sony 6758.TO -0.67% has clung to despite pressure to do otherwise: its lithium-ion battery unit. Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai emphasized in early February that the company sees its battery business as essential to growth of smartphones and other mobile devices.  But now, it looks like the company has another incentive.   On Wednesday, Sony indicated it’s also

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SynQor, Inc. announced the release of its military Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) EXA Series of isolated and fully-regulated dc-dc converters. This new EXA Series offers up to 300W of power in a quarter-brick package. These highly efficient (95% at full load), high power density dc-dc converters have a 28V nominal input voltage (16-40Vin range with a 50V transient for 1 second). They

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Analog Devices has added the ADSP-BF70x to the Blackfin processor family. The new offerings incorporate the new Blackfin+ core. It can handle 2 by 16-bit, 32-bit and complex math operations in a single cycle. It is backwards compatible and delivers 800 MMACS for 16-bit operations and half that for 32-bit operations. Versions are available with up to 1 Mbyte of

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Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have recently introduced the highest performing III-V metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors (FETs) at the 2014 Symposium on VLSI Technology. The UCSB research promises to help deliver higher semiconductor performance at lower power consumption levels for next-generation, high-performance servers. The research is supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world’s

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STMicroelectronics has revealed an advanced new product family enabling power supply designers to drive up energy efficiency in applications such as solar inverters and electric vehicles, enterprise computing and industrial motor drives. ST is among the first companies to produce this type of device, a high-voltage silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFET, and has achieved the industry’s highest temperature rating of

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Natcore Technology, Inc. has engaged the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) to augment what Natcore has accomplished in its own R&D Center and in the Chinese factory of one of the world’s largest photovoltaic manufacturers. “We’ve been building a head of steam,” says Provini. “We want to capitalize on it. We want to accelerate the delivery of black

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Robert Wilson takes a very hard-headed look at the state of the global energy system, in particular at the US and China. He comes up with some stunning conclusions. America’s per-capita energy consumption, he argues, is excessive and could easily be halved without any negative impact on the standard of living. But no matter what the US does, China is

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