Toward chip-scale RF front ends Professor Songbin Gong( right) and members of his Illinois Integrated RF Microsystems Group are developing chip-scale hybrid microsystems for RF communication, sensing, and imaging applications.
Light illuminates the way for bio-bots
Toward chip-scale RF front ends Professor Songbin Gong( right) and members of his Illinois Integrated RF Microsystems Group are developing chip-scale hybrid microsystems for RF communication, sensing, and imaging applications.
The recent proliferation of wireless devices like cell phones, smart radios, and Internet of Things sensors are putting a strain on the limited radio frequency( RF) spectrum. Researchers like ECE Professor Songbin Gong and his students are working on the underlying front-end wireless technology that can help alleviate that strain. In 2016, they developed a spurious mode-suppression technique that they used to make a new class of front-end device— lithium niobate( LiNbO 3
) laterally vibrating resonators. The team integrated 200 of these resonators in a ladder network on a 360 x 350 µ m 2 chip that operated at 750 and 400 MHz simultaneously.
Source: IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices,“ Analysis and removal of spurious response in SHO Lithium Niobate MEMS resonators,” volume 63, May 2016.
Light illuminates the way for bio-bots
Bioengineering Professor Rashid Bashir and his students demonstrated a new class of miniature biological robots that have been genetically engineered to respond to light, giving researchers control over the bots’ motion, a key step toward their use in applications for health, sensing and the environment. Bashir’ s group previously demonstrated bio-bots that were activated with an electrical field, but electricity can cause adverse side effects to a biological environment and has steering limitations. The new light-stimulation technique is less invasive and allows the researchers to steer the bio-bots in different directions. The bio-bots are made of rings of mouse muscle tissue that have a gene added so the tissue contracts when exposed to light. These rings are like building blocks that can be combined with any 3-D-printed skeleton to make bio-bots for a variety of applications. This work was part of the NSF-funded Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems project. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,“ Optogenetic skeletal muscle-powered adaptive biological machines,” volume 113, March 2016.
The bio-bots research team includes( left to right) Research Professor Parijat Sengupta, graduate student Caroline Cvetkovic, Professor Rashid Bashir, and graduate student Ritu Raman.
micro + nanotechnology lab | 9 | 2016 highlights report