Supercapacitor On-a-Chip Now One Step Closer

schwit1 writes: In 2010 Spectrum reported a new approach for creating chip-scale supercapacitors on silicon wafers, proposed by researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia and the Universite Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. In an article published in Science the researchers described how to make supercapacitor electrodes from porous carbon that could stick to the surface of silicon wafers so that they could be micromachined into electrodes for on-chip supercapacitors.

Now the same team has finally succeeded in doing just that.

In a paper published in this week's Science, researchers from the two initial teams report creating efficient porous carbon electrodes that really stick to the surface of a silicon wafer. They made layers of porous carbide derived carbon (CDC) that are completely compatible with all treatments used in the semiconductor industry, says Patrice Simon, a researcher at Universite Paul Sabatier who has researched porous CDC electrodes over the last ten years and co-authored both the 2010 and this week's paper in Science.

PLL redux

[niftymitch]

This allows PLLs to run in a lot smaller footprint.
This can open interesting blocks of radio frequency spectrum to
smaller bits of silicon.
Source synchronous data links will get easier.
The antenna on the roof might be smaller and more worthy.

This could enable a long list of old bulky tech to fit in a match box.
Power regulation too.

BTW: PLL = phase locked loop.