The Kynix Blog

Harvard University researchers have made the first entirely 3D-printed organ-on-a-chip with integrated sensing. Built by a fully automated, digital manufacturing procedure, the 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip can be quickly fabricated in customized form factors allowing researchers to easily collect reliable data for short-term and long-term studies.This new approach to manufacturing may one day allow researchers to rapidly design organs-on-chips, also known as microphysiological systems, that match the properties of a specific disease or even an individual patient's cells.The research is published in Nature Materials."This new programmable approach to building organs-on-chips not only allows us to easily change and customize the design of the system by integrating sensing but also drastically simplifies data acquisition," said Johan Ulrik Lind, first author of the paper and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Lind is also a researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University."Our microfabrication approach opens new avenues for in vitro tissue engineering, toxicology and drug screening research," said Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS, who coauthored the study. Parker is also a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute.Organs-on-chips mimic the structure and function of native tissue and have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional animal testing. Harvard researchers have developed microphysiological systems that mimic the microarchitecture and functions of lungs, hearts, tongues and intestines.However, the fabrication and data collection process for organs-on-chips is expensive and laborious. Currently, these devices are built in clean rooms using a complex, multi-step lithographic process and collecting data requires microscopy or high-speed cameras."Our approach was to address these two challenges simultaneously via digital manufacturing," said Travis Busbee, coauthor of the paper and graduate student in the Lewis Lab. "By developing new printable inks for multi-material 3D printing, we were able to automate the fabrication process while increasing the complexity of the devices."The researchers developed six different inks that integrated soft strain sensors within the micro-architecture of the tissue. In a single, continuous procedure, the team 3D printed those materials into a cardiac microphysiological device—a heart on a chip—with integrated sensors."We are pushing the boundaries of three-dimensional printing by developing and integrating multiple functional materials within printed devices," said Jennifer Lewis, Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, and coauthor of the study. "This study is a powerful demonstration of how our platform can be used to create fully functional, instrumented chips for drug screening and disease modeling."The chip contains multiple wells, each with separate tissues and integrated sensors, allowing researchers to study many engineered cardiac tissues at once. To demonstrate the efficacy of the device, the team performed drug studies and longer-term studies of gradual changes in the contractile stress of engineered cardiac tissues, which can occur over the course of several weeks."Researchers are often left working in the dark when it comes to gradual changes that occur during cardiac tissue development and maturation because there has been a lack of easy, non-invasive ways to measure the tissue functional performance," said Lind. "These integrated sensors allow researchers to continuously collect data while tissues mature and improve their contractility. Similarly, they will enable studies of gradual effects of chronic exposure to toxins.""Translating microphysiological devices into truly valuable platforms for studying human health and disease requires that we address both data acquisition and manufacturing of our devices," said Parker. "This work offers new potential solutions to both of these central challenges."Reference:KY45-59020-010KY45-59135-020KY45-MK21P-1B90C-500W   

Researchers have developed a prototype of a next-generation lithium-sulphur battery which takes its inspiration in part from the cells lining the human intestine. The batteries, if commercially developed, would have five times the energy density of the lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones and other electronics.The new design, by researchers from the University of Cambridge, overcomes one of the key technical problems hindering the commercial development of lithium-sulphur batteries, by preventing the degradation of the battery caused by the loss of material within it. The results are reported in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.Working with collaborators at the Beijing Institute of Technology, the Cambridge researchers based in Dr Vasant Kumar's team in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy developed and tested a lightweight nanostructured material which resembles villi, the finger-like protrusions which line the small intestine. In the human body, villi are used to absorb the products of digestion and increase the surface area over which this process can take place.In the new lithium-sulphur battery, a layer of material with a villi-like structure, made from tiny zinc oxide wires, is placed on the surface of one of the battery's electrodes. This can trap fragments of the active material when they break off, keeping them electrochemically accessible and allowing the material to be reused."It's a tiny thing, this layer, but it's important," said study co-author Dr Paul Coxon from Cambridge's Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. "This gets us a long way through the bottleneck which is preventing the development of better batteries."A typical lithium-ion battery is made of three separate components: an anode (negative electrode), a cathode (positive electrode) and an electrolyte in the middle. The most common materials for the anode and cathode are graphite and lithium cobalt oxide respectively, which both have layered structures. Positively-charged lithium ions move back and forth from the cathode, through the electrolyte and into the anode.The crystal structure of the electrode materials determines how much energy can be squeezed into the battery. For example, due to the atomic structure of carbon, each carbon atom can take on six lithium ions, limiting the maximum capacity of the battery.Sulphur and lithium react differently, via a multi-electron transfer mechanism meaning that elemental sulphur can offer a much higher theoretical capacity, resulting in a lithium-sulphur battery with much higher energy density. However, when the battery discharges, the lithium and sulphur interact and the ring-like sulphur molecules transform into chain-like structures, known as a poly-sulphides. As the battery undergoes several charge-discharge cycles, bits of the poly-sulphide can go into the electrolyte, so that over time the battery gradually loses active material.The Cambridge researchers have created a functional layer which lies on top of the cathode and fixes the active material to a conductive framework so the active material can be reused. The layer is made up of tiny, one-dimensional zinc oxide nanowires grown on a scaffold. The concept was trialled using commercially-available nickel foam for support. After successful results, the foam was replaced by a lightweight carbon fibre mat to reduce the battery's overall weight."Changing from stiff nickel foam to flexible carbon fibre mat makes the layer mimic the way small intestine works even further," said study co-author Dr Yingjun Liu.This functional layer, like the intestinal villi it resembles, has a very high surface area. The material has a very strong chemical bond with the poly-sulphides, allowing the active material to be used for longer, greatly increasing the lifespan of the battery."This is the first time a chemically functional layer with a well-organised nano-architecture has been proposed to trap and reuse the dissolved active materials during battery charging and discharging," said the study's lead author Teng Zhao, a PhD student from the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy. "By taking our inspiration from the natural world, we were able to come up with a solution that we hope will accelerate the development of next-generation batteries."For the time being, the device is a proof of principle, so commercially-available lithium-sulphur batteries are still some years away. Additionally, while the number of times the battery can be charged and discharged has been improved, it is still not able to go through as many charge cycles as a lithium-ion battery. However, since a lithium-sulphur battery does not need to be charged as often as a lithium-ion battery, it may be the case that the increase in energy density cancels out the lower total number of charge-discharge cycles."This is a way of getting around one of those awkward little problems that affects all of us," said Coxon. "We're all tied in to our electronic devices - ultimately, we're just trying to make those devices work better, hopefully making our lives a little bit nicer."Reference:KY605-ML-621S/ZTNKY605-MS412FE-FL26EKY605-MS518SE-FL35E

A low-cost, low-risk memory solution has been announced by Microchip, it offers unlimited endurance and safe data storage at power loss. This I2C EERAM memory is an easy to implement, Non-Volatile SRAM (NVSRAM) that can be used by applications that need to constantly or instantaneously record, update or monitor data in sectors which include metering, automotive and industrial.EERAM is a standalone SRAM with shadow EEPROM back-up on a single chip that helps to automatically retain the contents of the SRAM memory when system power is lost. The EERAM offers instant random writes to the array with no write-cycle delay. The I2C EERAM family is available in 4 and 16Kb densities and in standard 8-pin SOIC, TSSOP and PDIP packages. EERAM is available in 3.0 and 5.0V options and in industrial and automotive temperature ranges, of -40 to 85°C and -40 to 125°C respectively and is also available as an automotive-grade memory.Comprised of two familiar and reliable memory technologies on a single chip, EEPROM and SRAM, EERAM offers a robust and dependable data solution that is also the lowest cost non-volatile SRAM solution. EERAM does not require an external battery to safely store data during a power-loss event. Instead, a small, external capacitor is used to provide the energy needed to store the contents of the SRAM on to the EEPROM when system power is lost.Key features:I2C EERAM is a low-cost NVSRAM that requires no external battery to retain dataCombines SRAM with EEPROM back-up on a single chip for lowest-cost NVSRAM solutionEnables instant random writes to the array with no write-cycle delayBenefits applications which constantly or instantaneously record, update or monitor dataAvailable in industrial and automotive temperature rangesReference:KY32-BQ2201SN-NKY32-DP8421AV-20KY32-DS1321KY32-MXD1210CSA+ 

For people with celiac disease or gluten intolerances, dining out can be stressful. Even trace amounts of the protein—found in wheat, barley, and rye—in a whole plate of food can cause adverse reactions.Now MIT spinout Nima—co-founded by CEO Shireen Yates MBA '13 and Chief Product Officer Scott Sundvor '12—has developed a portable, highly sensitive gluten sensor that lets diners know if their food is, indeed, safe to eat.According to the National Institutes of Health, celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that leads to intestinal damage when gluten is eaten, affects around 1 percent of the U.S. population, or roughly 3 million people. According to the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, millions more may suffer from nonceliac gluten intolerances.Nima's sensor, also called Nima, is a 3-inch-tall triangular device with disposable capsules. Diners put a sample of food—about the size of a pea—or liquid into the capsule, screw on the top, and insert the capsule into the device, which mixes the food into a solution that detects gluten. In two to three minutes, a digital display appears on the sensor, indicating if the food sample does or doesn't contain gluten.Every time someone runs a test, the result is automatically sent to an app Nima has developed. The diner can enter information about where and what they ate, and whether the food contained gluten. Any Nima user can log in to see the results.The aim is to create "a peace of mind at mealtime," Sundvor says. By amassing data on food, he adds, the startup hopes to provide people with better information about what they eat. "Right now, we don't know what's in our food, whether it is allergens, pesticides, or other harmful chemicals," he says. "There's not a good way to get that data. We want to give people the ability to understand their food better and how it affects their health."Sensitive sensorNima can sense gluten at 20 parts per million (ppm) or more, the maximum concentration for "gluten-free" foods as determined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.Nima's high sensitivity comes from the immunoassay inside the sensor, developed primarily by MIT chemical engineering alumnus Jingqing Zhang SM '12, PhD '13, who is now the lead scientist at Nima. The immunoassay contains custom antibodies that are highly sensitive to gluten molecules. When gluten is present, the antibody bonds to the gluten molecules, causing a color change in the immunoassay, which is captured by an optical reader. If any gluten is detected, the sensor will display an icon with a "gluten found" message. If the sample has less than 20 ppm of gluten, the sensor will display a smiley face.Nima can detect gluten in foods that are labeled as "gluten-free" but may have picked up microscopic amounts of the protein during the production or cooking process. A steak may have been fried on the same grill as gluten-based foods, for example, or a salad dressing may contain trace amounts of wheat flour. The device can even detect if someone touched a piece of bread that contained gluten, before handling the food in question. "It's the equivalent to finding a breadcrumb in an entire plate of food," Sundvor says.Moreover, Sundvor says, the device seamlessly integrates that chemistry with electronics and mechanics. "We've created this grinding, mixing, and extracting system, and together it works really well," he says.Filling the consumer gapNima was founded in 2013 as GlutenTech, when Yates, then an MIT Sloan School of Management student, dreamt up an idea for a portable gluten sensor. Seeking an engineer to bring the device to life, she met Sundvor, a recent MIT graduate who had studied mechanical engineering and product design.Together, they set up shop at the now-defunct MIT Beehive, a startup incubator on MIT's campus, with aims of filling "a huge consumer gap" in food-allergen testing, Sundvor says. Conventional at-home tests, he says, require equipment such as test tubes, pipettes, a mortar and pestle, and microscale. "You can't bring test tubes to a restaurant," he says.Sundvor began working long hours in an MIT machine shop building a prototype, while Yates brought the idea around to her MIT Sloan classes. Of note was a particular pricing class, where students sketched out pricing and demand models for the product. "The result of that was that I found there's a real opportunity here: There's a need and a willingness to pay," Yates says.In spring 2013, GlutenTech entered the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with a proof-of-concept model, and they earned the Audience Choice Award in the Accelerate contest. That summer, the team entered the Global Founders Skills Accelerator (GFSA), a 12-week startup program held at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.Participating in the $100K forced the team develop a business plan they could pitch to investors, Yates says. "It was a testing period to see, if we position ourselves in a certain way, will it resonate with investors?" she says."The GFSA was incredible," Sundvor adds, "It gave us the opportunity to have a safe space to go full-out on this for three months, have mentors, and have just enough money to squeak by."By the time the GFSA Demo Day rolled around in September, GlutenTech had its first working prototypes—"which were so ugly," Sundvor says, laughing.The 9-inch-long aluminum tubes "looked like lightsaber handles," Sundvor says. Inside the tubes were chemicals used in conventional food tests, and the system took about 10 minutes to detect gluten. When it did, a bright light flashed and a loud alarm went off. "We got many looks at restaurants," Sundvor says. "But they worked and got us our first investors."Three years ago, GlutenTech moved headquarters from Boston to San Francisco, and changed its name to 6SensorLabs. This year, they renamed the startup as Nima. In three years, the startup has gained more than $14 million in capital venture funding.New opportunitiesConsumers are the startup's first market. But as more individuals start using Nima, restaurants will have more data on their food to better serve patrons, Sundvor says. A couple of restaurants in San Francisco, in fact, are working with Nima on validating their gluten-free menu items.Next year, Nima plans to release two new sensors, one for peanuts and one for dairy, which is "surprisingly sneaky," Sundvor says. Bread at a restaurant, for instance, could have been fried in a pan with remnants of butter. "A lot of people are getting sick from dairy allergies, so that will be a big market," Sundvor says.Reference:LM50BIM3/NOPBDS18B20-PAR+T&RAD592BNZ 

Powerbox introduces two board mounted DC/DC converters to power industrial and railway applications; the extra wide input PQB50U-72S and the ultra-high power density PFB600W-110S. With an unprecedented extra wide input of 12:1 (14V to 160V) the PQB50U-72S delivers 50W in quarter brick packaging, bringing simplicity to power designers addressing EN50155 applications (one unit covering all bus voltages).In full brick packaging, the PFB600W-110S delivers industry’s first 600W unit within a 4:1 input voltage range of 43V to 160V, accommodating 72V, 96V and 110V bus voltages. Both products can be operated from -40°C up to +100°C case temperature, matching very demanding and ruggedized requirements such as in construction vehicles, mining equipment & heavy machinery process control.Demanding Industry and Railway power designers always face challenges to optimize board power solutions when designing standardized equipment for worldwide operation on a very large variety of system bus voltages. In the railway industry, designers are permanently seeking the best power architecture to operate within the overall EN50155 input voltage range, from 24V up to 110V (including continuous operation in the 14.4V brownout condition and 154V transients). To guarantee board power designers the highest level of flexibility, the PQB50U-72S has been developed to deliver full and stable power within an extended input voltage range from 14V up to 160V.In Demanding Industry and the forthcoming Industry 4.0 applications, system designers have to guarantee full performance in a multitude of applications operating from 24V to 72V and fixed industrial battery backup systems using 110V in which the quality of line is often disturbed. In those applications, the PQB50U-72S is designed to sustain high level of line disturbance within a range as low as 14V to a 200V surge. In such environments, the PQB50U-72S guarantees full output performance, simplifying design for systems architects and by having only one power module covering all ranges of input voltage, thus reducing inventory.PQB50U-72S comes in a standardized DOSA quarter-brick package. The module is available in four output voltages (5V/6A ; 12V/4.2A ; 24V/2.1A and 48V/1.05A). The device sustains 200V/100ms surge input voltage, includes short circuit and over-voltage protection, meets UL60950-1-2nd edition basic insulation and meets the EN50155 (EN61373) shock and vibration standard. The unit can be operated from -40 up to +100°C case temperature and has an efficiency of 86%. The PQB50U-72S includes an aluminum baseplate, making it possible to fix a heatsink or mount it directly to a cold-wall or chassis.Used in demanding applications, the PQB50U-72S has an isolation voltage of 3,000VDC (min) between input/output, 1,500VDC input/case and 1,500VDC output to case.“From the early days, board mounted DC/DC converters simplified the design process, whilst shortening the time to market” says Martin Fredmark, VP Product Management. “With the increased demand from Systems Designers to meet a large variety of bus voltages and from Supply Chain Managers to reduce inventory and fewer product-codes, Powerbox has been working on Swiss-knife power solutions, of which the PQB50U-72S and PFB600W-110S are perfect example of products responding to those needs”Part of the railway and industry modernization programs introduce more digital communication, entertainment systems, local computers and radio-communication, requiring higher power board mounted converters, able to operate independently of the system bus voltage, such as the EN50155 input bus voltage (72V, 96V, 110V), industrial 48V while delivering 600W output power.Designed and optimized for railway 110V systems, the new Powerbox PFB600W-110S can be operated from 43V up to 160V input, sustaining 180V/100ms surge voltage. The 4:1 input voltage range makes it easier and simpler for the system designer when developing new equipment for international railway applications.Packaged in an industry standard full-brick, the PFB600W-110S is available in four output voltages (12V/50A ; 24V/25A ; 28V/21.4A and 48V/12.5A) with an output power up to 600W. The PFB600W-110S is fully regulated and operates at a fixed switching frequency of 250 KHz and includes a PI type input filter reducing the input and noise. PFB600W-110S includes current limiting, continuous short-circuit protection, under/over-voltage lockout and an over-temperature protection with thermal shutdown with automatic recovery. For safety, the module complies with the UL60950-1 2nd edition (Basic isolation) has an input/output and input/case isolation of 2,500VDC and 500VDC output/case.For additional power or operational redundancy, the PFB600W-110S can be used in parallel. A paralleling control circuit is included within the product, guaranteeing true load-sharing, without the need to add external components. PFB600W-110S has a typical efficiency of 89% and designed carefully to optimize the thermal dissipation through the baseplate.The product complies with EN50155 (EN61373) shock and vibration standard and environmental EN50155 (EN60068-2-1). PQB50U-72S and PFB600W-110S meet CE Mark 2004/108/EC requirements.Reference:DS1200DEZ1582CM-2.5SC2608AS  

Samsung Electronics unveiled the industry’s first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC UFS 1.0 Card Extension Standard, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 GB, Samsung’s UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics.“By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritise performance and user convenience above all.”Samsung’s new 256GB UFS removable memory card ─ simply referred to as the UFS card will provide greatly improved user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback.It provides more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 MB/s which is similar to the sequential read speed of the most widely used SATA SSDs.With this UFS card, consumers have the ability to read a 5GB, Full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 microSD card, which would take over 50 seconds with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed.Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.When it comes to writing, the new 256GB UFS card processes 35,000 random IOPS, which is 350 times higher than the 100 IOPs of a typical microSD card, and attains a 170MB/s sequential write speed, almost doubling the top-end microSD card speed.With these substantial performance improvements, the new 256GB UFS card significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs (1,120 MB-equivalent) continuously with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s.To achieve the highest performance and most power-efficient data transport, the UFS card supports multiple commands with command queuing features and enables simultaneous reading and writing through the use of separately dedicated paths, doubling throughput.As the leading memory storage provider, Samsung has been aggressive in preparing UFS solutions for the marketplace, while contributing to JEDEC standardisation of the Universal Flash Storage 2.0 specification in September 2013 and the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard in March 2016.Following its introduction of the industry-first 128GB embedded UFS chip in January 2015, the company successfully launched a 256GB embedded UFS memory for high-end mobile devices in February of this year.As of earlier this month, Samsung also completed the Universal Flash Storage Association (UFSA)’s certification program that evaluates electrical and functional specifications for compatibility of a UFS card, and Samsung’s new UFS card products were approved as UFSA-certified UFS cards with the right to use the official UFS logo for the first time in the industry.Reference:S29GL032N11FFIS42S29GL064N90FFIS30S29AS016J70BFA040