Electrical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated the ability to print fully functional and recyclable electronics at sub-micrometer scales. The technique could impact the more than $150 billion electronic display industry and its environmental impact while providing a toehold for U.S. manufacturing to gain traction in a vital and quickly growing industry.

The research appears in the journal Nature Electronics.

“If we want to seriously increase U.S.-based manufacturing in areas dominated by global competitors, we need transformational technologies,” said Aaron Franklin, the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Chemistry at Duke.

“Our process prints carbon-based transistors that can be fully recycled and provide comparable performance to industry standards. It’s too promising of a result not to be given further attention.”

Electronic displays play a key role across just about every industry: think TVs, computer screens, watch faces and car displays. Nearly all of them are made overseas, mostly in South Korea, China and Taiwan.

The manufacturing process has a significant environmental impact due to the greenhouse gas emissions and enormous energy footprint required by vacuum-based processing. And to top it off, according to a United Nations estimate, less than a quarter of the millions of pounds of electronics thrown away each year are recycled.

Several years ago, Franklin’s laboratory developed the world’s first fully recyclable printed electronics. That demonstration, however, used aerosol jet printing that can’t form features smaller than 10 micrometers, greatly limiting their potential applications in the world of consumer electronics.

In the new research, Franklin and his colleagues worked with Hummink Technologies to break through this size barrier. Their “high precision capillary printing” machines use natural competing surface energies to pull tiny amounts of ink out of an equally tiny pipette. This is the same phenomenon that makes paper towels so absorbent, as liquid is drawn into the narrow spaces between their fibers.

“We sent Hummink some of our inks and had some promising results,” said Franklin. “But it wasn’t until we got one of their printers here at Duke that my group could harness its real potential.”

The researchers used three carbon-based inks made from carbon nanotubes, graphene and nanocellulose that can be easily printed onto rigid substrates like glass and silicon or flexible substrates like paper or other environmentally friendly surfaces. These are essentially the same inks that were originally demonstrated in Franklin’s previous research, but with tweaked fluid properties that allow them to work with the Hummink printers.

In the demonstration, they show this combination of novel ink and hardware can print features tens of micrometers long with small, submicrometer-sized gaps between them.

These small, consistently formed gaps form the channel length of the carbon-based thin-film transistors (TFTs), with smaller channel dimensions translating to strong electrical performance. And it’s these kinds of transistors that form the backplane control of all flat-panel displays.

“These types of fabrication approaches will never replace silicon-based, high-performance computer chips, but there are other markets where we think they could be competitive—and even transformative,” said Franklin.

Behind every digital display in the world is a huge array of microscopic thin-film transistors that control each pixel. While OLED displays require more current and need at least two transistors for each pixel, LCD displays require only one.

In a previous study, the researchers were able to demonstrate their printed, recyclable transistors driving a few pixels of an LCD display. And Franklin believes the new submicrometer printed TFTs are close to having the performance needed for demonstrating the same for OLED displays.

While there are other potential use cases for this technology, such as squeezing more sensors into a chip’s footprint to increase its accuracy, Franklin believes digital displays are the most promising. Besides being fully recyclable, the printing process requires much less energy and produces many fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional TFT manufacturing methods.

“Displays being fabricated with something similar to this technique is the most feasible large-scale application I’ve ever had come out of my lab,” said Franklin.

“The only real obstacle, to me, is getting sufficient investment and interest in addressing the remaining obstacles to realizing the considerable potential.”

“Unfortunately, the National Science Foundation program that we were pursuing funding from to continue working on this, called the Future Manufacturing program, was cut earlier this year. But we’re hoping to find a fit in a different program in the near future.”

Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned on Wednesday.

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

Unprecedented

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings that some customers used inside their networks.

Control of the build system and access to the source code, customer configurations, and documentation of unpatched vulnerabilities has the potential to give the hackers unprecedented knowledge of weaknesses and the ability to exploit them in supply-chain attacks on thousands of networks, many of which are sensitive. The theft of customer configurations and other data further raises the risk that sensitive credentials can be abused, F5 and outside security experts said.

Customers position BIG-IP at the very edge of their networks for use as load balancers and firewalls, and for inspection and encryption of data passing into and out of networks. Given BIG-IP’s network position and its role in managing traffic for web servers, previous compromises have allowed adversaries to expand their access to other parts of an infected network.

F5 said that investigations by two outside intrusion-response firms have yet to find any evidence of supply-chain attacks. The company attached letters from firms IOActive and NCC Group attesting that analyses of source code and build pipeline uncovered no signs that a “threat actor modified or introduced any vulnerabilities into the in-scope items.” The firms also said they didn’t identify any evidence of critical vulnerabilities in the system. Investigators, which also included Mandiant and CrowdStrike, found no evidence that data from its CRM, financial, support case management, or health systems was accessed.

The company released updates for its BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IQ, and APM products. CVE designations and other details are here. Two days ago, F5 rotated BIG-IP signing certificates, though there was no immediate confirmation that the move is in response to the breach.

The pulp and paper industry consumes large amounts of energy. But despite stricter EU requirements for efficiency improvements, there has been no way to measure and compare energy consumption between different companies in a fair way. In collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, now present a solution that has great potential to be used throughout the EU.

“Even if this would contribute to increasing efficiency by one or a few percent only, this involves so much energy that it can make a huge difference,” says Kristina Nyström, Ph.D. student at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University.

Globally, the pulp and paper industry accounts for 4% of energy used by the industrial sector. Through its Industrial Emissions Directive, the EU has set efficiency requirements for the industrial sector to reduce climate impact. An important tool for this is to make comparisons between factories within an industry—so-called benchmarking.

“But this has not been possible in the paper industry, because the mills have been so different that comparable results have not been achieved,” Kristina Nyström explains.

Therefore, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, assisted by Linköping University and Chalmers Industriteknik and in consultation with the paper industry, has developed a calculation method to enable comparisons. The method, which is presented in an article published in the journal Applied Energy, has great potential to be used throughout the EU, according to Olof Åkesson, former Swedish Environmental Protection Agency employee, who initiated the project.

The solution is to divide paper production into standardized processes such as actual pulp production, dissolution of purchased pulp, drying of pulp or paper production. These processes are common to enough mills for comparisons to be meaningful. In this way, companies can discover what in their processes works less efficiently compared to others, where improvements can be made and which actions would be most beneficial.

In addition, this method allows for more measures to be included in the energy efficiency efforts. One example is that companies are credited with the residual heat from manufacturing that is used in the surrounding community, such as the heating of homes or greenhouses.

Should this method gain ground, it could contribute to a changed approach to energy efficiency. At present, public agencies’ demands for energy audits often focus on details, which risks significant efficiency measures being overlooked.

“The benefit of making the pulp and paper industry more efficient is that this can reduce the use of fossil fuels and release raw materials, biofuels and electricity for other purposes,” says Åkesson.

With the involvement of researchers, public agencies and companies in the pulp and paper industry, chances are high that the method was designed in a way that is useful in practice. The collaboration between organizations can serve as a model for other industries wanting to develop their own measurement methods, according to Nyström.

Several companies that tested the measurement method have been positive, and it now needs to be spread and tested on a larger scale, the researchers say. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is working to develop the model, now also in dialog with public agencies and the pulp and paper industry in Finland.