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"This whole industry is very much stuck in the '60s and '70s," said Drew Strongrich, a Ph.D. student in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. Strongrich spoke eagerly about his work as he walked around the room, pointing out various sensors and instruments. He is working on improving a technology known as "lyophilization." It refers to a freeze-drying process that is important for many pharmaceutical and food manufacturing applications. Removing water from various products can improve their shelf life. Water is traditionally removed from products by heating the product and evaporating water vapor. However, many products, including certain drugs and foods, cannot withstand the required heat, so another method is required.

Engineers make the fins of 14-nanometer FinFETs acoustically resonate to forge the building block of 5G oscillators, filters, and processor clocks Engineers at Purdue University and GlobalFoundries have gotten today’s most advanced transistors to vibrate at frequencies that could make 5G phones and other gadgets smaller and more energy efficient. The feat could also improve CPU clocks, make wearable radars, and one day form the basis of a new kind of computing. They presented their results today at the IEEE International Solid-States Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University researchers and industry leaders are teaming up to transform the freeze-drying process, formally known as lyophilization, used to make everything from lifesaving drugs and biotech products to foods. A consortium of researchers, industry members from pharmaceutical and food processing sectors, as well as equipment makers and others, are working together at the Advanced Lyophilization Technology Hub, or LyoHub, at Purdue to modernize a process that has not changed fundamentally in 70 years even though it has a worldwide annual market of about $16 billion.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers are applying the same “hydrodynamic transport model” used to study flow in fluids to explain heat transport in a solid semiconductor, with potential implications for the design of high-speed transistors and lasers. Thermal imaging of tiny nanoscale semiconductor heat sources revealed details about vortices of heat-carrying objects called phonons.

A newly formed group of 10 counties has come together to become a national hub of agricultural and manufacturing innovation. The Wabash Heartland Innovation Network received a $38.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to help advance the Internet of Things. That's an interconnected network of sensors in agriculture and manufacturing sectors. This network is already being implemented. The data collected is being used to make better farming and manufacturing decisions. Purdue and Ivy Tech are at the forefront of research in this revolution.

LAFAYETTE – The Wabash Heartland community will get a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” with a $38.9 million Lilly Endowment grant. Wabash Heartland Innovation Network's (WHIN) chair Gary Henriott said the almost $40 million grant will help a 10-county region become a global hub for agriculture and advanced manufacturing.

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated how to harness a property called negative capacitance for a new type of transistor that could reduce power consumption, validating a theory proposed in 2008 by a team at Purdue University. The researchers used an extremely thin, or 2-D, layer of the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide to make a channel adjacent to a critical part of transistors called the gate. Then they used a "ferroelectric material" called hafnium zirconium oxide to create a key component in the newly designed gate called a negative capacitor.

Purdue University researchers will use an award from the National Science Foundation to make computing more effective and energy efficient using “spins.” Joerg Appenzeller, the Barry M. and Patricia L. Epstein Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, will lead the effort. He says the newly formed Computing Advances by Probabilistic Spin Logic (CAPSL) center is approaching the problem by developing new hardware. “Most other groups have worked on software implementations for probabilistic computing,” he says, “but not many have developed new hardware components to achieve more effective computing that uses much less energy in this way.”

INDIANAPOLIS - Former Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) Chief Executive Officer John Lechleiter says Indiana has all the tools it needs to be an agbiosciences leader, including heritage, strength in education, life sciences and logistics and an invested state government. Lechleiter was part of a panel on "crossing sector lines" at today's Agbiosciences Innovation Summit in Indianapolis. He says the key is getting all of those players to part with their "narrow self interests" and share ideas and resources.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New research published in Nature Communications suggests that electrons in a two-dimensional gas can undergo a semi-ordered (nematic) to mostly-ordered (smectic) phase transition, which has been discussed in physics theory but never seen in practice before. “Imagine that we could build an ice skating rink for electrons, and the electrons had to move along the surface; they couldn’t move up and down, so they just had to skate around each other,” said Michael Manfra, the Bill and Dee O’Brien Chair Professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue. “When you cool them down to very low temperatures and place them in a magnetic field, they sort of lock in step with each other; they line up like soldiers on a battlefield.”