Solid-state

Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat.

​Here's one we missed from last week's electric car avalanche at Auto Shanghai. Sitting on around a billion American dollars' worth of investment, Enovate Motors showed a neat concept sports car built around a high capacity, fast charging solid state battery pack.

At IFA this week, Samsung has unveiled the Portable SSD X5, a new solid state drive designed with speed in mind. To that end, it's kitted out with a Thunderbolt 3 connection and built on the NVMe platform, marking two firsts for Samsung's portable consumer SSDs.

Intel has unveiled what it calls the world’s densest solid state drive (SSD), packing 32 TB into a device the size of an old 12-inch ruler. The development should help data centers get more bang for their buck, cutting the cost of cooling and making more efficient use of the physical space.

A new technique can store bits as single hydrogen atoms, reaching a data density a thousand times greater than commercially available magnetic and solid-state drives.

Clean and plentiful, hydrogen is a promising fuel source, but there are a few problems in the path to mainstream use. South Korean scientists have now developed a new system for producing hydrogen from water, which that they say overcomes some of these issues and produces the gas more efficiently.

Magnesium-ion batteries have potential if scientists can crack the problem of finding an efficient electrolyte. Now scientists have developed a solid-state material that appears to be one of the fastest conductors of magnesium-ions, which could lead to safer and more efficient batteries.

​New York's high-end audio company McIntosh has announced its first hybrid integrated amplifier, the MA252. The all analog amp's retro looks are a design nod to the company's iconic MC275 Vacuum Tube Amplifier, but only the preamp stage uses tubes – the output stage rocks solid-state circuitry.​

Lithium-ion batteries are great at storing lots of energy in tight spaces, but can run into trouble at high temperatures. Researchers have just thrown up one possible answer to this problem, building a solid-state lithium-ion battery that can be heated to 100° Celsius without bursting into flames.​

At 3.2 million watts, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory laser diode array is the most powerful ever built, and will form part of an even larger quadrillion watt femtosecond pulsed laser currently under construction for the European Union's Beamline facility in the Czech Republic.

Israeli startup Anobit has announced a line of solid state drives that unites the speed and endurance of single-level cells to the low cost and storage density of multi-level memory cell.

The OCZ Technology Group's Enyo portable SSD with USB 3.0 has impressive read/write figures for an external hard drive.