ICON student, Alexander Fordham, was a member of the organising team for the world's first hackathon.  

As humans we have greatly benefited from our five natural senses, which have supported us in overcoming major barriers pertaining to our survival in the past from lighting our first fires to navigating vast expanses such as the oceans and deserts. However, as our needs and wants expanded we have lacked further senses such as a magnetic sense to satiate our exploratory nature.

Sunlight is arguably the most abundant clean source of energy that is capable of enabling “indefinite” and sustainable economic growth, with minimum detrimental impact on the environment. Crystalline silicon solar cells have been continuously advancing in efficiency and reducing in cost of fabrication over the last 40 years, and in some locations in the world at the current prices, they are capable of producing electricity from sunlight at a comparable cost to the price of electricity generated from fossil fuels.

The development and implementation of renewable energies generated by wind, solar or tidal powers are increasing and set an important milestone for the change towards a sustainable energy society. However, the revolution of the energy landscape is only possible with the implementation of stationary and mobile energy storage technologies able to balance energy fluctuations or use on demand.

The evolution of transistors from vacuum tubes during the mid 1940s opened a new era of ‘semiconductor devices-&-circuits’, which made our lives today easy, comfort & safe with ample of applications. Scaling up the number of transistors on a single micro-chip for various applications kept man curious to hunt for new materials, circuit topologies and technologies.