Thursday, October 9, 2008

Battery Charges to 90% in 10 Minutes

Fast charging battery power is essential for portable and wireless devices, and a new battery technology opens up more options for devices.

Toshiba's Super Charge Ion Battery (SCIB) technology offers a 90% charge capacity in 10 minutes. The unit handles from 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles, which is at least 10 times the amount in standard lithium-ion batteries. The tech is made of a durable material that offers a high level of thermal stability, prevents overheating, and will not explode when crushed. The Schwinn Tailwind electric bicycle will reportedly feature a SCIB battery that charges in less than 30 minutes. That's one application for the component, but this innovation in battery tech can help designers in all facets of the industry.

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Friday, October 3, 2008

Cooperative Effort Creates Green LEDs

The environment concerns manufacturers and consumers alike. In the area of lighting, LEDs have become a good alternative for incandescent companies. This effort by two companies shows good promise for the industry.

IMEC and Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp. have signed an agreement to jointly develop manufacturing technology for LED devices. The tech would be based on IMEC's compound semiconductors device technology. Applications for the new LED tech would include backlighting for high-vision LCD televisions. I feel that companies from separate countries and continents (such as this example from Belgium and Japan, respectively) should collaborate more, not only because of the improved exchanged of ideas, but also because the single technology developed addresses problems plaguing us all.

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

CompactRIO Chosen for Next-Gen Robot Controls

More Than 42,000 students in the FIRST Robotics Competition Will develop Advanced Robotics Applications using the NI Robotics Platform powered by NI LabVIEW.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) has selected the National Instruments CompactRIO embedded control platform as its next-generation FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robot controller. This is a good choice since students can program their robots based on CompactRIO in either NI LabVIEW graphical programming software or the ANSI C language. Students will start creating advanced robots in the 2009 FIRST season. NI's technology will truly help the builders in their quest to make a functioning robot.

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Monday, September 29, 2008

"Identify the Image" Challenges Public

Nikon Small World is displaying samples of winning images from its 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. Some images look like fruit, others like stained glass, but you may be surprised to find out what they really are.

Nikon Instruments is giving the public the chance to test its skills and interact with microscopic images typically viewed by scientists with its new online game, "Identify the Image." The game gives players a series of 5 2008 Nikon Small World finalist images and asks them to correctly identify each photomicrograph. Players are then graded based on their performance. Nikon is opening up the judging to the public who can now vote for their favorite images until October 10.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Seventh Grader Shines in Solar Cell Research

Solar cell research has been looked into for years as a way to generate energy. Now, the youth of the U.S. are taking action as green engineers of the future.

William Yuan, a 7th grader in Meadow Park Middle School in Oregon, researched an idea to create a more efficient solar cell in the applications of nanotechnology and renewable energy. His work led him to an idea for an innovative 3-D solar cell that will absorb visible and UV light. This earned him an award and a $25,000 scholarship from the Davison Institute for Talent Development. Yuan is 12 years old and looks to study nanotechnology, biotechnology or medicine at a university level. If all American youths were as bright and knowledgeable as he is, then the world wouldn't need to worry about future energy problems.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Tesla Coil Acts as Guitar Amp

The Tesla coil, an invention named after its inventor (not to mention our blog), generates high votlage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity.

ScopeBoy has made it possible to use a tesla coil for guitar amplification as a functional guitar amp. This use of the coil utilizes all 250,000 volts, and is neither practical nor safe. It does, however, look quite cool. I wonder what Nikola Tesla would think of this if he was alive today. And I wonder if Metallica would use a Tesla coil as an amp when they go on tour.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

New Communication Standard Performs in Manufacturing Process

There are hundreds or thousands of machines and independent systems operating in consortia in a manufacturing facility. It is difficult to communicate information and process data among these devices, but a new connectivity standard is emerging to deal with these complications.

Based on XML, MTConnect offers flexible representation for exchanging semistructured machine-readable data to replicate the success of standard interfaces, like USB, in manufacturing. The project will use open and royalty-free technologies to provide implementations of the example software, which can be used as-is, modified to suit special needs, reverse-engineered or the user-created to meet MTConnect requirements. This allows connectivity from the lowest end of the process chain to the highest design or process planning tool. The expectation is that MTConnect will enable a host of third party solution providers to develop software and hardware to make the entire manufacturing enterprise more productive.

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Monday, September 8, 2008

Vintage Computer Festival East Returns

The mission of the Vintage Computer Festival is to promote the preservation of "obsolete" computers by offering people a chance to experience the technologies, people and stories that embody the remarkable tale of the computer revolution.

The 5th annual Vintage Computer Festival East will be held on Saturday, September 13th and Sunday, September 14th, at the InfoAge Science Center at Wall Township, New Jersey. Guest speakers will be Bill Mauchly, son of ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly, Watts Humphrey and Claude Kagan. The event will feature a replica-building workshop to build a Apple 1 or KIM-1 single-board computers, and a computer exhibit. Tours of 1st wing of the new MARCH - Grabbe Computer Museum and the InfoAge Science Center are available.

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008

England's St Pancras International Offers
Free Wi-Fi

Establishments including Starbucks and Panera Bread have been delivering complimentary Wi-Fi to their customers for years. Now, people who are waiting to travel on the Eurostar can enjoy Wi-Fi.

Urban digital network provider City Space has installed and will manage free Wi-Fi broadband service at St Pancras International station. The network is built on 30 BelAir 100s nodes around the station, providing all areas are covered, including platforms on both levels, restaurants, shops, bars and boutiques. About 45 million people travel through St Pancras annually.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Wireless Earphones Deliver CD-Quality Stereo Sound

Wireless technology is always adapting to new applications. One company has created what could become the next big thing in the music electronics industry.

Kleer's Sennheiser MX W1 wireless stereo earphones are said to deliver crystal-clear CD-quality stereo sound using Kleer's Listen In™ technology. The devices are untethered ‘twist-to-fit’ ear pieces with a small, rechargeable coin cell battery. The earphones are fully interoperable to receive wireless audio from any Kleer-based portable media player. The Listen In™ technology enables up to four people, each with a set of MX W1 earphones, to listen to the same audio stream at the same time.

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Bluetooth Chips Save Power in Laptops

Bluetooth has become a standard piece of tech for cell phones. Now, it’s being integrated into use for laptops.

CSR and Intel Corporation have collaborated to integrate Bluetooth chips with laptop PCs to save up to 1 W of power, giving the PC up to 30 extra minutes of battery life through USB Sideband Deferring. The objective of the new Bluetooth firmware and complementary Windows software is to eliminate the power drain caused by frequent polling of the Bluetooth chip by the USB subsystem. An integrated USB Bluetooth device can prevent the processor from entering the C3 state because it needs to be constantly polled to check whether it has any data to send to the system. Bluetooth Advanced Power Management (APM) lowers power consumption by making sure that the Bluetooth device is only polled when it has data to pass to the system, thus letting the processor enter C3.

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Flywheels Help Hospitals Go Green

Flywheels are a well-known component that help with power conditioning in a variety of environments by providing more efficient backup power. Hospitals, which thrive on cleanliness, can now have clean power to back them up.

Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota are replacing the lead acid batteries used for backup power in their data centers with VYCON's VDC flywheel backup system. The flywheel doesn't contain any chemicals and doesn't present a disposal hazard while taking up less space than battery solutions. The backup systems are high-speed flywheels that provide clean ride-through backup power and can replace traditional UPS batteries or work in tandem with batteries to provide instantaneous on demand power. The VYCON flywheel UPS system has been in operation since April of this year.

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Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Wi-Fi Takes Flight

Technology has become more essential to people for business and pleasure and the Internet is key for both. Wi-Fi technology is catching up with the consumer demand for a steady Internet connection while flying on a business trip or to a vacation destination.

Delta and Aircell have teamed up to offer passengers broadband Wi-Fi access on Delta’s fleet of 133 MD88/90s with Aircell’s GoGo™ cellular data service. Delta customers traveling with Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, will be able to access the Internet, corporate VPNs, corporate and personal e-mail accounts, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. The service will be expanding to the remaining domestic fleet of more than 330 Boeing 737, 757 and 767-300 aircrafts by the summer of 2009. This won’t be free though; the service fee is $9.95 for flights 3 hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights.

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Friday, August 1, 2008

Nanoribbons Carved Using Iron Particles

Few layer grapheme (FLG) has emerged as a promising new material for use in post-silicon devices that incorporate the quantum effects that emerge at the nanoscale.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania have found a method in which FLG can be etched flawlessly onto crystallographic axes by using thermally-activated iron nanoparticles. This creates macroscopic length ribbons of grapheme without rough edges, which was hard to do due to the inadequacy of current nanofabrication standards. The nanoribbons form after researchers deposited grapheme onto a silicon substrate, coated them in iron nitrate, heated them to them to 900°C and spread them across the substrate surface to etch away trenches in the grapheme sheets. The team is now attempting to refine their control of the process and test their capability to fabricate devices whose properties will reflect the intrinsic quality of atomically-precise grapheme.

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Monday, July 28, 2008


Economy Accelerates Wired-Phone Decline

The rise of the Internet and telecommunications revolution of the 1990s hurt the wired-phone industry. At first, wired phones rose with the wireless boom, but it’s been a different story since 2000.

In addition to the wireless boom over the past decade, today’s lackluster economy has a crushing effect on the wired-phone business. The economy makes it tough to afford both a landline and a cell phone simultaneously. The features and convenience of cell phones clearly outmatch the call-only and restrictiveness of landlines. The situation with today’s real estate plays a role in helping decrease wired phones since there are millions of foreclosed and vacant homes that don’t need a landline.

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Monday, July 21, 2008


Magazine Debuts First Ever Digital Cover

The idea behind a digital magazine cover has gotten to be more of a reality thanks to the commercialization of electronic paper technology. This goes to show that we're not the only ones thinking about technology in the magazine publishing industry.

To celebrate 75 years being published, Esquire has teamed up with E Ink to produce a modernized paper magazine cover. The idea is the brainchild of David Granger, Esquire's editor-in-chief, since he feels that the look of magazines haven't changed in 150 years. In order for this to work, Esquire had find an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to fit inside of a magazine cover and then have the devices put into magazines, cover by cover, in Mexico before going to the distributor. Ford Motor, one of Esquire's sponsors, decided to place an ad inside of the magazine using the same technology. Only 100,000 out of the 720,000 copies in circulation will use the technology that will flash "The 21st Century Begins Now" in September.

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008


TMSUK Robot Goes Shopping

Humanoid robot technology has been useful in multiple applications. This is an interesting use in the technology and could be a foreshadowing for things to come.

A modified TMSUK-4 humanoid robot was seen at the Izutsuya department store in Kitakyushu, Japan helping a young woman shop for a hat. This particular TMSUK-4 is a prototype of the telerobotic shopper that incorporates a variety of cell phone communications technology. In this particular case, a NTT DoCoMo video-capable cell phone was used to be the eyes and controls for the woman’s grandmother, who was at her home. The TMSUK-4 has 27 degrees of freedom and has been around since 1999.

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Thursday, July 3, 2008


Printing Press Creates Optical Electronics

European researchers have taken a major step towards the goal of developing printable electronics that can be used for creating radio frequency identification tags and flexible watch displays.

The Labratester 2 gravure printing press, made by the EU-funded CONTACT project's research team, demonstrates that organic liquid crystal displays and other optical electronic devices can be printed out on glass plates. These patterned plates have 25 micron features with 25 micron spacing and 10 micron precision sequential layers. The press will be able to print hundreds of thousands of organic thin film transistor (TFT) arrays or other circuit elements. The device will use optical cameras to detect alignment marks in order to register each layer precisely over the previous one. The researchers include various academic and industrial partners from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Schläefli Machines and Asulab plan to finalize the Labratester 2.

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008


Chip Uses Novel Sleep Mode to Set Low-Power Record

We don't need to belabor how important it is to save energy. From the costs involved in production and distribution to the limited energy budget provided by storage devices, the ability to use less power benefits both fixed and portable device applications. This advance from the University of Michigan emphasizes the energy savings that we can realize from reducing the power that is currently (no pun intended) wasted in devices on standby

A low-power microchip developed at the University of Michigan uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than comparable chips now on the market.The Phoenix Processor, which sets a low-power record, is intended for use in cutting-edge sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors or surveillance equipment. The chip consumes just 30 picowatts during sleep mode. A picowatt is one-trillionth of a watt. Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years.Scott Hanson, a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will present the design June 20 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Symposium on VLSI Circuits. Hanson jointly leads this project with Mingoo Seok, a doctoral student in the same department.

University of Michigan
www.ns.umich.edu

For more information:
www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6610

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Friday, June 20, 2008


Local investors to keep Philly’s muni WiFi network running

Municipal wireless is a service whose time has come. Politics and profits aside, America needs a seamless, secure, and robust wireless data infrastructure to compete in the global information society. Ubiquitous computing, pervasive services (which should be the profit engine of the service providers, not fees on the data pipeline itself), and enhanced functionalities in personal devices must have such an environment to function properly and provide full value to the communities involved.

Philadelphia's municipal WiFi has won a stay of execution, as a group of "local investors" have decided to take over operations of the network in order to prevent it from being shut down. The investors—which include businessmen Derek Pew and Mark Rupp—plan to expand the current network architecture that was originally set up by EarthLink in hopes of eventually offering free WiFi access to all city residents.

The news comes just days after the network was supposed to go dark thanks to EarthLink's decision to pull the plug. EarthLink, which had originally set up the entire network for free for the city, had decided months beforehand that it would exit the municipal WiFi business. Since then, the company has been shopping around for someone—anyone—to take Philadelphia's network off its hands with no success. When EarthLink finally decided to shut the network down last month (after giving Philadelphia not one, but two deadlines to figure out a plan to take over the network at no charge), it blamed the sad conclusion of the months-long drama on the city's inability to get its act together.

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Monday, June 16, 2008


Converting plastic into light-emitting nanostructures

Every step in applied nanotechnology is less material needed in the creation of modern devices. Less material is good for the earth as well as well as lowering the bar for widened implementation of information-using and life-expanding technologies.

Light-emitting nanostructures are widely used for optical, photonic, chemical, and biological devices. For example, fluorescent nanoparticles are useful for biological assays and as tumor markers, chemical sensors, and organic lasers, whereas one-dimensional luminescent nanowires are exploited for novel nanoscale photonic devices such as nano-lasers and nanowire scanning microscopy. While several methods to prepare organic, inorganic, and polymeric light-emitting nanostructures have been developed, the fabrication of luminescent nanoarchitectures with a tailored morphology and pattern is still challenging.

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Thursday, May 30, 2008


Computer trained to "read" mind images of words

Controlling computers with the mind has been a science-fiction staple from the beginning. The ability to manage data directly from the brain would open all kinds of doors, for good and ill. (The “nerve staple” and other devices of a thought-control nature have also been with us in SF since day one.) This is the kind of blue-sky Buck Rogers stuff that got me into this business in the first place.

A computer has been trained to "read" people's minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers announced. They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information. This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.

"The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?" Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

"It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question."

Mitchell's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain scan that can see real-time brain activity.

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Monday, May 19, 2008

"Challenge X" Vehicles Strut Their Stuff In Manhattan
By Alix Paultre

It may have been a cold and damp morning in Manhattan, but that didn’t damp the passions of the participants in the Challenge X national collegiate engineering competition. This year’s challenge, sponsored by the US Department of Energy and General Motors, focuses on technology integration and full-vehicle development of advanced alternate-technology drivetrain and subsystems. By participating in the Challenge X program, the students gain real-world engineering skills and hands-on learning to better prepare them for a future career in engineering.

More than 300 students from 17 University teams across the United States were each given a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox to modify and refurbish with their technology, with an emphasis on functionality and consciousness of the well-to-wheel process their fuel of choice takes on its way to the pump.

The competition also helps seed the automotive industry with engineers who are committed to advancing vehicle technology to address the energy and transportation challenges of the 21st Century. Competing powertrain technologies ranged from reformulated gasoline to an ethanol/hydrogen mix and storage covered approaches from Lithium batteries to hydraulic accumulators.

Since the competition began in 2004, Hundreds of Challenge X graduates have found jobs with automakers and automotive suppliers. The teams and their vehicles were on Display at Tavern on the Green in Central Park as part of the first leg in their 350- mile tour from New York City to Washington D.C. to show off the utility and roadworthiness of their advanced vehicle powertrain designs.

For more information visit the Challenge X website at www.challengex.org.

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Thursday, May 14, 2008

Ethernet Alliance University Program (EAUP) Announces White Paper Challenge Winner

We commend Francisco on his achievement. Reducing power usage in systems is such an important issue, and the network backbone is a power-hungry beast that we must continue to tame. His white paper on power reduction in Ethernet switches is a fine addition to the body of engineering knowledge.

The EAUP is pleased to announce Francisco Blanquicet, graduate student from the University of Southern Florida (USF), as the winner of the first White Paper Challenge Program. Francisco and Dr. Ken Christensen (USF graduate advisor), were flown to Las Vegas to present his white paper, PAUSE Power Cycle: A New Backwards Compatible Method to Reduce Energy Use of Ethernet Switches, at Interop 2008.

The EAUP also hosted a party at Interop 2008 in Francisco's honor, where he was awarded a prize of $3,000 from the EAUP. The EAUP also presented a check for $3,000 to Dr. Ken Christensen, to be given to the University of South Florida Foundation.

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Thursday, May 9, 2008

New wi-fi devices warn doctors of heart attacks

The ability to constantly monitor a person medically during their everyday activities will free a great many people. Remote 24/7 heart monitoring will benefit those with marginal health conditions who still wish to live a life outside of a health maintenance facility. This device heralds full-body telemetry using a myriad of devices implanted throughout the body. There are ramifications in the area of privacy that would need to be addressed, though. (Shameless plug – my science-fiction novel deals with computing MEMS devices in the brain.)

The Bluetooth wireless technology that allows people to use a hands-free earpiece while making a mobile telephone call could soon alert the emergency services when someone has a heart attack, Ofcom predicts.

The communications regulator said that sensors could be implanted into people at risk of heart attack or diabetic collapse that would allow doctors to monitor them remotely.

If the "in-body network" recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

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Thursday, May 1, 2008


Image courtesy UC Santa Cruz "Memory Resistor" Circuit Proven to Exist

Theorized in the 1970s by Leon Chua of UC Berkeley, a memory resistor (or memristor) is a fourth type of basic passive circuit. This demonstration by Stanley Williams and his team proving that such a circuit could actually exist in reality is a major leap in our understanding of electronics.

It took about 40 years to find it, but scientists at Hewlett-Packard said on Wednesday they discovered a fourth basic type of electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot up. The finding proves what until now had only been theory -- but could save millions from the tedium of waiting for a computer to find its "place," the researchers said.

Williams likens the property to water flowing through a garden hose. In a regular circuit, the water flows from more than one direction. But in a memory resistor, the hose remembers what direction the water (or current) is flowing from, and it expands in that direction to improve the flow. If water or current flows from the other direction, the hose shrinks.

"It remembers both the direction and the amount of charge that flows through it. ... That is the memory," Williams said.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

Images from the 2008 Embedded Systems Conference

This year's Embedded Systems Conference was a good one, with a lot of great technology and devices on the cutting edge of computing, processor, and software technology. There was some engineer eye candy, like Kontron's walking mechanical giraffe that they used to highlight their computing technology. There is an slideshow available on the event site, but we thought you might like some of these pictures we took at the event.

Floor traffic was relatively light at times, but most exhibitors said they had a number of quality leads. Our interpretation is that the traffic reduction was due to the absence of the makers of peripheral technologies that usually exhibit when the market is doing well. The SBC and processor people were well represented, but there weren't as many intelligent sensor, imaging or other intelligent subsystem OEMs as in the past.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Building a multi-ton mechanical calculator... from 19th-century plans

Sometimes you just have to scratch the builder’s itch. While this device may not be at the cutting edge, it does remind us of our technological history and provide us with both information and entertainment.

Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see for themselves how they did computing the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank and some muscle. The Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., will unveil a new construction, the first in the United States, of the 19th century British mathematician Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier mechanical digital calculator.

Babbage finalized the design in the late 1840’s but it was not built during his lifetime, or for a long time afterward. Finally, in the late 1980’s, London’s Science Museum launched the first and until now only full-blown construction project, based on Babbage’s original detailed drawings, and in 1991 unveiled the completed calculator, 11 feet long, 7 feet high, with 8,000 parts in bronze, cast iron and steel, weighing about 3 tons.

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Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Building-Block Storage Technology Promises Improved Reliability and Performance

Storage is a problematic issue for everyone, no matter the level of computer system involved. Scalability, reliability, and performance are always at the mercy of the drive media and how it is configured. Intelligent Storage Element technology promises to significantly reduce storage issues by integrating power, control, and cooling into each media module so they can be configured as building blocks scalable from a terabyte to a petabyte of storage.

Xiotech will be unveiling the fruits of five years' labor by Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture Group, acquired by the Eden Prairie, MN-based storage vendor last year. The technology is called ISE, for Intelligent Storage Element. From where I'm sitting, it is potentially the most disruptive introduction in the storage world since the hard disk.

ISE is, for lack of a non-trademarked metaphor, a Lego building block for storage. Think of it as a compact brick of disk drives arranged into two sets, called datapacs. The brick comprises either ten 3.5-inch drives or 20 2.5-inch drives of any type, which are configured in a grid that leverages 75 hardware and software patents, including a high-performance RAID algorithm combined with disc firmware changes for data protection.

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Friday, April 4, 2008

Using molecules as processable semiconductors

The world of microprocessors is a place of fine circuits at insane scales. As we reach the limits of what we can do with silicon and related materials in circuit creation, we look to natural materials for solutions (no pun intended). The low processing temperatures, self-assembling proclivity, and low environmental impact of organic semiconductors can be harnessed to create molecular circuitry. If we follow this approach our products will become more sophisticated while also being more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Contrary to amorphous silicon, which is widely used in solar cells and flat screen displays, organic materials offer the benefits that they can be deposited on plastic substrates at low temperature by employing solution-based printing techniques, which would result in a dramatic reduction of the manufacturing costs. Another benefit is the reduced environmental impact: Organic transistors and other printed electronics allow transistors to be formed by printing directly onto the substrate. This means that manufacturing processes can be dramatically simplified in comparison to conventional semiconductors; waste materials and carbon dioxide emissions generated through manufacturing processes can be reduced.

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) have been mainly based on two types of semiconductors: conjugated polymers and small conjugated molecules. A recent review, published in Chemical Society Reviews, provides a general introduction about the current standing in the area of OFETs focusing on the new processable small molecules that have been recently reported for their use as organic semiconductors ("Novel small molecules for organic field-effect transistors: towards processability and high performance" http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1039/b614393h – free access article).

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Engineers make first 'active matrix' display using nanowires

The dirty little secret about alternative display technologies is that no matter how innovative, flexible, colorful, exotic, or inexpensive a display technology is, it still needs an active backplane in order to deliver a quality image. Each pixel needs to be driven independently (an "active"display) in order for the image to have a satisfactory level of performance. Using nanowire transistor technology to create an inexpensive flexible active-backplane can enable the commercialization of a great number of technologies, not all display related.

Purdue postdoctoral research associate Sanghyun Ju, sitting, and professor David B. Janes work at a "micro-manipulation probe station" in research using nanotechnology to create transparent transistors and circuits. The transistors are made of "nanowires," tiny cylindrical structures that are assembled on glass or thin films of flexible plastic. The researchers used nanowires as small as 20 nanometers - a thousand times thinner than a human hair - to create a display containing organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDS..

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Monday, March 28, 2008

Milestone in sound heard 148 years later

I always believed that the first analog data recording device (the printed word is a language code) was the phonograph, and I always thought I knew my tech history. I doubt I was the only one surprised by the existence of the phonautograph, a device created by Parisian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville 17 years before Edison’s breakthrough. Edison’s device was superior in that it could also play back the sounds it recorded, but homage must also be given to that earlier analog data capture technology (this technique would have worked equally well with pressure transducer data, for example).

THOMAS Edison's 1877 phonograph established him as the father of recorded sound, but American researchers have now played back a French inventor's recording made 17 years earlier.

Parisian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded the traditional song Au Clair de la Lune in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph, an invention that converted sound waves into etchings on a sheet of paper, but could not play them back.

But using technology to create a virtual stylus that could read Scott's paper recordings, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California were able to play back the 10-second recording of a woman singing the French folk song, effectively crediting Scott with the first-ever recording of a human voice.

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Pea-sized high-intensity plasma bulb challenges industry

Ever since Tesla’s and Edison’s rivalry at the turn of the previous century, scientists and engineers have tried to create a better light bulb and topple incandescent technology from its perch as the dominant illumination technology. Solid-state technology promises to deliver inexpensive, efficient, and high-quality light eventually but the commercialization of the technology has been hampered by its high development costs. This new approach from Luxim (a video of the tech in action can be found HERE) using charged plasma may yet leapfrog LEDs and other electroluminescents to become the dominant illumination tech for architectural lighting..

LUXIM Corp. is pleased to announce the introduction of its new LIFI™ Entertainment solid state high intensity light source product line. The new module outputs up to 12,000 lumens from a small emitter in a forward intensity pattern with a color rendering index (CRI) of 91 and a 20,000 hour lifetime.

In applications like moving heads, scanners and follow spots, LIFI™ Entertainment light sources enable 50% higher fixture efficiency than conventional lamps. As a result, designers of entertainment lighting can increase beam intensity and reduce optical system size. In addition, LIFI™ Entertainment systems last seven times longer than those using conventional HID lamps and are safe to use in any application since they do not experience explosions or broken glass.

More info URL:
www.luxim.com

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Wednesday, March 20, 2008

EU backs Nokia standard for mobile TV

Standards can help an industry by establishing a common operating framework for inter-relating technologies and devices. However, it is very important to ensure that the proposed standards address all the issues of the affected application areas.

The European Commission moved to simplify the nascent mobile phone TV sector by adopting a standard backed by Finland's Nokia, but mobile operators said Brussels was acting too quickly.

The Commission said setting the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) as the preferred European Union standard would give the industry a boost.

"For mobile TV to take off in Europe, there must first be certainty about the technology," European Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement on Monday.

DVB-H is the only standard with a global presence although South Korea, Japan, the United States and China are embracing local rivals, such as one set by U.S. company Qualcomm.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Single-Crystal Semiconductor Wire Built into an Optical Fiber

As optical fibers become more and more ubiquitous in electronics, increasing their functionality without losing their size advantage is a daunting task. Advances like this one promise to create "intelligent" active optical fibers for sensing and communications applications.

An international science team from Penn State University in the United States and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom has developed a process for growing a single-crystal semiconductor inside the tunnel of a hollow optical fiber. The device adds new electronic capabilities to optical fibers, whose performance in electronic devices such as computers typically is degraded by the interface between the fiber and the device. The research is important because optical fibers -- which are used in a wide range of technologies that employ light, including telecommunications, medicine, computing, and remote-sensing devices -- are ideal media for transmitting many types of signals.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Cult of the Volt

This blog’s eponymous inspiration was one of the most influential inventors in the fields of energy generation and transmission while doing the same for radio. We still use the three-cycle power methodology Tesla developed, and he has finally been recognized as the legitimate father of modern radio. (Nikola Tesla was one of the first to patent a means to reliably produce radio frequency currents. Tesla's U.S. Patent 447,920 , "Method of Operating Arc-Lamps" was filed on March 10, 1891.) Repressed by his competitors back in the day, he is finally getting some of the recognition he truly deserves.

There's a scene in the film "Coffee and Cigarettes" where Jack and Meg White, of the band the White Stripes, are discussing the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. The two hipsters are slouched at a table in a café, staring moodily at Jack's homemade Tesla coil, a high-voltage transformer that looks like something from a 1950s sci-fi movie. Talking about the inventor, the usually taciturn Jack becomes animated with enthusiasm for his unsung hero's accomplishments. Without Tesla, White explains, our world would look and sound radically different: we'd have no radio, no television, no AC electricity, no induction motors, no X-ray technology, no fluorescent lights. Meg nods in agreement, and then adds, "Or the band Tesla."

Such is the tragicomic legacy of a scientist who was a celebrity in his time but is today overshadowed by his rivals Guglielmo Marconi (often credited with inventing the wireless radio) or Thomas Edison (DC electricity), while being most often linked to an '80s hair band. Yet to a growing group of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, Tesla has become an inspiration.

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Friday, March 14, 2008

GE Demonstrates World's First "Roll-to-Roll" Manufactured Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs)

Ever since OLEDs burst out of the labs to tantalize the display industry at the turn of the century, the potential to create a large-scale rool-to-roll manufacturing process for flexible OLED displays has been a highly-desired goal. If this process can be made commercially viable it will generate an entirely new category of flexible and potentially conformable displays.

GE Global Research, the centralized research organization of General Electric (NYSE: GE), and GE Consumer & Industrial, today announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices. This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today.

OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. They represent the next evolution in lighting products. Their widespread design capabilities will provide an entirely different way for people to light their homes or businesses.Moreover, OLEDs have the potential to deliver dramatically improved levels of efficiency and environmental performance, while achieving the same quality of illumination found in traditional products in the marketplace today with less electrical power.

"Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process," said Anil Duggal, manager of GE's Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. "Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices."

Duggal continued, "Beyond OLEDs, this technology also could have broader impact in the manufacturing of other organic electronic devices such as organic photovoltaics for solar energy conversion, sensors and roll-up displays."

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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Counterfeit electronics can cause more than performance issues

According to security experts, not only can counterfeit parts cause problems in system reliability and performance, they can also provide a back door to the unscrupulous. This gives us yet another reason to validate our components and sources.

Software vulnerabilities and online scams receive plenty of public attention. Viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, phishing schemes that trick people into providing financial data—all have made headlines in recent years. The emerging hardware threat is different. Imagine buying a computer, printer, monitor, router or other device in which malevolent instructions, or at least security loopholes, are etched permanently into the silicon. MORE...

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Student Develops First Polarized LED

The need for polarized light in many display and illumination applications has always been satisfied by using filters that significantly reduce the optical output of the system involved. This breakthrough by an RPI student promises to create better LCD backlights and other polarized illumination products by providing light with a much higher efficiency than existing means.

Martin Schubert, a doctoral student in electrical, computer, and systems engineering, has developed the first polarized LED, an innovation that could vastly improve LCD screens, conserve energy, and usher in the next generation of ultra-efficient LEDs. Schubert’s innovation has earned him the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize.

Schubert’s polarized LED advances current LED technology in its ability to better control the direction and polarization of the light being emitted. With better control over the light, less energy is wasted producing scattered light, allowing more light to reach its desired location. This makes the polarized LED perfectly suited as a backlighting unit for any kind of LCD, according to Schubert. Its focused light will produce images on the display that are more colorful, vibrant, and lifelike, with no motion artifacts. MORE...

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Monday, March 3, 2008



New Hampshire Startup Makes World's Largest Sheets of Carbon Nanotubes
By Neil Savage

Ever since scientists first figured out how to make carbon nanotubes—tiny cylinders of carbon with diameters of a few tens of nanometers—they've been touted as the material of the future: as strong as steel but far lighter, with the ability to conduct electricity in useful ways. The problem is that because they're so small, it's been difficult to make them at scales that would be useful to industry. You can't really build a lightweight airplane a few microns at a time, after all.

Now a New Hampshire company, Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, says it has overcome that limitation, producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure three feet by six feet and promising slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer.

"From the get-go, we wanted to build something that would be manufacturable," says Peter Antoinette, CEO and co-founder of Nanocomp. "We're out to make value-added components out of that material." MORE...

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Monday, March 3, 2008

MIT Fights for Clean Power With Holy Grail of Fusion in Reach

MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) is about as Hollywood-worthy as science gets. The stakes, after all, could hardly be higher. If fusion can be perfected, it could mean a golden age for power production, with systems providing all of the benefits of nuclear reactors—but none of the drawbacks. Fusion is, to some extent, the exact opposite of fission: Instead of splitting atoms, fusion combines them, creating larger atoms and releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. MORE...