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Graphene May Give Processors A Boost
Researchers at MIT have figured out that graphene, sheets of atom-thick carbon, could be used to make chips a million times faster.
The researchers have worked out that slowing the speed of light to the extent that it moves slower than flowing electrons can create an “optical boom”, the optical equivalent of a sonic boom.
Slowing the speed of light is no mean feat, but the clever folks at MIT managed it by using the honeycomb shape of carbon to slow photons to slow photons to several hundredths of their normal speed in a free space, explained researcher Ido Kaminer.
Meanwhile, the characteristics of graphene speed up electrons to a million metres a second, or around 1/300 of the speed of light in a vacuum.
The optical boom is caused when the electrons passing though the graphene reach the speed of light, effectively breaking its barrier in the carbon honeycomb and causing a shockwave of light.
As electrons move faster than the trapped light, they bleed plasmons, a form of virtual particle that represents the oscillation of electrons on the graphene’s surface.
Effectively, it is the equivalent of turning electricity into light. This is nothing new – Thomas Edison did it a century ago with fluorescent tubes – but it can efficiently and controllably generate plasmons at a scale that works with microchip technology.
The discovery could allow chip components to be made from graphene to enable the creation of light-based circuits. These circuits could be the next step in the evolution of chip and computing technology, as the transfer of data through light is far faster than using electrons in today’s chips, even the fast pixel-pushing ones.
So much faster that it’s “six orders of magnitude higher than what is used in electronics”, according to Kaminer. That’s up to a million times faster in plain English.
“There’s a lot of excitement about graphene because it could be easily integrated with other electronics,” said physics professor Marin Soljačić, a researcher on the project, who is confident that MIT can turn this theoretical experiment into a working system. “I have confidence that it should be doable within one to two years.”
This is a pretty big concept and almost sci-fi stuff, but we’re always keen to see smaller and faster chips. It also shows that the future tech envisioned by the world of sci-fi may not be that far away.
Courtesy-TheInq
Intel Looking Into Atomic Energy
May 25, 2016 by admin
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Shortly after cancelling two generations of Atom mobile chips, Intel putting its weight behind future low-power mobile technologies with a new research collaboration with a French atomic energy lab.
Fundamental research leading towards faster wireless networks, secure low-power technologies for the Internet of Things, and even 3D displays will be the focus of Intel’s collaboration with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).
Intel and the CEA already work together in the field of high-performance computing, and a new agreement signed Thursday will see Intel fund work at the CEA’s Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology (LETI) over the next five years, according to Rajeeb Hazra, vice president of Intel’s data center group.
The CEA was founded in 1945 to develop civil and military uses of nuclear power. Its work with Intel began soon after it ceased its atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons test programs, as it turned to computer modeling to continue its weapons research, CEA managing director Daniel Verwaerde said Thursday.
That effort continues, but the organization’s research interests today are more wide-ranging, encompassing materials science, climate, health, renewable energy, security and electronics.
These last two areas will be at the heart of the new research collaboration, which will see scientists at LETI exchanging information with those at Intel.
Both parties dodged questions about who will have the commercial rights to the fruits of their research, but each said it had protected its rights. The deal took a year to negotiate.
“It’s a balanced agreement,” said Stéphane Siebert, director of CEA Technology, the division of which LETI is a part.
Who owns what from the five-year research collaboration may become a thorny issue, for French taxpayers and Intel shareholders alike, as it will be many years before it becomes clear which technologies or patents are important.
Hazra emphasized the extent to which Intel is dependent on researchers outside the U.S. The company has over 50 laboratories in Europe, four of them specifically pursuing so-called exa-scale computing, systems capable of billions of billions of calculations per second.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/intel-look-to-atomic-energy-for-mobile-technologys-future.html
Will Apple Go All-In On Car Batteries?
March 6, 2015 by admin
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A year and a half ago, Apple Inc applied for eight patents related to car batteries. Recently, it has added a slew of engineers, just one of whom had already filed for 17 in his former career, according to a Thomson Reuters.
The recent spate of hires and patent filings shows that Apple is fast building its industrial lithium-ion battery capabilities, adding to evidence the iPhone maker may be developing a car.
Quiet, clean electric cars are viewed in Silicon Valley and elsewhere as a promising technology for the future, but high costs and “range anxiety”, the concern that batteries will run out of power and cannot be recharged quickly, remain obstacles. Those challenges could also be seen as opportunities to find solutions to take the technology mainstream.
The number of auto-related patents filed by Apple, Google Inc, Korea’s Samsung, electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc and ride-sharing startup Uber tripled from 2011 to 2014, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters IP & Science of public patent filings.
Apple has filed far fewer of these patents than rivals, perhaps adding impetus to its recent hiring binge as it seeks to get up to speed in battery technologies and other car-building related expertise.
As of 18 months ago, Apple had filed for 290 such patents. By contrast, Samsung, which has been providing electric vehicle batteries for some years, had close to 900 filings involving auto battery technology alone.
The U.S. government makes patent applications public only after 18 months, so the figures do not reflect any patents filed in 2014.
Earlier this month, battery maker A123 Systems sued Apple for poaching five top engineers. A search of LinkedIn profiles indicates Apple has hired at least another seven A123 employees and at least 18 employees from Tesla since 2012.
The former A123 employees have expertise primarily in battery cell design, materials development and manufacturing engineering, according to the LinkedIn profiles and an analysis of patent applications.
A123, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012 but has since reorganized, supplied batteries for Fisker Automotive’s now-discontinued hybrid electric car.
“Looking at the people Apple is hiring from A123 and their backgrounds, it is hard not to assume they’re working on an electric car,” said Tom Gage, Chief Executive of EV Grid and a longtime expert in batteries and battery technology.
Apple is building its own battery division, according to the A123 lawsuit. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Can Plastic Replace Silicon?
Can plastic materials morph into computers? A research breakthrough recently published brings such a possibility closer to reality.
Researchers are looking at the possibility of making low-power, flexible and inexpensive computers out of plastic materials. Plastic is not normally a good conductive material. However, researchers said this week that they have solved a problem related to reading data.
The research, which involved converting electricity from magnetic film to optics so data could be read through plastic material, was conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa and New York University. A paper on the research was published in this week’s Nature Communications journal.
More research is needed before plastic computers become practical, acknowledged Michael Flatte, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa. Problems related to writing and processing data need to be solved before plastic computers can be commercially viable.
Plastic computers, however, could conceivably be used in smartphones, sensors, wearable products, small electronics or solar cells, Flatte said.
The computers would have basic processing, data gathering and transmission capabilities but won’t replace silicon used in the fastest computers today. However, the plastic material could be cheaper to produce as it wouldn’t require silicon fab plants, and possibly could supplement faster silicon components in mobile devices or sensors.
“The initial types of inexpensive computers envisioned are things like RFID, but with much more computing power and information storage, or distributed sensors,” Flatte said. One such implementation might be a large agricultural field with independent temperature sensors made from these devices, distributed at hundreds of places around the field, he said.
The research breakthrough this week is an important step in giving plastic computers the sensor-like ability to store data, locally process the information and report data back to a central computer.
Mobile phones, which demand more computing power than sensors, will require more advances because communication requires microwave emissions usually produced by higher-speed transistors than have been made with plastic.
It’s difficult for plastic to compete in the electronics area because silicon is such an effective technology, Flatte acknowledged. But there are applications where the flexibility of plastic could be advantageous, he said, raising the possibility of plastic computers being information processors in refrigerators or other common home electronics.
“This won’t be faster or smaller, but it will be cheaper and lower power, we hope,” Flatte said.
Will Computer Obtain Common Sense?
Even though it may appear PCs are getting dumbed down as we see constant images of cats playing the piano or dogs playing in the snow, one computer is doing the same and getting smarter and smarter.
A computer cluster running the so-called the Never Ending Image Learner at Carnegie Mellon University runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week searching the Internet for images, studying them on its own and building a visual database. The process, scientists say, is giving the computer an increasing amount of common sense.
“Images are the best way to learn visual properties,” said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with [this program], we hope that computers will do so as well.”
The computers have been running the program since late July, analyzing some three million images. The system has identified 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images, according to the university.
The program has connected the dots to learn 2,500 associations from thousands of instances.
Thanks to advances in computer vision that enable software to identify and label objects found in images and recognize colors, materials and positioning, the Carnegie Mellon cluster is better understanding the visual world with each image it analyzes.
The program also is set up to enable a computer to make common sense associations, like buildings are vertical instead of lying on their sides, people eat food, and cars are found on roads. All the things that people take for granted, the computers now are learning without being told.
“People don’t always know how or what to teach computers,” said Abhinav Shrivastava, a robotics Ph.D. student at CMU and a lead researcher on the program. “But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong.”
He noted, for instance, that a human might need to tell the computer that pink isn’t just the name of a singer but also is the name of a color.
While previous computer scientists have tried to “teach” computers about different real-world associations, compiling structured data for them, the job has always been far too vast to tackle successfully. CMU noted that Facebook alone has more than 200 billion images.
The only way for computers to scan enough images to understand the visual world is to let them do it on their own.
“What we have learned in the last five to 10 years of computer vision research is that the more data you have, the better computer vision becomes,” Gupta said.
CMU’s computer learning program is supported by Google and the Office of Naval Research.
IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.
Will Microsoft Sell The Surface RT For $199?
August 23, 2012 by admin
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Microsoft’s Surface for Windows RT tablet will sell for $199 when it ships on Oct. 26, according to an unidentified source in an Engadget story.
At that price, Microsoft would surely be selling below its costs, analysts said. However, Microsoft could take the loss in hopes of making up revenues on apps and media sales for the device.
Also, Microsoft would be trying to make an impact against the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire sold at the same $199 price, since Microsoft arrived arrived late to the tablet game.
Engadget said it learned the price from an inside source at Microsoft’s recent Tech Ready15 conference, where launch details for Surface were announced.
Microsoft said the Surface tablet would be priced in-line with Windows RT tablets from other makers such as Asus, which hasn’t announced a price. However, given the components in the Surface and other Windows RT tablets, analysts have suggested it could cost more than $600.
Google Tweaks It’s Search Engine
May 24, 2012 by admin
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Google is changing the way it handles searches in the United States to give users quick access to answers without leaving the page, the company said.
The new search process is based on what Google calls the “knowledge graph” — meaning that it tries to pinpoint faster the context surrounding its users’ keyword searches.
“Over the years, as search has improved, people expect more,” said Amit Singhal, vice president of engineering at Google and the head of search, in an interview. “We see this as the next big improvement in search relevance.”
The redesign, which for now affects only U.S.-based English language users, is gradually being rolled starting Wednesday on desktop, mobile and tablet platforms. Google plans to eventually expand the new search features outside the U.S., Singhal said, without specifying when.
Many of the results will carry more graphical elements, compared to standard lists of search results, such as maps and pictures of related results, often in separate pop-ups. The idea is to let users easily discover what related material interests them and click through to it, Singhal said.
DRAM Prices Going Up
iSuppli is reporting that global chip revenue should increase to $325.2 due to supply and demand. Two months ago iSuppli originally forecasted a 5.8 percent increase to $320.1 billion. Apparently, DRAM chips will be impacted the most with a price increase due to supply issues as a result of the recent earthquake in Japan. iSuppli had originally forecasted sales of DRAM chips to shrink by four percent this year instead of seeing a drop of 10.6 percent.