Solar powered microchips put batteries in the shade

In a new, more efficient approach to solar powered microelectronics, researchers have produced a microchip which directly integrates photovoltaic cells. While harnessing sunlight to power microelectronics isn't new, conventional set-ups use a separate solar cell and battery. What sets this device apart from is that high-efficiency solar cells are placed straight onto the electronics, producing self-sufficient, low-power devices which are highly suitable for industrial serial production and can even operate indoors.
The autonomous microsystem was developed by the Semiconductor Components group at the University of Twente's MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology led by Professor Jurriaan Schmitz. The researchers collaborated with colleagues from Nankai University in Tianjin, China and the Debye Institute of Utrecht University. The research was made possible by the STW Technology Foundation.
Instead of manufacturing the solar cell separately, the design sees the chip used as a base and the solar cell applied to it layer by layer. According to the UT release, this results in a more efficient production process, uses fewer materials and ultimately performs better.
The production process has not been trouble-free with the researchers finding that the fragile electronics can easily be damaged. For this reason it was decided to use amorphous silicon or CIGS (copper - indium - gallium – selenide) solar cells. The manufacturing of these cells does not influence the electronics, and these types of solar cells also produce sufficient power to allow the microprocessors to operate in low-light or indoors. There is a catch though – the chip's energy use must be well below 1 milliwatt.
Tests have shown that the electronics and the solar cells function properly, and the manufacturing process is also highly suitable for industrial serial production with the use of standard processes.
The paper Above-CMOS a-Si and CIGS Solar Cells for Powering Autonomous Microsystems by J. Lu, W. Liu, C.H.M. van der Werf, A.Y. Kovalgin, Y. Sun, R.E.I. Schropp and J. Schmitz was presented at the International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco in December.

Samsung to unveil next-gen flexible and transparent AMOLED displays at CES 2011

There’s bound to be all manner of display technologies vying for eyeballs at CES 2011 when it kicks off in Las Vegas next week and two prototype AMOLED displays from Samsung Mobile Display (SMD) will definitely be high on our list of things to check out. The first is a 4.5-inch 800 x 480 (WVGA) resolution flexible AMOLED display concept prototype for mobile devices, while the second is the world’s largest transparent AMOLED display prototype for use in PC monitors and TVs.

Flexible AMOLED display prototype

SMD’s 4.5-inch flexible AMOLED display is two millimeters (0.08-in) thick and can be rolled down to a radius of one centimeter (0.39-in). The concept prototype’s 800 x 480 resolution, which Samsung claims is four times that of the previous most flexible AMOLED prototype constructed, comes courtesy of a new plastic substrate that can withstand the 450-500 degree Celsius temperatures required in the manufacturing process.
As this overcomes the problem of previous plastic materials melting during the manufacturing process that made commercialization of such devices difficult, Samsung says the concept display on show marks a major step on the road to mass production for the next-gen display, which is aimed at smartphones and tablet PCs.

Transparent AMOLED display prototype

The second prototype display to be unveiled is aimed at larger screen applications such as TVs and PC monitors. The 19-inch transparent AMOLED display prototype sports a qFHD (quad Full High Definition) resolution. This is a non-standard resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels arranged in a 16:9 aspect ratio that gets its name from being four times the resolution of 1080p.
The prototype display is the world’s first large transparent AMOLED display prototype and, while the average amount of transparency previously achieved has been below 10 percent, SMD’s display maintains up to 30 percent transparency whether it is turned on or off. Samsung says this will allow the technology to be used for surfing the internet while watching TV or even watching TV on windows – and by that it means the glass kind, including car windows, not the operating system.
As well as the 19-inch prototype, SMD will also be exhibiting a 14-inch qFHD transparent AMOLED display designed for notebooks.

IBM researchers bring Racetrack memory another step closer to reality

Racetrack memory is an experimental form of memory that looks to combine the best attributes of magnetic hard disk drives (low cost) and solid state memory (speed) to enable devices to store much more information, while using much less energy than current memory technologies. Researchers at IBM have been working on the development of Racetrack memory for six years and have now announced the discovery of a previously unknown aspect of key physics inside the new technology that brings it another step closer to becoming a reality.
Instead of making computers seek out the stored data it needs, as is the case with traditional computing systems, Racetrack memory automatically moves data to where it can be used by sliding magnetic bits back and forth along nanowire “racetracks.” The researchers say that, because the data is stored as magnetic patterns – also known as domains – in racetracks just a few tens of nanometers wide, the technology would allow for portable devices to be created that could store all the movies produced within a given year with room to spare.
IBM has already proven that domains can act as nano-sized data keepers that can store at least 100 times more information than today’s techniques and can also be accessed at much greater speeds. The domain walls are moved at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour and stopped precisely at the position needed by controlling electrical impulses in the device, thereby allowing massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second.
Now, for the first time, the researchers have been able to measure the time and distance of domain wall acceleration and deceleration in response to electric current pulses, which allows the precise control of the placement of the domains.
“We discovered that domain walls don't hit peak acceleration as soon as the current is turned on, and that it takes them exactly the same time and distance to hit peak acceleration as it does to decelerate and eventually come to a stop,” said Dr. Stuart Parkin, an IBM Fellow at IBM Research – Almaden.
“This was previously undiscovered in part because it was not clear whether the domain walls actually had mass, and how the effects of acceleration and deceleration could exactly compensate one another. Now we know domain walls can be positioned precisely along the racetracks simply by varying the length of the current pulses even though the walls have mass,” Parkin added.
This surprised the scientists because previous experiments had shown no evidence for acceleration and deceleration for domain walls driven along smooth racetracks with current.
The scientists say that, aside from giving them an unprecedented understanding and control over the magnetic movements inside these devices, the discovery also brings Racetrack memory closer to marketplace viability. It is also likely to be of interest to other researchers working on the technolog

IBM's annual list of five innovations set to change our lives in the next five years

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.

3D telepresence

It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at IBM point to recent advances in 3D cameras and movies, predicting that holography chat (aka 3D telepresence) can’t be all that far behind. Already, the University of Arizona has unveiled a system that can transmit holographic images in near-real-time.
It is also predicted that 3D visualization could be applied to data, allowing researchers to “step inside” software programs (wasn’t that just in a movie?), computer models, or pretty much anything else that is limited by a simple 2D screen. IBM compares it to the way in which the Earth appears undistorted when we experience it first-hand in three dimensions, yet it appears pinched at the top and bottom when we see it on a two-dimensional world map.

Air-powered or non-existent batteries

Lithium-air batteries are already in the works, and IBM predicts that batteries “that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal” will result in smaller, lighter rechargeable batteries that last ten times longer than today’s lithium-ion variety. While such batteries could be used in everything from cars to home appliances, it is also suggested that small items such as mobile phones might not need batteries at all. IBM is trying to reduce the amount power required for such devices to less than 0.5 volts per transistor. At those rates, it is claimed, they could be powered via “energy scavenging” – like already-existing kinetic wrist watches that get their power from the user’s arm movements, or experimental piezoelectric devices.

Personal sensors creating “citizen scientists”

As it currently stands, most scientific data must be gathered by scientists, who have to go out in the field and set up sensors or other data recording devices. Within five years, however, a lot of that data could be gathered and transmitted by sensors in our phones, cars, wallets, computers, or just about anything else that is subjected to the real world. Such sensors could be used to create massive data sets used for everything from fighting global warming to tracking invasive species. IBM also sees custom scientific smartphone apps playing a part in “citizen science,” and has already launched an app called Creek Watch, that allows us regular folks to update the local water authority on creek conditions.

Customized commutes

Invaluable as Mapquest and other online mapping services have become to many of us, apparently it’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the not-so-distant future, says IBM, sensors and other data sources (such as the aforementioned citizen scientists, perhaps?) will provide a continuous stream of information on traffic conditions, road construction, public transit schedules, and other factors that could affect your commute. When you inquire about the quickest way of getting from A to B, computer systems will do more than simply consulting a map – they will also take into account all the variables unique to that day and time, combine them with mathematical models and predictive analytics technologies, and advise a route accordingly. It is also possible that, utilizing such data, traffic management systems could learn traffic patterns, and self-adjust themselves to minimize congestion.

Harvesting computer heat

It is estimated that half of the energy consumed by data centers goes toward cooling computer processors, with most of the removed hot air simply being blown into the atmosphere. Instead, IBM sees that heat being captured to warm the air in other areas of the building, to heat water, or to be converted into electricity. The company has already developed an on-chip water-cooling system for computer clusters, which is being demonstrated on the Swiss Aquasar supercomputer. It utilizes a network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink, attached to the surface of each chip. Water flows within a few microns of the semiconductor material, picks up heat from it, then pipes the warm water to a heat exchanger – from there, the cooled water returns to the computers, within a closed loop system.
As with last year’s list, given that all of these technologies are already in experimental use, it’s a pretty good bet that they will indeed one day find their way our lives. Whether that day is within the next five years, however, is another question.

Scientists successfully manipulate qubits with electrical fields

Until now, the common practice for manipulating the electron spin of quantum bits, or qubits, – the building blocks of future super-fast quantum computers – has been through the use of magnetic fields. Unfortunately, these magnetic fields are extremely difficult to generate on a chip, but now Dutch scientists have found a way to manipulate qubits with electrical rather than magnetic fields. The development marks yet another an important development in the quest for future quantum computers, which would far outstrip current computers in terms of speed.
Just like a normal computer bit, a qubit can adopt the states ‘0’ and ‘1’. One way to make a qubit is to trap a single electron in semiconductor material. It’s state can be set by using the spin of an electron, which is generated by spinning the electron on its axis. As it can spin in two directions, one direction represents the ‘0’ state, while the opposite direction represents the ‘1’ state.
Until now, the spin of an electron has been controlled by magnetic fields but the scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology have now succeeded in controlling the electron spin in a qubit with a charge or an electric field.
According to Leo Kouwenhoven, scientist at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft this form of control has major advantages. "These spin-orbit qubits combine the best of both worlds. They employ the advantages of both electronic control and information storage in the electron spin," he said.
In another important quantum computing development, the scientists have also been able to embed these qubits into semiconductor nanowires. The scientists were able to embed two qubits in nanowires measuring just nanometers in diameter and micrometers in length made of indium arsenide.
"These nanowires are being increasingly used as convenient building blocks in nanoelectronics. Nanowires are an excellent platform for quantum information processing, among other applications," said Kouwenhoven.
The scientists’ findings appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Students design electronic device that indicates safe drinking water

The worldwide shortage of clean drinking water is a serious problem, although in many cases there’s a relatively simple solution – just leave the tainted water outside in clear plastic bottles, and let the sun’s heat and ultraviolet rays purify it. This approach is known as SODIS (SOlar DISinfection of water in plastic bottles), and it removes 99.9 percent of bacteria and viruses – results similar to those obtained by chlorine. Unfortunately, however, there’s been no reliable way of knowing when the water has reached a safe level of purity. Now, four engineering students from the University of Washington have created a simple, inexpensive device that does just that... and they won US$40,000 in the process.
The UW students took part in a contest promoted by InnoCentive Inc., a company that hosts a website where organizations post technical challenges, and anyone can send in their solutions for a chance to win cash prizes. In this case, the nonprofit GlobalGiving Foundation had asked other nonprofits around the world to submit their water-related challenges, from which it chose five to post on InnoCentive – the Rockerfeller Foundation supplied the prize money. The challenge the students took up had been submitted by the Bolivia-based Fundación SODIS, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of SODIS in Latin America.
The students, Chin Jung Cheng, Charlie Matlack, Penny Huang and Jacqueline Linnes, developed a simple device using parts from a keychain that blinks when exposed to light. When attached to a water bottle, it monitors how much light is passing through the water. An indicator light blinks on and off as long as particulates are still obstructing the light flow, and stops blinking once the water is safe to drink. It is also able to tell when a bottle of water is present in front of it, so it’s not trying to measure data when nothing’s there.

It is estimated that parts for each device would cost about US$3.40, although bulk buying should push that figure even lower. Matlack described it as containing “all the same components that you'd find inside a dirt-cheap solar calculator, except programmed differently.”
Fundación SODIS now holds a non-exclusive license to develop the technology, although a donor from the foundation has offered Matlack US$16,000 to do so himself. Along with Linnes and another student, he is now setting up a nonprofit business called PotaVida to produce and promote the water bottle indicator, and is looking for industry partners to add their expertise.
“We're at a point where we recognize the need for work on this beyond engineering,” he said. “Ultimately, the hardest part is going to be to get people to use it.”

Word Lens app turns your phone into a real-time translator

Word Lens translates printed words in real time on your iPhone. Can our jet packs be far behind? Developed by Quest Visual, Word Lens is an augmented-reality translation app that uses your phone's camera to view printed words and translate them into another language as you watch. If you’re traveling for business or on vacation and need to read a street sign or a menu, point your phone and Word Lens instantly translates it, maintaining the color and font as it goes.
Word Lens is currently available for the iPhone via iTunes. The app is free, with languages available for in-app purchase at US$5 each. So far, only Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish are available, but Quest Visual has plans to offer additional languages soon. After you purchase the languages, they are downloaded to your phone so you do not need a network connection to use Word Lens.

Quest Visual says the app is as easy to use as taking a picture with your phone. The app offers a zoom feature so you can crop out extraneous details, and a flashlight feature to light up the text if necessary. In addition, you can translate words by typing them in. Word Lens works best on clearly printed text, and does not work with decorative fonts or handwriting.
The app uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to analyze the image and translate the words it finds. You can test out the Word Lens OCR capability in the free app using two cute features that will spell all words in the image backwards, or digitally erase all the words in the image. Like most translators and translation software, Word Lens is not perfect, but Visual Quest promises that you can at least get the general meaning of the text.

Word Lens works with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod Touch with camera, and requires iOS 4.0 or later (The iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch do not support the zoom and flashlight features). There is no official word on an Android version yet.
Quest Visual seems to have a hit on its hands. In its first day of release on iTunes, Word Lens quickly climbed into the top 40 app chart. Hopefully we can look forward to its continued development, with more languages and improved translations.

WWF introduces new PDF-like file format to stop you from printing

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) says that an area of forest the size of Greece is cleared every year and that a significant proportion of that wood is pulped to make paper. In an effort to curb the needless printing of documents, the German branch of the organization has teamed up with Jung von Matt to introduce a new PDF-like digital file format that actually prevents a user from sending documents to the printer.


Even in these enlightened days of digital documents and in spite of various public, business and government efforts to reduce and recycle, trees are still being cut down to make paper. Ahead of next year being designated International Year of the Forests by the United Nations, WWF Germany has developed a new WWF file format to focus our attention on such issues every time we save a digital document.
Any document that doesn't need to be printed can be saved with a WWF file extension and when it's subsequently opened in a reader, the print option is blocked. WWF says that a WWF file can be viewed by most software that's able to read PDF documents – and I can confirm that this is certainly true of readers from Foxit and Adobe, although neither company has indicated official support for the development.
"We think the PDF ISO standard and Acrobat have tremendous potential to help customers with their efforts to go green," Adobe's Senior Director of Product Management for Acrobat Solutions told Gizmag. "Adobe Acrobat allows customers to create PDF with a range of security permissions, including the ability to disallow printing. The WWF format is based on the PDF standard and it is great to see WWF leveraging PDF in creative ways. At this point, we don't intend to support the .wwf file extension. We do participate with the ISO standards groups to further improve PDF and helping customers better leverage PDF for efficient and eco-friendly document sharing and printing is an important part of that effort."

Anyone wishing to support the new WWF document format will first need to download some free conversion software developed by the Jung von Matt advertising agency (currently compatible only with Mac OS X systems, a Windows version is on the way). Once installed, a new "Save As WWF" option will appear as an extra print option or be available via the application dock.
WWF Germany says that the campaign is meant to be viral and an extra page tagged onto each new format document will help introduce new users to the campaign and encourage awareness about how we use paper in our digital lives. If you don't want this extra page added to catalogs, official documents, CV's and so on then you'll need to choose another method of saving files and run the risk that such things may end up in a print queue somewhere.
More information on the campaign, together with a link to the conversion software, is available from the Save As WWF website.

New IBM chip technology integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon

IBM has announced another breakthrough in its long term research goal to harness the low power consumption and incredible speed promised by optical computing. Following on from the Germanium Avalanche Photodetector – a component able to receive optical information signals at 40 Gb/sec and multiply them tenfold using a mere 1.5V supply – the company has now unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon. So how far can this technology take us? Eventually, IBM hopes, all way to the Exascale – that's one million trillion calculations per second.
IBM says the new technology, called CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, will revolutionize the way chips communicate and enable an improvement of over 10 times the integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques by integrating optical devices and functions onto a silicon chip. This is possible because IBM’s new technology sees a single transceiver channel with all accompanying optical and electrical circuitry occupying only 0.5mm2, which is ten times smaller than previous efforts. This means it should be possible to manufacture single-chip transceivers as small as 4x4mm2 that can receive and transmit over a trillion bits (Terabit) per second.

Standard CMOS foundry manufacture

In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, IBM says its new technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line without the need for any new or special tooling. This approach allows silicon transistors to share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices and, to make this approach possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are scaled down to the diffraction limit – the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford.
IBM says single-chip optical communications transceivers can now be manufactured in a standard CMOS foundry, rather than assembled from multiple parts made with expensive compound semiconductor technology. This is made possible through the addition of a few more processing modules to a standard CMOS fabrication flow and enables a variety of silicon nanophotonics components, such as: modulators, germanium photodetectors and ultra-compact wavelength-division multiplexers, to be integrated with high-performance analog and digital CMOS circuitry.

Shooting for an Exaflop

By dramatically increasing the speed and performance between chips, IBM expects the new technology to further its ambitious Exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations – or an Exaflop – in a single second. Such a supercomputer would be around one thousand times faster than the fastest machine existing today.
“The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. “With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality.”
The details of IBM’s research effort were presented at the major international semiconductor industry conference SEMICON held in Tokyo on the December 1, 2010.

Monitor blood pressure while scrolling and clicking with the MDMouse

Monitoring blood pressure at home is recommended by the American Heart Association for the estimated 74.5 million American adults suffering from hypertension. CalHealth has created a blood pressure monitor that's housed in a computer mouse. After a user pushes a finger into the cuff monitor, the device sends readings to software on a PC for analysis, or to send on to doctors via email.
CalHealth's MDMouse is a fully functional USB optical mouse with a sphygmomanometer payload. The blood pressure meter extends on a rotating arm out of the body of the mouse. The user inserts a finger, and an air pump expands an air bag inside the tube around the digit. A pressure sensor stops the pump when it detects that the right amount of pressure has been applied and the user sets the monitoring to start via the computer software.
The pressure on the finger is initially increased beyond cutoff and then slowly decreased until arterial vessel pulsation is detected. CalHealth says that "the corresponding cuff pressure at this point will be substantially equal to systolic blood pressure which is the pressure when the heart is pumping."
The decrease of pressure continues until the device no longer registers arterial pulsation where, according to the company, "the pressure of the cuff at this point will be substantially equal to diastolic blood pressure."
The readings are then interpreted by the software and displayed for the user. The software can also store data from previous tests and present the user with graphs for onward email transmission to medical personnel.
There's a release valve to let the air out after each test, so there's no fear of the experience turning into some Jigsaw nightmare where the device starts to menacingly crush the trapped finger.
However, there has been some doubt cast on the accuracy of finger-based monitors. The American Heart Association recommends an automatic, cuff-style, upper-arm monitor: "Wrist and finger monitors are not recommended because they yield less reliable readings."

Any home monitoring device should be checked for accuracy by medical practitioners.

Latest LHC experiments show early universe behaved like a liquid

Physicists from the ALICE detector team have been colliding lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in an attempt to recreate the conditions in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Early results have shown that the quark-gluon plasma created at these energies does not form a gas as predicted, but instead suggest that the very early universe behaved like a hot liquid.
The Large Hadron Collider enables physicists to smash together sub-atomic particles at incredibly high-energies, providing new insights into the conditions present at the beginning of the universe.

ALICE (an acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment) researchers have been colliding lead nuclei to generate incredibly dense sub-atomic fireballs – mini Big Bangs at temperatures of over ten million degrees.
Previous research at lower energies had suggested the hot fire balls produced in nuclei collisions behaved like a liquid, yet many still expected the quark-gluon plasma to behave like a gas at these much higher energies.
Additionally, it has been found that more sub-atomic particles are produced in the collision than some theoretical models suggested.
“Although it is very early days we are already learning more about the early Universe,” said Dr David Evans, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, and UK lead investigator at ALICE experiment. “These first results would seem to suggest that the Universe would have behaved like a super-hot liquid immediately after the Big Bang.”

The ALICE experiment aims to study the properties of the state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. The ALICE Collaboration comprises around 1,000 physicists and engineers from around 100 institutes in 30 countries. During collisions of lead nuclei, ALICE will record data to disk at a rate of 1.2 gigabytes (GB), equivalent to two CDs every second, and will write over two petabytes (two million GB) of data to disk. This is equivalent to more than three million CDs, or a stack of CDs without boxes several miles high!
To process this data, ALICE will need 50,000 top-of-the-range PCs, from all over the world, running 24 hours a day.

Dynamic Eye sunglasses use moving LCD spot to reduce glare

Chris Mullin from Pittsburgh has designed a pair of smart electronic sunglasses that pinpoint and reduce glare using a moving liquid crystal display spot inside the lens. Dubbed "Dynamic Eye", the sunglasses dim direct sunlight or other hot spots without dimming everything else in view, so you no longer have to worry about driving home with the sun streaming directly into your line of vision.
Mullin came up with the electronic sunglasses after completing his PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. The idea behind the design sprung from the general lack of functionality from most sunglasses, including polarized lenses, to cut out direct sunlight glare whilst keeping a clear picture of everything thing else.
Using the two polarizers in the liquid crystal display, the glasses are able to darken the area between your pupil and the glare source. Half the light passes through the first polarizer and the liquid crystal in the middle determines whether the light will be absorbed by, or pass through, the second polarizer. If the sun moves, then so does this crystal liquid spot and if there is no glare, there is no spot.
 
“The problem with the sun is that it’s ten thousand times brighter than everything else you’re looking at, and your eyes can’t handle the difference. You squint, pull down the shade, put your hand, or do anything to get rid of the sun,” explained Mullin on Kickstarter.com. “With our glasses, you can relax, because the sun is dimmed down to an acceptable level. You can still see it, as well as any silhouettes that come in front, and because the glare is blocked, you can see a lot more of what’s near the sun.”
Glare reducing night glasses which use a special transparent LCD developed by researchers at Kent State University is also in development.