Slashdot Mirror

An update of the Bluetooth specification released today enables location services accurate to within 10 centimeters thanks to a new direction-finding capability. From a report: It arrives as a separate draft standard is nearly ready for an even faster and more accurate capability using ultra-wideband (UWB) radio, geared for use in smartphones. Bluetooth 5.1 describes ways to determine location using multiple antennas at either the transmitter or receiver. It uses measures of signal phase and amplitude to measure location, though profiles for application developers are still being finished.

In mid-March, the IEEE 802.15.4z standard for UWB should be in a stable draft form, opening the door for silicon designs. It enables location measures within a single centimeter and resolves in a nanosecond, a rate faster than Bluetooth. Smartphone giants Apple and Samsung have been active in the .4z meetings also attended by Huawei, leading some to suggest that the capability could be integrated in handsets within two years. NXP has also been active since the group started a year ago, giving rise to speculation that UWB could come into phones though an integrated NFC chip.

Junko Yoshida, writing for EETimes: Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then. By 2019, RISC-V won't be the only game in town. Wave Computing (Campbell, Calif.) announced Monday (Dec. 17) that it is putting MIPS on open source, with MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and MIPS' latest core R6 available in the first quarter of 2019. Art Swift, hired by Wave this month as president of its MIPS licensing business, described the move as critical to accelerate the adoption of MIPS in an ecosystem.

Going open source is "a big plan" that Wave CEO Derek Meyer, a MIPS veteran, has been quietly fostering since Wave acquired MIPS Technologies in June, explained Swift. Swift himself is a MIPS alumnus who worked at the company as a vice president of marketing and business development for four years. Wave, which styles itself as a tech startup poised to bring "AI and deep learning from the datacenter to the edge," sees MIPS as a key to advancing Wave's AI into a host of uses and applications. Included in MIPS instruction sets are extensions such as SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) and DSP. Swift promised that MIPS will bring to the open-source community "commercial-ready" instruction sets with "industrial-strength" architecture. "Chip designers will have opportunities to design their own cores based on proven and well tested instruction sets for any purposes," said Swift.

Junko Yoshida, writing for EETimes: Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then. By 2019, RISC-V won't be the only game in town. Wave Computing (Campbell, Calif.) announced Monday (Dec. 17) that it is putting MIPS on open source, with MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and MIPS' latest core R6 available in the first quarter of 2019. Art Swift, hired by Wave this month as president of its MIPS licensing business, described the move as critical to accelerate the adoption of MIPS in an ecosystem.

Going open source is "a big plan" that Wave CEO Derek Meyer, a MIPS veteran, has been quietly fostering since Wave acquired MIPS Technologies in June, explained Swift. Swift himself is a MIPS alumnus who worked at the company as a vice president of marketing and business development for four years. Wave, which styles itself as a tech startup poised to bring "AI and deep learning from the datacenter to the edge," sees MIPS as a key to advancing Wave's AI into a host of uses and applications. Included in MIPS instruction sets are extensions such as SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) and DSP. Swift promised that MIPS will bring to the open-source community "commercial-ready" instruction sets with "industrial-strength" architecture. "Chip designers will have opportunities to design their own cores based on proven and well tested instruction sets for any purposes," said Swift.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will invest $100 million into two research programs over the next four years to create the equivalent of a silicon compiler aimed at significantly lowering the barriers to design chips. "The two programs are just part of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) expected to receive $1.5 billion over the next five years to drive the U.S. electronics industry forward," reports EE Times. "ERI will disclose details of its other programs at an event in Silicon Valley in late July." From the report: Congress recently added $150 million per year to ERI's funding. The initiative, managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced on Monday that the July event will also include workshops to brainstorm ideas for future research programs in five areas ranging from artificial intelligence to photonics. With $100 million in finding, the IDEAS and POSH programs represent "one of the biggest EDA research programs ever," said Andreas Olofsson, who manages the two programs.

Together, they aim to combat the growing complexity and cost of designing chips, now approaching $500 million for a bleeding-edge SoC. Essentially, POSH aims to create an open-source library of silicon blocks, and IDEAS hopes to spawn a variety of open-source and commercial tools to automate testing of those blocks and knitting them into SoCs and printed circuit boards. If successful, the programs "will change the economics of the industry," enabling companies to design in relatively low-volume chips that would be prohibitive today. It could also open a door for designers working under secure regimes in the government to make their own SoCs targeting nanosecond latencies that are not commercially viable, said Olofsson.

"A former paperboy from Wisconsin passionate about maps led the team in the Air Force responsible for designing the navigation system we use everyday," writes Slashdot reader dkatana. IoT Times reports: At the IEEE honors ceremony today in San Francisco, Bradford Parkinson, a retired Air Force colonel who spent his life between maps and navigation systems, will be awarded the 2018 IEEE Medal of Honor, "For fundamental contributions to and leadership in developing the design and driving the early applications of the Global Positioning System." The current Global Positioning System (GPS) did not exist until 1995, just 22 years ago, and the engineer who led the project for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was Mr. Parkinson.

Parkinson, whose first job was delivering newspapers, had a passion for maps. He used those maps when canoeing to navigate the lakes and streams of Minnesota, aided by a hand compass. When he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering, he joined the Air Force to study navigation systems. In 1960, when his superiors saw his engineering potential, they sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue graduate studies. He became a protegee of Charles Stark (Doc) Draper, the father of inertial navigation, who was teaching at MIT at the time. Draper was the lead engineer developing the computer systems for NASA's Apollo program. [...] It was in 1972 when his path on inertial navigation collided with satellite systems. He had been recently promoted to colonel when he received a call from another colonel who was part of the Air Force inertial guidance "mafia." He moved to Los Angeles and joined the group, a bunch of Air Force engineers from MIT. Then Parkinson asked to work on the Air Force 621B program, the genesis of GPS.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is funding a completely new kind of non-von-Neumann processor called a HIVE -- Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit. According to EE Times, the funding is to the tune of $80 million over four-and-a-half years, and Intel and Qualcomm are participating in the project, along with a national laboratory, a university and defense contractor North Grumman. From the report: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Washington) and Georgia Tech are involved in creating software tools for the processor while Northrup Grumman will build a Baltimore center that uncovers and transfers the Defense Departments graph analytic needs for the what is being called the world's first graph analytic processor (GAP). Graph analytic processors do not exist today, but they theoretically differ from CPUs and GPUs in key ways. First of all, they are optimized for processing sparse graph primitives. Because the items they process are sparsely located in global memory, they also involve a new memory architecture that can access randomly placed memory locations at ultra-high speeds (up to terabytes per second). Together, the new arithmetic-processing-unit (APU) optimized for graph analytics plus the new memory architecture chips are specified by DARPA to use 1,000-times less power than using today's supercomputers. The participants, especially Intel and Qualcomm, will also have the rights to commercialize the processor and memory architectures they invent to create a HIVE. The graph analytics processor is needed, according to DARPA, for Big Data problems, which typically involve many-to-many rather than many-to-one or one-to-one relationships for which today's processors are optimized. A military example, according to DARPA, might be the the first digital missives of a cyberattack.

Friday EE Times shared the story of a Tesla crash that occurred during a test drive. "The salesperson suggested that my friend not brake, letting the system do the work. It didn't..." One Oregon news site even argues autopiloted Tesla's may actually have a higher crash rate.

But there's also been stories about Teslas that have saved lives -- like the grateful driver whose Model S slammed on the brakes to prevent a collision with a pedestrian, and another man whose Tesla drove him 20 miles to a hospital after he'd suddenly experienced a pulmonary embolism. (Slate wrote a story about the incident titled "Code is My Co-Pilot".) Now an anonymous Slashdot reader asks: How many successes has the autopilot had in saving life and reducing damage to property? What is the ratio of these successes to the very public failures?
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think. If you add it all up, are self-driving cars keeping us safer -- or just making us drive more recklessly?

Press2ToContinue writes: Apple's Lightning cable cartel be damned: Switzerland is moving forward with a plan for a single, universal phone charger across the country, standardizing phone chargers across the board. While the exact standard hasn't been mentioned yet, it wouldn't be hard to guess the standard: Micro USB, used across phone platforms, most especially Android, which has a gigantic chunk of the cell phone market worldwide.

The likely loser? Apple, which has relied on proprietary chargers since introducing the iPhone in 2007. While many companies have tried releasing generic cables, Apple often relies on DRM software to ensure that it's an Apple certified cable, charging $19 a piece for the Lightning charger used by the iPhone 5 and 6 and similar models.

What do you think -- are government-mandated standards for chargers a good idea? Despite the success of the standard household 3-prong electrical plug, doesn't this hamper progress? China seems to have done most of the work on the wall-circuit side of the equation,several years ago. But as to the "standard" 3-prong plug, any particular plug type is only as universal as the sockets and voltages they supply.

alexvoica writes: The first general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) now available as open-source RTL was unveiled at the Hot Chips event. Although the GPGPU is in an early and relatively crude stage, it is another piece of an emerging open-source hardware platform, said Karu Sankaralingam, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sankaralingam led the team that designed the Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin (MIAOW). A 12-person team developed the MIAOW core in 36 months. Their goal was simply to create a functional GPGPU without setting any specific area, frequency, power or performance goals. The resulting GPGPU uses just 95 instructions and 32 compute units in its current design. It only supports single-precision operations. Students are now adding a graphics pipeline to the design, a job expected to take about six months.

dkatana writes Some analysts expect fraud to increase this year as thieves will step up their efforts to capture more credit card details before the Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) standard conversion goes into full throttle. The next time U.S. cardholders receive a new card it will probably be equipped with an EMV chip, and most likely be contactless. The U.S. is finally making the transition to secure cards based on the European EMV standard, mostly because the liability shift imposed by the three big credit card brands — Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The European Union, where EMV became standard ten years ago, has the lowest level of credit card fraud in the world, while the U.S. accounted for 47.3% of the worldwide payment card fraud losses but generated only 23.5% of total volume.

dkatana writes: Samsung will introduce the Galaxy S6 on Sunday, March 1st, at the Barcelona Forum, one day before the Mobile World Congress officially starts. Serious rumors from different sources indicate that the Korean giant will also introduce its version of a global mobile payment system, which will likely have the moniker "Samsung Pay." Samsung can't afford to give away its position in the smartphone market, and a payments system tailored to customers is a key factor.

dkatana writes: NXP, having worked with Apple on Apple Pay, is now launching its PN66T module for secure NFC mobile transactions — for Android. It's intended to implement the same functionality of Apple Pay. While NXP claims the module is OS independent, the features clearly indicate that Android devices are the likely recipients of the SoC. The PN66T is Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMVCo) certified, and also supports American Express ExpressPay, thus fully covering the three big credit card companies, ensuring compatibility and interoperability with existing and future payment methods.

You remember Peter Hoddie, right? He was one of the original QuickTime developers at Apple. He left in 2002 to help found a startup called Kinoma, which started life developing multimedia players and browsers for mobile devices. Kinoma was acquired in 2011 by Marvell Semiconductor, whose management kept it as a separate entity.

The latest creation from Peter and his crew is the 'Kinoma Create,' AKA the 'JavaScript-Powered Internet of Things Construction Kit.' With it, they say, you can 'quickly and easily create personal projects, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things prototypes.' EE Times mentioned it in March, and they're not the only ones to notice this product. Quite a few developers and companies are jumping on the 'Internet of Things' bandwagon, so there may be a decent -- and growing -- market for something like this. (Alternate Video Link)

An anonymous reader writes with this article about the future of the analog engineer. Some say technology advancements are obsoleting the need for analog engineers, while others say that good, experienced analog designers will always be needed and currently are in short supply. After years spent encouraging engineering students to focus on software and digital electronics, some people say the day of reckoning appears to be drawing near: Many analog mixed-signal design jobs now stay open longer or are simply going unfilled, say recruiters, with some engineers even unable to retire because they can't find a suitable replacement. On the one hand, some people blame the shift from analog to digital, which produced a generation of engineers who speak the language of code, not circuit schematics. On the other hand, others say that with the advent of systems-on-chip, the easy availability of free circuits, pioneered by companies like TSMC, and software tools to verify designs, there is simply less need for analog designers.

New submitter robertchin writes "Michael Barr recently testified in the Bookout v. Toyota Motor Corp lawsuit that the likely cause of unintentional acceleration in the Toyota Camry may have been caused by a stack overflow. Due to recursion overwriting critical data past the end of the stack and into the real time operating system memory area, the throttle was left in an open state and the process that controlled the throttle was terminated. How can users protect themselves from sometimes life endangering software bugs?"

Rambo Tribble writes "In what appears to be a major reversal of policy, Intel's new president, Renee James, has indicated that Intel will be open to manufacturing chips based on rivals' designs. While the language is a bit tentative, this appears to open an opportunity for such as ARM to benefit from Intel's manufacturing expertise and technology." From the article: "James said Intel will evaluate prospective foundry clients on a 'deal by deal basis, not on an architecture by architecture basis.' That applies, James said, 'even in areas where there may be some competition with businesses that we’re in.'" Intel is already manufacturing FPGAs for Altera that include 64-bit ARM cores.

MojoKid writes "A few weeks ago, the analyst company ABI Research published a report claiming that Intel's new CloverTrail+ platform (dual-core Medfield) for smartphones was significantly faster and more power efficient than anything ARM's various partners were shipping. If you follow the smartphone market, that was a very surprising claim. Medfield was a decent midrange platform when it launched in 2012, but Intel made it clear that its goal for Medfield was to compete with other platforms in its division — not seize the performance crown outright. Further investigation by other analysts has blown serious holes in the ABI Research report. Not only does it focus on a single, highly questionable benchmark (AnTuTu), the x86 version of that benchmark is running different code than the ARM flavors. Furthermore, the recently released Version 3.3 of the test is much faster on Intel hardware than on any of the other platforms. But even with those caveats in place, the ABI Research report is bad science. Single-source performance comparisons almost inevitably are."

An anonymous reader writes "Clones of the ARM processor intellectual property are again becoming available for free from the open source hardware community. ARM was rigorous in shutting cloners down in the past but the clones are rising again under codenames Amber, Storm and Atlas, albeit of older instruction set architectures."

An anonymous reader writes "SanDisk sampling its 1Y-based NAND flash memory products and has revealed they are manufactured at same minimum geometry as the 1X generation: 19 nm. The author speculates that this is one of the first instances of a Moore's Law 'fail' since the self-fulfilling prophecy was made in 1965 — but that it won't be the last."

An anonymous reader writes "Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for the digital economy, wants to use 5 billion euros of European Union tax payers' money, together with matching funds from the chip industry, to recreate European success in semiconductors similar to that of Airbus. Because of its strategic importance to wealth creation Kroes wants Europe to reverse its decline in chip manufacturing and move back up from 10 percent to 20 percent of global production."

An anonymous reader writes "ARM licensee Allwinner sold more application processors for tablet computers in 2012 than Intel and Qualcomm put together, according to this EE Times article that references market researcher Strategy Analytics. Overall one in five tablet processors was provided by a Chinese vendor in 2012, according to the article, partly because they sell chips at half the price of similarly specified chips from better known vendors."

An anonymous reader writes "EE Times examines whether Samsung could be about to control the equipment output of Apple by putting the Cupertino company on a rationed supply of NAND flash as the non-volatile memory goes into short supply in 2013. The analysis argues that Apple may need to put down billions of dollars of cash to fund a guaranteed NAND flash supply plan, something that Samsung did in the middle of the last decade."

DeviceGuru writes "In a recent EE Times 2013 Embedded Market study, Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey's participants, second only to 'in-house/custom' (at 28 percent). But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate the various shades of Linux to see how they compare? Parsing the EE Times data that way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market."

An anonymous reader writes "Cheap handheld terahertz scanners that do the same thing as those big bulky full-body scanners at the airport could be in your doctor's and dentist's office soon. The Semiconductor Research Corp. has successfully sponsored chip maker Texas Instruments in making cheap CMOS chips that do the same thing as those refrigerator sized full-body scanners at the airport. The resulting handheld versions can be tuned to look inside your teeth in the dentist chair and under you skin at the doctor's office. The best part is that terahertz rays are completely safe, unlike the X-rays used today by dentists and doctors which can cause cancer. Count me in!"

eldavojohn writes "Details are really thin, but the EE Times is reporting that Algotochip claims to be sitting on the 'Holy Grail' of SoC design. From the article: '"We can move your designs from algorithms to chips in as little as eight weeks," said Satish Padmanabhan CTO and founder of Algotochip, whose EDA tool directly implements digital chips from C-algorithms.' Padmanabhan is the designer of the first superscalar digital signal processor. His company, interestingly enough, claims to provide a service that consists of a 'suite of software tools that interprets a customers' C-code without their having any knowledge of Algotochip's proprietary technology and tools. The resultant GDSII design, from which an EDA system can produce the file that goes to TSMC, and all of its intellectual property is owned completely by the customer—with no licenses required from Algotochip.' This was presented at this year's Globalpress Electronics Summit. Too good to be true? Or can we expect our ANSI C code to be automagically implemented in a SoC in such a short time?"

MrSeb writes with this news from Extreme Tech: "In a move that will shock and disgust bleeding-edge technophiles everywhere, Asus has announced at Mobile World Congress 2012 that its new Transformer Pads — the high-end Infinity Series — will use the recently-announced dual-core Qualcomm S4 SoC. The critically acclaimed Transformer Prime, the Infinity Series' predecessor which was released at the end of 2011, used the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3. Why the sudden about-face? Well, the fact that quad-core processors don't really have a use case in mobile devices is one reason — but it doesn't hurt that the Krait cores in the S4 are significantly faster than the four Cortex-A9 cores in the Tegra 3, too. The S4 is also the first 28nm SoC, while Tegra 3 is still on 40nm, which means a smaller and cheaper package, and lower power consumption to boot. The S4 is also the first SoC with built-in LTE, which was probably a rather nice sweetener for Asus." The Snapdragon S4 "Krait" CPU is still a bit shrouded in mystery as far as hard specs (Qualcomm has never been one to release docs), but it appears to be similar to the Cortex-A15 in performance; how they stand up to Intel's new Medfield designs remains to be seen.

angry tapir writes "Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers. Intel has expanded its chip-to-order business by signing up additional customers to take advantage of its 22-nanometer process facilities." In particular, two FPGA design companies will be using Intel's fabrication plant, and "the unit has more than two customers but others are not disclosing their plans yet."

bonch writes "After a historical reputation for not monetizing breakthrough technologies (including the mouse and desktop GUI), Xerox PARC is now focused on making money from its inventions. CEO Anne Mulcahy vowed in 2001 to return the company to profitability, encouraging 'open innovation' and mandating that research turned a profit. The latest innovation is thin-film printed electronics, intended for a variety of products, from RFID readers to price labels."

New submitter gbl08ma writes "The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to create a $25 Linux box, won an award for the category 'Best in Show for Hardware Design' at ARM TechCon, even though they haven't yet released any final product (the release will be sometime in late November). Eben Upton demonstrated the capabilities of one of the prototypes that have been built. From advanced graphics at 1080p resolution to simple web browsing and desktop productivity, the small boards with ARM-based processors and PoP SDRAM have proven to be very versatile, fast and durable."

donberryman writes "IEEE Times reports that Heathkit, the fabled electronics kits company, is going back into that business after a two-decade hiatus. The Heathkit website says that they will be releasing Garage Parking Assistant kit (GPA-100) in late September followed by a Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor kit. Amateur radio kits may be coming by the end of the year." I hope for real this time — I never saw for sale the HERO kit they promised a few years ago.

An anonymous reader writes "Panelists at a recent technology expo argued about how to motivate people to conserve energy, dragging out all the usual suspects, from financial incentives to emotion appeals to 'save the planet.' However, one panelist trumped the status quo by noting that adding the 'cool factor' could make energy conservation fun via apps on smartphones and tablets. By making energy conservation as fun as a video game, the fickle on-again, off-again of human nature might just be overcome."

PabloSandoval48 submitted a fairly lengthy story running on the EE Times about the A5 processor that powers the iPad 2. The story talks a bit about the A4 and A5, the IP issues surrounding the chip, and more. The real question now is what comes next.

An anonymous reader writes "Electronic networks — from wireless cellular to the Internet — are often too big to simulate node-by-node, but new uses of graph theory are unsnarling them, according to former Microsoft Research fellow and electronics-guru Laszlo Lovasz, who spoke at the Kyoto Prize Symposium this week. 'We are identifying what is common to these networks—mathematically—so that even very large networks can be accurately modeled,' said Lovasz. He also showed some very cool methods that anybody can use to make any network--even simple organizational charts--easier to read. And even if you don't use them for real work, they are just fun to play with (his app, for instance, allows you to input a random network, which it then redraws right before your eyes so no connections cross over each other, making them extremely legible)."

siliconbits writes "A single 'universal' memory technology that combines the speed of DRAM with the non-volatility and density of flash memory was recently invented at North Carolina State University, according to researchers. The new memory technology, which uses a double floating-gate field-effect-transistor, should enable computers to power down memories not currently being accessed, drastically cutting the energy consumed by computers of all types, from mobile and desktop computers to server farms and data centers, the researchers say."

angry tapir writes "The Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence. Many question the use of a single metric — Linpack — to rank the performance of something as mind-bogglingly complex as a supercomputer. During a panel at the SC2010 conference this week in New Orleans, one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get the largest Linpack number, thereby revealing the 'stupidity' of Linpack. While grumbling about Linpack is nothing new, the discontent was pronounced this year as more systems, such as the Tianhe-1A, used GPUs to boost Linpack ratings, in effect gaming the Top500 list." Fortunately, Sandia National Laboratories is heading an effort to develop a new set of benchmarks. In other supercomputer news, it turns out the Windows-based cluster that lost out to Linux stumbled because of a bug in Microsoft's software package. Several readers have also pointed out that IBM's Blue Gene/Q has taken the top spot in the Green500 for energy efficient supercomputing, while a team of students built the third-place system.

DeviceGuru writes "A Lego Mindstorms robotics kit controlled by an HTC Nexus One smartphone successfully untangled a Rubik's Cube puzzle in 12.5 seconds at this weeks ARM technical conference in Silicon Valley. The current 3x3x3 cube-solvers's 15-second average represents a substantial improvement over the 25-second solutions of an earlier version, which was powered by a circa-2006 Nokia N95 smartphone, thanks to a faster (1GHz) CPU, more RAM, and revamped cube-solving algorithms. ARM Engineer David Gilday, who created the robotic cube-solver, claims the current version's algorithms can handle cube complexities up to 100x100x100, assuming he build the mechanics. In terms of racing humans, Gilday says the Lego robotics kits can only manage around 1.5 moves per second, whereas human players can make between 5 and 6 moves per second, amazingly enough." Update: 11/12 03:45 GMT by T : Apologies to creator David Gilday, whose name was earlier misspelled.

An anonymous reader writes "A single-atom DRAM was demonstrated by IBM recently with a slow-mo movie of the atomic process of setting and erasing a bit on a single atom. Videos of atomic processes inside chips were not possible until now, leading to IBM's claim that its pulsed-STM (used to make the movie) will lead to a new atomic-scale semiconductor industry, and not just for memory chips, according to this EETimes story: 'The ultimate memory chips of the future will encode bits on individual atoms, a capability recently demonstrated for iron atoms by IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., which unveiled a new pulsed technique for scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs). Pulsed-STMs yield nanosecond time-resolution, a requirement for designing the atomic-scale memory chips, solar panels and quantum computers of the future, but also for making super efficient organic solar cells by controlling photovoltaic reactions on the atomic level.'"

eagledck tips news that the FCC has "finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US." The Samsung device will use MetroPCS as a carrier, but tech specs, software details and a launch timetable are still uncertain. Meanwhile, Verizon is ramping up testing of their own LTE infrastructure, hoping to launch in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. An anonymous reader notes that LTE rollouts could be hampered by a confused and conflicted patent situation. "It is impossible to know where all the patents are but we have identified more than 60 companies holding essential patents. It is a very large landscape and fragmented. If there was one major patent pool and a handful of individual companies to deal with, that would be possible. But signing license deals with 40 plus [entities] is not. A unified patent pool is best," said a representative for one of three patent pool organizations trying to accomplish that.

An anonymous reader writes with the latest advance in the quest for a cloak of invisibility (Michigan Tech University's press release). We've been following this research as it develops; here are stories from each of the last four years. "Invisibility cloaks are slowly working their way up to shorter wavelengths — starting at millimeter-long microwaves and working their way to the nanometer wavelengths of visible light. EETimes says we are about half way there — micrometer wavelengths — in this story about using chalcogenide glass to create invisibility cloaks in the infrared. Quoting: 'Invisibility cloaks cast in chalcogenide glass can render objects invisible to infrared frequencies of light, according to researchers at Michigan Technological University... Most other demonstrations of invisibility cloaks have used metamaterials composed of free-space split-ring resonators that were constructed from metal printed-circuit board traces surrounded by traditional dielectric material. The Michigan Tech researchers... claim that by substituting nonmetallic glass resonators made from chalcogenide glass, infrared cloaks are possible too...'"

PabloSandoval48 writes "The world's largest telescope, currently under construction more than a mile beneath the Antarctic ice, is on schedule to be completed next year, according to a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, the lead institution for a scientific project called IceCube."

PabloSandoval48 writes, "A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter. More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it." Reader mattnyc99 notes a related article in which the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless. "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this). Is the mainstream media making too big a deal out of the avalanche of World Cup tweets, or is the world literally flooding the zone?"

PabloSandoval48 writes "Apple's A4 processor is heavily influenced by Apple's long-established relationship with Samsung and represents an evolution rather than a revolution in circuit design. A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."

An anonymous reader writes "Engineers at the Belgian research institute IMEC are looking at the use of silicon transistors in the sub-threshold region of their operation as a way of pursuing ultra-low power goals. A chip the engineers are designing for biomedical applications could have blocks designed to operate at 0.2 or 0.3 volts, researchers said, according to EE Times. The threshold voltage is the point at which the transistor nominally switches off. Operating a transistor when it is 'off' would make use of the leakage conduction that is normally seen as wasted energy, according to the article."

Plocmstart writes "Here's what EETimes.com is claiming to be the first teardown of the A4 processor. 'Apple's iPad chip is a single-core ARM A8 made by Samsung. Through various benchmarking testing, UBM TechInsights was able to find out the details of the A4 processor.'"

An anonymous reader passes along a brief EE Times note on a suggestive Microsoft job ad. ARM is explicitly mentioned, as are solid-state disk drives as an area of experimentation in the quest to reduce power consumption; but Intel does not get a mention. Here is the ad. "Microsoft is looking for senior software development engineer to help with its Bing data centers, potentially running them on ARM hardware, according to an EE Times article. Whoever gets the job 'can own the decision on the hardware that we use,' the job description said, and added that power management is a key aspect of the job. ... Microsoft was reportedly experimenting with the Intel Atom microprocessor in February 2009 with a view to creating a green low-power data center. One issue discussed then was the Atom microprocessor lacked performance compared with other Intel processors and that therefore any power saving might be negated by the need for more processors to carry a given computational load."

An anonymous reader writes "Google has teamed up with microcontroller maker Microchip to develop an API for a piece of software called Google PowerMeter, according this EE Times story. Why? Because Google wants to host all the details of the electricity and other energy consumption of people's homes. It wants to do this so that it can show people on their iGoogle homepages when and where they are consuming energy so that they can start to reduce their power consumption. The good news is that it is an opt-in service and free so you don't have to make Google your energy-monitor if you don't want to do so."

An anonymous reader writes "How about typing on a computer just by thinking about it? The downside is you have to wear a skull cap with electrodes that capture your brain waves like an EEG machine. According to this EE Times story, a team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with movement disabilities. The system does rely on a lot of processing on a remote computer, but it is a wireless system. And these thought-to-computer systems have wider applicability than medical support. One of the research groups involved in this development has already looked at wireless electroencephalography (EEG) to enable measures of emotion to be fed back into computer games."

An anonymous reader writes "How about typing on a computer just by thinking about it? The downside is you have to wear a skull cap with electrodes that capture your brain waves like an EEG machine. According to this EE Times story, a team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with movement disabilities. The system does rely on a lot of processing on a remote computer, but it is a wireless system. And these thought-to-computer systems have wider applicability than medical support. One of the research groups involved in this development has already looked at wireless electroencephalography (EEG) to enable measures of emotion to be fed back into computer games."

An anonymous reader writes "Quantum film could replace conventional CMOS image sensors in digital cameras and are four times more sensitive than photographic film. The film, which uses embedded quantum dots instead of silver grains like photographic film, can image scenes at higher pixel resolutions. While the technology has potential for use in mobile phones, conventional digital cameras would also gain much higher resolution sensors by using quantum film material." The original (note: obnoxious interstitial ad) article at EE Times adds slightly more detail.

eldavojohn writes "Last week, Freescale Semiconductor announced their i.MX508 chip and a few days ago released a rather bland and boring announcement that it's available. But there was at least one interesting line from that press release, 'The i.MX508 applications processor is expected to be priced at less than $10 (USD) in quantities greater than 250K units.' Yes, less than ten dollars. This sparked a wave of articles detailing how this new chip will allow the sub-$99 e-reader to emerge and according to market research, consumers are thirsty for something much more affordable than the Kindle."