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Electronix Express Newsletter

March, 2005 Issue

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Welcome to the Electronix Express Newsletter. We hope you find it to be both interesting and useful. Also, we invite you to submit any hints, tips, news-bits or articles of your own.

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STORIES

1. Smart Bandage
2. Nanotech Battery
3. New Display Technology
4. Double-Sided Display
5. Carbon Transistors
6. More Hardware Speed, Same Software Price
7. That's Cool

Smart Bandage

IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center), a leading European independent research center in microelectronics and nanotechnology, has come up with a "smart-bandage". Still in research, the flexible stick-on device measures 35 mm by 12 mm by 2 mm thick and contains a rechargeable battery, sensors, a DSP chip, and a wireless link. It can measure ECG signals or EEG signals while the patient walks about.

Nanotech Battery

Bell Labs together with the nanotechnology firm mPhase have developed a "nano-battery" consisting of a tiny drop of liquid electrolyte placed on special microscopic silicon structure. The drops are dormant until an electric field is applied; the electrolyte then reacts with the silicon to produce a current.

New Display Technology

The HP Labs facility in Bristol England has developed a prototype of a new color display made from plastic. It does not require expensive technology such as photo-lithography or vacuum deposition. Essentially, it's an LCD display without the glass plates. The RGB prototype measures 3 cm by 4 cm and can display 125 colors without an active matrix. The goal is to have inexpensive high-quality displays that can be imbedded into a printed page.

Double-Sided Display

The Japanese firm Omron has developed an LCD display for cellphones that can be viewed in the dark from both sides while being lit from only one side. A typical clam-shell cell phone has two back-to-back displays. The front display is lit when the clam-shell is closed while the other display is lit when the clam-shell is open. Omron's new design cuts the thickness of a phone's display in half; it also improves viewing quality and reduces cost.

Carbon Transistors

A research team of scientists from the University of Manchester in England and Chernogolovka in Russia have come up with a new technology for producing very fast switching transistors. By stripping a single sheet of carbon atoms off a layer of graphite, a sheet of graphene can be made. Graphene is a single planar sheet of bonded carbon atoms. It is stable, very flexible, strong, and extremely conductive. FETs can be made from graphene that have almost no electron scattering. The result is a transistor with very high electron mobility. Graphene based transistors could replace more expensive devices made from gallium or indium.

4. MORE HARDWARE SPEED, SAME SOFTWARE PRICE

Chip makers like Intel and AMD must have given a sigh of relief when Microsoft announced that its processor licensing model will charge customers per processor, not per core. In other words, it will not cost more to run Microsoft server software on the new dual-core processors than on single-core processors. Intel predicts that dual core chips (and later multicore chips) will become standard over the next two years. By the end of 2006, Intel expects that dual-core processors will represent 70 percent of all Pentium shipments, 85 percent of all server chips and 70 percent of all mobile chips. But others disagree, saying it's cheaper to just buy more computers.

6. THAT'S COOL

Speed means heat, and heat is the enemy of semiconductors. Intel's recent cancellation of a 4-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor was due in large part to cooling concerns. And Apple Computer had to add liquid-cooling to its G5 computers last year to prevent their IBM processors from going into melt-down. The research firm Business Communications Co. (BCC) forecasts that the world market for electronics thermal-management products will grow from $3.3 billion in 2003 to $5.9 billion by 2008, with the largest market segment-computers-expanding from $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion.

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