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Electronix Express Newsletter
March 2007 Issue
Welcome to the March 2007 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
1. Single-pixel Camera Takes on Digital
Researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography. The single-pixel camera is designed to tackle what its developers see as the inefficiencies of modern digital cameras.
It currently resembles an old-fashioned pinhole camera and is the size of a suitcase.
The camera was created, according to Dr Kelly, assistant professor of electrical engineering and his colleague Richard Baraniuk, because digital cameras are very wasteful. They require expensive microprocessors and massive battery power to capture an image, most of which will not be used in displaying the picture. This is because the captured image is compressed, to a jpeg file for example, to make the file size smaller and more convenient to store. However, the single-pixel camera has a way to go before it is available for practical use.
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2. Silicon Device Could Enable Cancer Screening
Doctors could soon be able to screen for various cancers using a silicon device. That device being developed by researchers at the University of Newcastle detects the presence of proteins and similar species in bodily fluids. Existing screening techniques involve complex, unpleasant procedures such as barium meals and enemas.
Unlike cantilever-type MEMS that have been used to weigh biological samples, this device is self-referencing and needs minimal temperature control to ensure accuracy. The 100um x 1µm diaphragm design is based on a silicon gyroscope previously developed by Professor Jim Burdess. According to Burdess, one of the advantages of this particular device configuration is that it has a certain common mode property. Essentially this means if you change any pre-tension in the sensor, which you could do through thermal changes, then those changes do not increase or decrease the modal split, they just move the two frequencies up and down. It's sort of an inherent compensation.
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3. Dell Joins HyperTransport Effort
The HyperTransport Technology Consortium, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing, promoting and licensing the HyperTransport interconnect technology announced that Dell has joined the consortium as a high-level member and is also set to leverage HyperTransport technology in a number of its server and desktop product lines.
HyperTransport technology is a CPU-native interconnect standard that its proponents claim delivers efficient high throughput with minimum latency between multiple devices including chassis, motherboards and chips. This interconnect technology is designed to support appliances, embedded systems, networking systems, PCs, workstations, gaming systems, servers and supercomputers.The HyperTransport Consortium consists of more than 50 member companies, including founding member Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Broadcom, Sun Microsystems, and others.
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4. Printed Electronics set to be Next Big Thing
Nowadays, the term printed electronics is taken to include thin film electronics that will become printable. Most of the potential for printed electronics lies in what Toppan Forms calls Smart Media Products (SMP) which will be intelligent and mass producible yet often customizable as well. They will usually be used at the human interface or connected to networks and embedded ubiquitously into the environment. All this means that printed electronics will largely create new markets.
Basically, we are scoping a major change throughout society from the smart shop and office to the smart home. The U.S. Army plans to use printed electronics to reduce the weight of a warfighter's pack by two thirds and give him smart clothing that generates electricity, heats him, cools him, monitors vital signs, acts as a long range antenna and so on. Printed electronics can reduce cost but it also involves sophisticated structures some of which perform better and are more fault tolerant than traditional alternatives. Most commonly, it will be used where traditional technology is simply not a feasible solution.
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5. Wireless Power Charger Makes Efficient Flooring
As workspaces and living rooms become increasingly populated with more and more battery-consuming electronic devices, it has occurred to some researchers that there may be a better way to supply power. This is the idea behind smart power transmission sheets, which selectively feed power to the electronic devices placed on them. Takayasu Sakurai, professor of the Center for Collaborative Research at the University of Tokyo, and Takao Someya, associate professor of the university's Quantum Phase Electronics Center, demonstrated these power transmission sheets, made of printed plastic MEMS switches and organic field-effect transistors (FETs), at the recent International Electron Devices Meeting. The concept represents a step toward ubiquitous electronics, where multiple electronic systems, scattered over desks, floors and walls, can be directly powered. The wireless transmission system may directly drive electronic objects and/or charge a rechargeable battery in the objects without requiring a connector, thereby simplifying recharging procedures.
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6. Understanding of Ferroelectrics
Although ferroelectric materials are prevalent throughout the electronics world, researchers actually know very little about how the materials work. In an effort to better understand their properties at the nanoscale for continued use, physicists at the University of Arkansas have discovered previously unknown properties. In a recent article in Physical Review Letters, Sergey Prosandeev, a UA research associate in physics, and Laurent Bellaiche, a physics professor at the university, created computer simulations of ferroelectric nanodots to better understand their potential properties. With various ferroelectric materials embedded in different polarizable media, the simulations predicted the existence of different phases, and discovered previously unknown phases as well.
Ultimately, they found six different structural phases - four of which had never been seen before. What is the result of such research? This could result in promising applications using negative refraction materials with possibilities for nanoscale devices with greater memory capacity.
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