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Electronix Express Newsletter
November 2006 Issue
Welcome to the November 2006 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
1. U.S. Still Tops in Electronic Equipment Design
This year the United States is set to maintain its lead in the worldwide electronic equipment design business, with the nation's activities in this area driving the most semiconductor purchasing of any country on earth. Japan is expected to maintain its second-place ranking in 2006, with its design activity generating 24.9 percent of worldwide chip sales, followed by third-placed Taiwan at 8.6 percent.
Meanwhile, China and Hong Kong are on the rise. The region is expected to achieve the leading growth among the top 10 nations in 2006, with a 26.1 percent expansion. Electronic design activities in the region will influence 6.5 percent of worldwide semiconductor purchasing in 2006, compared to 5.6 percent in 2005. China and Hong Kong will surpass Germany and South Korea to become the world's fourth-largest national influencer of electronic-design generated semiconductor spending in 2006.
India's electronic-design influence on semiconductor spending will surge by 76 percent in 2006, handily beating other fast-growing nations like Poland and Slovakia, which are expected to see increases of 60 percent and 53 percent, respectively.
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2. Mobile Phone Market in Midst of Boom
Cellular phone mania is sweeping the globe, according to the latest reports from two market research firms. Although the computer market is still by far the leading consumer of ICs and is forecast to represent 47 percent of the 2006 IC market, the electronic system type driving most of the IC market growth this year is cellular phones.
A billion mobile phone subscribers are expected to be in place by the end of next year. This represents about 45 percent of the world's population of 6.6 billion in 2007.
The forecast for the sale of cellular handsets is expected to steadily increase. The number of cellular handsets sold this year will reach 965 million, an increase of 20 percent over 2005. Moreover, it would take a handset growth rate of only 3.6 percent to push worldwide cellular phone sales over the one-billion-unit level in 2007.
These reports concluded that the cellular phone industry is expected to be one of the most important, if not the most important, future IC market drivers.
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3. Brain-Computer Interface is Commercially Viable
A non-invasive device that allows severely paralyzed people to interact with a computer via their brain signals has been improved to make it a viable commercial product by Cambridge Consultants (CCL). Known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), the device uses electroencephalography (EEG) to detect microvolt brain signals. Once these brain signals are detected, it then applies an adaptive algorithm that focuses on the EEG features the person is best able to control. Those signals can be mapped onto functions for tasks such as maneuvering a cursor around a PC screen, or for spelling out words for a speech synthesizer.
The system, developed by researchers at the Wadsworth Center, a New York State health unit, originally used a large, $13,000 64-channel amp and the user had to wear a bulky cap to apply 64 electrodes to the skull. CCL's input involved reducing the size, complexity and cost to make it more suitable for home or hospital use.
The cost of the enhanced system has been reduced to $5,000, the amount users can claim from Medicare for a speech-assist device.
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4. Does Virtualization Drive The Future?
The evolution of the electronics industry progresses toward virtualization.
A system, be it a physical process, an object in the real world, or an imaginary person is virtualized when it has undergone three key steps. First, a boundary must isolate the system from its environment. Second, designers identify the inputs and outputs that cross the boundary, along with the transforms that produce the outputs, thus modeling the system. Third, designers produce a functionally equivalent block, one that accepts the same inputs and produces the same outputs under the same circumstances with an electronic system.
From at least the mid-1960s, engineers have used electronic systems to virtualize physical things either components of the electronic system itself or objects in the outside world and incorporate those models in place of the real objects. This virtualization has made it possible for electronic systems to behave as if they had hardware that they did not have. It has also allowed systems to behave as if they were interacting with a world from which they were isolated, either by distance or by the fact that that world didn't exist. These capabilities have accelerated the growth of electronics and in the future are likely to lend electronic systems capabilities that in the past were the province of humans alone.
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5. Intel Closing In On Low-Cost Silicon Laser
Intel's research into the combination of lasers and silicon chips is getting close to their desired result--computers that can connect to the Internet at speeds that are 1,000 times the speed of today's computers.
Mario Paniccia, head of Intel's Photonics Technology Lab says, "These networks will be able to carry terabits of information." Working with the University of California, Santa Barbara, Paniccia's team created a hybrid chip that glues indium phosphide, which is primed for lasers, with a low-cost silicon substrate. The team found a glue layer that was 26 atoms thick and could bond to both the indium phosphide and the silicon. So far, the team of six people has been able to build a chip with 26 lasers. This electrically pumped hybrid laser will enable Intel to build dozens or hundreds of lasers on a single silicon chip in the future. By combining all of the elements of an optical network on a chip, Intel could set optical computing on a course that follows Moore's Law.
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6. Scientists Call for More Nanotech Funding, Research
Nanotechnology is no longer a scientific curiosity. It is in the workplace, the environment and the home. The successful development of nanotechnology is being jeopardized by the lack of a clear federal strategy for examining possible environmental, health and safety risks and inadequate funding for this work.
More than $32 billion in products containing nano-materials were sold globally last year, and Lux Research projects that $2.6 trillion in manufactured goods will incorporate nanotechnology by 2014. California is still leading the United States in total nanotechnology based production output, but greater Boston, New York state and Illinois have exceeded California per capita in nanotech-based production.
Dr. Andrew Maynard, the chief science advisor on the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies proposed that the federal government invest a minimum of $100 million over two years in targeted risk research for safe nanotechnology to raise awareness about the technology.
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