Electronix Express Newsletter

November 2007 Issue

Welcome to the November 2007 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter

STORIES

Size Matters, Even in Nanometers

What Does '45-nm' Mean, Anyway?

World Now Has Four Billion Phone Lines

Robots and Senior Citizens in Aging Japan?

Mexico's America Movil Going 3G in 2008

How the iPhone Changed Verizon Wireless

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1. Size Matters, Even in Nanometers

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has reported that the length of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) has a significant impact on their optical properties. One of those properties is call Raman scattering. In this phenomenon, when light passes through a transparent sample, a fraction of the light scatters in all directions. In Raman scattering, a small fraction of the scattered light has a different wavelength as opposed to most of the scattered photons being of the same wavelength of the incident light. Researchers typically consider such properties to be constants when working with materials at conventional scales, but NIST's close examination of 50 to 500-nm-long nanotubes revealed length-driven variability that may arise from quantum physical effects. How will this prove useful? That variability could prove useful when it comes to building SWCNTs into applications such as tiny optical sensors and biological probes. So even in the smallest of applications size really does matter.

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2. What Does '45-nm' Mean, Anyway?

Originally, IC processes were named for the narrowest line that could be resolved by the printing equipment and the photoresist, and then successfully transformed into a feature on the surface of the wafer. In practical terms, this smallest feature was almost always the line that defined the gate electrode on the MOS transistor. So the name of a process became identified with the width of the gate electrode.

Just to make matters more complex, designers referred to this as the gate length. If you look at a transistor the way the current does, from one end through to the other, the width of the gate electrode determines the path length the current must traverse getting through the channel region. Unfortunately for clarity, the gate length is also an approximate measure of transistor speed and of how densely you can pack transistors together in a hand-crafted layout.

Marketing departments seized upon the term as a measure of goodness, and quickly turned what had been a measure of a physical dimension into a measure of marketing bravado. The fascinating part today is that it is physically impossible for the printers, which work with 193-nm-wavelength light, to accurately transfer, for example, a 65-nm line from the mask to the wafer's surface. So today, "65 nm" or "45 nm" doesn't exactly refer to the line width, and certainly doesn't indicate how closely you can pack transistors together, although it does provide some indication of these things. Still, it is probably most accurate to say that the number is simply the name of the process, rather than the measure of any particular feature.

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3. World Now Has Four Billion Phone Lines

Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide. The International Telecommunications Union counts 1.27 billion fixed lines and 2.68 billion mobile accounts. The total number of people represented by those figures is unclear because many people, particularly in industrial countries, have both kinds of service.

The increase has been especially strong in developing countries that have been able to provide cellular phone service to tens of millions of people much more cheaply than having to wire up homes and offices for fixed-line telephones.

As a result, 61 percent of the world's mobile subscribers are in developing countries. China and India, for example, together added almost 200 million mobile subscribers to the global total in the first three months of this year.

In 1996 there were fewer than 1 billion fixed-line and mobile phone subscribers altogether. Fixed-line subscriptions have grown slowly since then, but mobile has taken off, showing spectacular success. The report also said more than 1 billion people in the world use the Internet.

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4. Robots and Senior Citizens in Aging Japan?

Ifbot, the resident robot at a Japanese nursing home, can converse, sing, express emotions and give trivia quizzes to seniors to help with their mental agility. Yet the pale-green gizmo has spent much of the past two years languishing in a corner alone. "The residents liked ifbot for about a month before they lost interest," said Yasuko Sawada, director of the facility in Kyoto, in western Japan. "Stuffed animals are more popular."

High-tech gadgets and futuristic robots Japan had hoped might lend a hand when the population turns gray haven't caught on with the elderly, who according to forecasts will make up around 40 percent of the population by the middle of the century. "Most elderly people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical. They want to be able to get around their house, take a bath, get to the toilet and that's about it," said Ruth Campbell, a geriatric social worker at the University of Tokyo.

Japanese manufacturers have learned the hard way that the elderly want everyday products adapted to their needs, easy to read for those with poor eyesight, big buttons for people with trembling hands and clear audio for the hard of hearing.

Not all high-tech products aimed at seniors have disappeared, though many are hardly blockbusters. For example, Secom's My Spoon, an automatic feeding device for those whose hands are too shaky to eat on their own, is available in Japan and the Netherlands. Two hundred have been sold, including 150 in Japan, since it first went on the market in 2002.

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5. Mexico's America Movil Going 3G in 2008

Officials of America Movil SA, the largest provider of wireless services in Latin America, said they expect to launch third-generation high-speed cell handsets in the region in the first quarter of 2008 and bid on more frequencies to expand their network, with capital investments of as much as US$3.2 billion over the next year.

The company reported strong subscriber growth of 6.2 million in the quarter, an increase of about 26 percent over the same quarter of 2006, bringing the total number of subscribers in the region to 143.4 million customers. Brazil and Mexico were the leaders, adding 1.7 million and 1.4 million subscribers, respectively.

Company CEO Daniel Hajj said testing on 3G networks is being carried out and that in Mexico, the company's home market where it controls about 70 percent of cell-phone service, the first products would be offered as early as January or February.

But he said America Movil hopes to be allowed to bid on additional frequencies the government is expected to auction soon, though the government could reserve WiMax frequencies for new competitors.

The company reported net profits of 11.1 billion pesos ($1.02 billion) in the third quarter, down from 11.3 billion pesos ($1.04 billion) in the same period last year. Net profit for the first nine months of the year totaled 42.1 billion pesos (US$3.9 billion; EU2.7 billion), a 26.4 percent increase over the first nine months of 2006.

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6. How the iPhone Changed Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless is reportedly talking to Google about using its upcoming mobile operating system. It has unveiled a host of phones for the holiday season and generally seems more hip overall. So why the change? Two words: Apple's iPhone.

The potential AT and T/Apple iPhone threat has pushed Verizon to come up with a new more hipper phone lineup. Verizon, which arguably has the best network has a lackluster phone lineup. The iPhone means rivals have to generate some kind of cool factor. And Verizon Wireless is so aware of this that it's even chatting with Google, which may be bidding for 700 Mhz wireless spectrum.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon Wireless is in advanced talks with Google about using the search giant's mobile operating system for its handsets. The move is notable because Google would get a huge win with Verizon Wireless on board. Verizon would get cheaper handsets, Google's mobile OS would be open source and Google gets to dent Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

These developments are quite a sea change for Verizon Wireless. Among wireless carriers the innovators on phones and new technology have been T-Mobile and Sprint. Here's to hoping Verizon Wireless' newfound edge benefits wireless customers.

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