#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:
and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.
since they re commonly used in toys and remote controls. He s also thinking about adding other sensors such as an accelerometer or thermometer to the battery o
#This Method of Robotic Pickup Could Stick The sticky effect seen when you rub a balloon on your hair could be used to help robots pick things up,
for example, it uses powered electrodes to sustain the electrostatic attraction, and alternating polarities to avoid charge buildup and keep the device from collecting dust.
to hold microchip wafers in place. But the trick works best with clean flat, smooth surfaces because the strength of the static cling depends on the size of the contact area.
Electrostatic attraction is suited not to manipulating ultrathin sheets of semiconductor material, for example, because these sheets are curved often.
including jobs that involve handling delicate materials such as thin semiconductors for new, advanced solar cells. But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.
Grabit, which was founded in 2011, counts Nike and Samsung among its strategic investors g
#How Magic Leap s Augmented reality Works A Florida startup called Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it had received $542 million in funding from major Silicon valley investors led by Google to develop hardware
for a new kind of augmented reality hardware. The secretive startup has yet to publicly describe or demonstrate its technology,
And last year, researchers at chip company Nvidia demonstrated a basic wearable display based on light fields.
One of Magic Leap patents covers the use of motion sensors and eye-tracking cameras on a wearable display to figure out at what depth a person eyes are focused.
Another of Magic Leap patent filings says that cameras, infrared sensors, and ultrasonic sensors could be used to sense the environment around a person,
and to recognize gestures. Depth-sensing cameras are now relatively cheap and compact (see ntel Says Tablets
The company is recruiting experts in chip design and fabrication apparently with a view to creating custom chips to process image data.
Dedicated chips could make that work more energy-efficient, something important for a wearable device. Magic Leap already employs Gary Bradski, a pioneer of computer vision research and software, notes Wetzstein.
Magic Leap is also trying to recruit people skilled in lasers, mobile and wireless electronics, cameras,
manufacturing supply-chain management, 3-D sensing, artificial intelligence, and video game development. Altogether, many of the underlying techniques Magic Leap needs to realize highly realistic augmented reality have been demonstrated,
and combine them in ways no one has managed yet to do. think people are starting to realize this is the future of building consumer devices he says. ut it involves big challenges at the intersection of optics, electronics, algorithms,
Even some of the area biggest technology boosters are appalled. ou have people begging in the street on University avenue Palo alto main street,
He blames globalization for wiping out the semiconductor industry and other high-tech manufacturing that once prospered in the region,
The Biom T2 uses a battery to power a system of microprocessors sensors springs and actuators;
Whereas brain-machine interfaces would require invasive surgery for brain implants he wants to connect electronic devices to the peripheral nerves at the site of the injury allowing people to control bionic limbs with their existing nerves
That means it can plug and play anywhere. t going to be quite difficult to regulate, Evans predicts.
The point-of-sale terminal at the CVS drugstore in Palo alto, California, can accept payments through a quick tap from a smartphone.
and clicking on Google alletapp intended to allow instant payment and taps the terminal. Nothing happens.
The iphone Touch ID fingerprint sensor already used to unlock the phone, recognizes it really you.
In the U s. there are only about 220,000 merchant point-of-sale terminals featuring the wireless payment communications system known as near field communication (NFC.
In a bid to force adoption of more secure credit cards that use a chip and a PIN number instead of a magnetic strip for payment authentication,
The sheets will contain organic LEDS, or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones.
OLEDS could be used in large sheets, because organic light-emitting molecules can be deposited over large surfaces.
They also run cooler than LEDS, so they don require elaborate heat sinks, making a lighting structure simpler.
OLED lighting is 10 to 100 times more expensive than conventional lighting but as costs come down,
In recent weeks, researchers have announced advances that could greatly improve the efficiency of OLED lighting.
It does this via nanoparticles that ease the transition for light as it passes between the parts of an OLED device.
Konica-Minolta and OLED Works (a business formed from Kodak former OLED division) are both developing cheaper new manufacturing techniques.
as well as the Dutch company Philips, plan to scale up production of OLED lighting in the next year or two,
OLED lighting is expensive in part because manufacturers typically use equipment developed for making high-resolution displays,
says Michael Boroson, the chief technology officer of OLED Works. His company is reëngineering the equipment
This fall, Konica-Minolta will start full-scale production of OLED lights on flexible plastic sheets.
which should be faster and cheaper than making OLED lights in batches, as is done now.
Even with such advances, it will take years to bring costs low enough to make OLED lighting widely used.
OLED lamps cost as much as $9, 000 now. But, Philips aims to introduce OLED products by the beginning of 2017 that cost $600 to $1, 600.
Costs are expected to drop further as the scale of production increases. Fundamental research could also make OLED lighting more realistic.
OLED lighting blends red, green, and blue light, but the blue light is relatively inefficient. Last week
Stephen Forrest, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, published work on a more efficient,
LEDS produce a beautiful sheet of light, Forrest says. believe OLED lighting will be a very important lighting source in the future, perhaps a dominant one.
But there a big gap between what we can do now and what we need to get costs down
To teach a robot running the software to pick up trash for example you would use a remote control to repeatedly guide its gripper to perform that task.
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
The chip on that board is made by mobile processor company Qualcomm which is an investor in Brain Corporation.
At the Mobile Developers Conference in San francisco last week a wheeled robot with twin cameras powered by one of Brain Corporation s circuit boards was trained live on stage In one demo the robot called
Brain Corporation was previously collaborating with Qualcomm on new forms of chip that write artificial neural networks into silicon.
Those neuromorphic chips as they are known are purely research projects for the moment. But they might eventually offer a more powerful and efficient way to run software like Brainos.
and one can envision how the extension of these concepts might lead to better sensors for advanced active safety and driverless car systems.
Sensors monitor the wearer s motion and battery-powered motors move cables to pull up on the heel
and novel soft sensors made of silicone rubber are integrated into the suit. The sensors developed at another lab at Harvard include embedded channels filled with a conductive liquid that changes in resistivity as the silicone is stretched.
To make the device even more efficient Walsh is studying human biomechanics and testing people s energy consumption as they use it.
and even high cholesterol in its development pipeline and has three in human trials progress that led the pharmaceutical company Sanofi to make a $700 million investment in the company last winter.
and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam to sense human movement such as gestures.
Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures
In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Another demonstration showed how a 3-D sensor could measure the dimensions of a sofa in a store
Bhowmik also showed how data from a tablet s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games where a virtual character viewed on a device s screen integrates into the real environment.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console which introduced gamers to depth sensing
Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
The rear sensor scans a scene using twin cameras that gauge depth with stereovision combined with an infrared camera to help fine-tune the results.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
The rear sensor in particular is compact enough to fit in very slim devices. On Monday Dell announced that the sensors will appear later this year in its Venue 8 7000 tablet which is only six millimeters thick thinner than any other tablet on the market t
#A Super-Strong and Lightweight New Material A new type of material made up of nanoscale struts crisscrossed like the struts of a tiny Eiffel Tower is one of the strongest and lightest substances ever made.
If researchers can figure out how to make the stuff in large quantities it could be used as a structural material for making planes and trucks as well as in battery electrodes.
In fact Greer says she is collaborating with German electronics company Bosch to apply her designs to lithium-air batteries i
#Manufacturing Advances Mean Truly Flexible Devices Are on the way One of the innovations packed inside the Apple Watchnd highlighted by designer Jony Ive at the company grand unveiling this weeks a flexible display.
As with other devices featuring flexible displays, such as those from LG and Samsung, the display has been laminated onto a stiff pane,
fixing it in place to prevent the damage that would come from repeated flexing. Even so, the appearance of the first few flexible screens in commercial devices may be a sign of things to Come in fact
Apple hasn disclosed why the Apple Watch has a flexible display. It might allow for a slight curve at the edges,
In a conventional LCD display the liquid crystals within the pixels need to be positioned perfectly between two sheets of glass.
is also extremely difficult to make a flexible backlighthe component needed to illuminate LCD pixels.
So the screen in the Apple Watch is almost certainly an OLED display. Rather than the pixels being illuminated by a backlight,
Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible. They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
The glass stabilizes the manufacturing process and afterwards the plastic, together with display and electronic components, is lifted off the glass.
Manufacturers have known how to do this for years. Samsung showed off a fully FLEXIBLE OLED display in 2013.
The tricky part is making sure the devices are durable. OLED pixels can be destroyed by even trace amounts of water vapor and oxygen,
so you have to seal the display within robust, high-quality, flexible materials. This is costly, and there are challenges with ensuring that the seal survives being bent hundreds or thousands of times over the lifetime of a device.
The parts within a flexible display also need to survive being bent. This is tricky because different layershe battery
the electronics, and the touch componentsend to be stacked, and the innermost layers have to bend more than the outermost ones.
Some researchers have developed stretchable electronics, which might help accommodate stresses (see tretchable Displaysand aking Stretchable Electronics.
Novel materials for touch screens that use flexible nanomaterials could also help. One patent application suggests Apple is already looking at this issue.
while keeping the electronics lined up properly with the pixels they control. Making a flexible battery is another challenge.
we have flexible displays that are fixed in places in the Apple Watch r
#A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.
because image sensors are designed for the ridges and valleys of adult fingertips. The Michigan State university researchers developed software that makes it feasible to accurately match fingerprints of children under five with off-the-shelf equipment.
and the sensors are small and work quickly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research specifically for recording vaccinations
The Michigan State university researchers needed to process images taken from fingerprint sensors using software to compensate for the small size of the children s fingerprints as well as their sometimes wet and oily skin.
He will try to make his own versions of the kind of chip inside A d-Wave machine.
And research published in 2011 showed that the machine s chip harbors the right kind of quantum physics needed for quantum computing.
and believes certain electrical insulator materials used in D-Wave s chips may be limiting its performance.
Earlier this year Siemens broke ground in Mainz Germany on what it says will be the world s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer.
Conventional augmented reality glasses use lenses, beam splitters, waveguides, reflectors, and other optics to relay an image to the eye,
It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights
or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel.
But before we re all riddled with electronics researchers have to figure out how to power it all.
#A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing A company called mcube has made a new kind of accelerometer, the device that senses motion from inside a smartphone or fitness monitor.
The component is small and cheap enough to lead to smart electronics in clothing and sports equipment.
The new accelerometers are a millimeter across, less than half the size of conventional ones. The company says they are more accurate, more power-efficient,
Accelerometers are made usually of two chips: a mechanical device that detects movement, and a microchip that makes sense of the signal from the first chip.
By integrating those components on a single chip, mcube has reduced not only the size of the device
but achieved a higher-quality signal. In fact, the company says its new accelerometer is sensitive enough to replace the gyroscope in a smartphone.
This could perhaps bring sophisticated motion-sensing capabilities to even the cheapest smartphones, some of which lack gyroscopes.
Nearly 70 million of mcube sensors have already been shipped to electronics manufacturers in China for use in smartphones.
which makes manufacturing equipment for electronics companies that compete with mcube, says its customers are interested also in integrated, single-chip accelerometers.
Rosa says Applied materials is, in fact, developing a process for making such chips using the latest materials,
including silicon germanium. Embedding motion sensors in clothing, mcube long-term goal, would require better ways of powering the devices
and having them communicate. But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
#Longer-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices A type of battery that could eventually store twice as much energy as a conventional one could be about to move beyond niche applications to wearable devices phones and even electric cars.
and are used in some wireless sensors but they have been too expensive to use elsewhere. Applied materials one of the world s biggest equipment suppliers for the semiconductor and display industries says it can make these batteries much cheaper.
This could clear the way for slimmer longer-lasting smart watches as well as electric cars with a range similar to gas-powered ones.
which makes it possible to replace conventional electrodes with lithium metal ones that hold far more energy.
Making high-quality electrode and electrolyte materials over large areas has been one of the challenges to making the solid-state batteries economically.#
#The batteries are made by successively depositing electrical contacts electrodes and the solid electrolyte that separates them in much the way that the many layers of a display are deposited.
much as you would dope semiconductor materials for chips. The company is also working on ways to deposit the energy-storing materials faster to enable thick layers that store large amounts of energy r
and machine learning techniques let a regular smartphone camera act as a depth sensor. Just about everybody carries a camera nowadays by virtue of owning a cell phone,
along with a ring of several cheap near-infrared LEDS. By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera. computer with Microsoft image of person's face e kind of turned the camera on its head
The light would bounce off the nearby object and return to the sensor with a corresponding intensity.
#Super-Fast Pixels Could Make Smartphones Brighter and Longer-Lasting Displays account for between 45 and 70 percent of the total energy consumption in portable electronics.
A new kind of liquid crystal display (LCD) with pixels that switch much more quickly could give smartphones brighter screens
The design uses new materials from Light Polymers, a startup based in South San francisco. In an LCD,
In a conventional LCD, pixels switch much too slowlyn the range of a couple of millisecondsor the technique to work.
The new designnown as a sequential displayould help LCDS close the energy efficiency gap with another type of display, the OLED.
OLEDS are used in some smartphones and TVS, but are more expensive to produce. Marc Mcconnaughey, CEO of Light Polymers, says the company materials are being evaluated by flat-panel display manufacturers.
#Terahertz Chip Identifies Short Strands of DNA One of the more significant practical challenges currently occupying molecular biologists is to find better ways of identifying short strands of DNA.
and markers that can be picked up by optical sensors providing a useful but indirect indication of the molecules that are present.
#IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does A new kind of computer chip,
Though it is no match for a conventional microprocessor at crunching numbers, the chip consumes significantly less power,
and is suited vastly better to processing images, sound, and other sensory data. IBM Synapse chip processes information using a network of just over one million eurons,
which communicate with one another using electrical spikess actual neurons do. The chip uses the same basic components as today commercial chipsilicon transistors.
But its transistors are configured to mimic the behavior of both neurons and the connectionsynapsesetween them.
The Synapse chip breaks with a design known as the Von neumann architecture that has underpinned computer chips for decades.
Although researchers have been experimenting with chips modeled on brainsnown as neuromorphic chipsince the late 1980s,
until now all have been many times less complex, and not powerful enough to be practical (see hinking in Silicon.
Details of the chip were published today in the journal Science. The new chip is not yet a product,
but it is powerful enough to work on real-world problems. In a demonstration at IBM Almaden research center, MIT Technology Review saw one recognize cars, people,
and it consumed 100,000 times as much power as the IBM chip. IBM researchers are now experimenting with connecting multiple Synapse chips together,
and they hope to build a supercomputer using thousands. When data is fed into a Synapse chip it causes a stream of spikes,
and its neurons react with a storm of further spikes. The just over one million neurons on the chip are organized into 4, 096 identical blocks of 250,
an arrangement inspired by the structure of mammalian brains, which appear to be built out of repeating circuits of 100 to 250 neurons,
Programming the chip involves choosing which neurons are connected, and how strongly they influence one another. To recognize cars in video, for example,
a programmer would work out the necessary settings on a simulated version of the chip, which would then be transferred over to the real thing.
Although the new Synapse chip has more transistors than most desktop processors, or any chip IBM has made ever, with over five billion,
it consumes strikingly little power. When running the traffic video recognition demo, it consumed just 63 milliwatts of power.
Server chips with similar numbers of transistors consume tens of watts of powerround 10,000 times more.
IBM new chip doesn have separate memory and processing blocks, because its neurons and synapses intertwine the two functions.
The new chip ay be a historic development, he says. he very low power consumption and scalability of this architecture are really unique.
even the best programmers find learning to work with the chip bruising, says Modha: t almost always a frustrating experience.
Asking the industry to adopt an entirely new kind of chip and way of coding may seem audacious.
because it is becoming clear that current computers won be able to deliver much more in the way of performance gains. his chip is coming at the right time,
The conventional way to stack semiconductors is to grow layers on top of each other. But not all semiconductors can be combined this way
because their crystalline structure doesn t allow it (see Adaptive Material Could Cut the Cost of Solar in Half).
Semprius grows semiconductor materials in the conventional way but also stacks several different combinations resulting in a solar panel that can capture more energy from sunlight.
Semprius has demonstrated cells made of three semiconductor materials stacked on top of a fourth solar cell that would not have been compatible otherwise.
Eventually the company hopes to stack two multijunction devices for a total of five or six semiconductors with a very high performance beyond 50 percent efficiency says Scott Burroughs vice president of technology at Semprius.
Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.
Smart thermostats on the market today, such as the Nest, are limited by the fact that they can sense temperature only in their immediate location.
and battery-free sensors behind couches and cabinets could provide the detailed data needed to make such thermostats more effective. ou could throw these things wherever you want
Versions were built that could power LEDS motion detectors, accelerometers, and touch-sensitive buttons. Adding Wi-fi capabilities makes the devices more practical.
Gollakota hopes to establish a company to commercialize the technology, which should also be applicable to other wireless protocols, such as Zigbee or Bluetooth,
and cellular network transmitters. But although enough energy can be collected that way to run low-powered circuits,
for example, one of the new prototypes switches its antenna back and forth between modes that absorb and reflect the signal from a nearby Wi-fi router.
The electronics need to fit into a smaller package, and rather than simply dealing with different wrist sizes youe got to contend with countless ear shapes,
Additionally, many of us are already wearing earbuds and headphones on and off throughout the day, and Leboeuf contends it not necessary to keep them on constantly to collect useful data.
including LG Heart rate Monitor Earphone and iriver iriveron Heart rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset (available to consumers for $180 and $200, respectively) and a pair of earbuds from Intel,
photodetector, and accelerometer into an earbud. The emitter shines an infrared light on a part of the ear between the concha and antitragusssentially, the lower part of the bowl of your ear,
The accelerometer, meanwhile, measures your movement. A digital signal processor (which can be housed inside or outside the earbud) analyzes the data,
removing oiselike skin movement or sunlight and extracting information like heart and respiration rates. With accelerometer and blood-flow data,
Leboeuf says, Valencell algorithms can also estimate things like the number of calories youe burned.
a paper he coauthored with researchers at Duke university medical school indicated that the company earbud sensor was able to accurately estimate total energy expenditure
Like Bluetooth headsets and some noise-cancelling headphones, the Performtek technology needs its own power source to work.
But a pair of Performtek-using earbuds that Intel showed off this year at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegaseant to be a reference design for manufacturersvoids this kind of bulk by harvesting power from the microphone jack.
Accelerometer data already being collected by the earbuds could even be used to create a sort of 3-D stereoscopic audio experience
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