#Google calls on FCC to mandate line-sharing pits itself directly against Comcast and other ISPS In the ongoing battle between net neutrality advocates and the ISPS,
one of the hot-button issues that emerged is whether or not ISPS should be regulated as common carriers.
Such regulation under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 would require that carriers share access to their lines and fiber networks.
Now, Google has weighed in on the issue, reminding the FCC that reclassifying companies like Comcast would serve the public interest and advance the deployment of high speed Internet.
What common carrier classification does and does not Do it may be helpful at this point to revisit
what a common carrier is. The concept is ancient dating back at least as far as the Roman empire.
At various points, governments have placed limits and strictures on professions that were deemed to act in the public interest.
One of the most common complaints from the telcos and cable companies is that the cost of building fiber networks (or
in the case of the proposed T-Mobile/AT&T merger, 4G LTE networks), is that it costs too much to be economically viable.
AT&T has made and broken repeated promises about network rollouts, often citing cost (Ars Technica has a summary of the shenanigans there over the years).
Verizon stopped deploying Fios citing construction costs and the difficulty of ramping the service in new markets.
Two years ago, an excellent piece by Bruce Kushnik skewered these claims by showing that Verizon total construction costs were dropping year-by-year,
even as it claimed that Fios was costing it more and more money. Despite securing additional money specifically for Fios upgrades,
the company never spent more cash in real dollars it just used the state funding it received to pay for fiber,
then cut the money it woulde spent on other networks to allow them to degrade.
In Verizon case it actively turned to tearing them out. This kind of bait -and-switch is what makes complaints that regulation represents unfair intrusion into the free market so damned egregious.
For decades, the telecommunications industry has gone collectively running to Congress, crying about the need for a greater slice of the tax revenue and service fee pie,
yet simultaneously resisting oversight. It has paid for legislation in nearly half the states that prevents municipalities from building
or funding their own broadband services, even in areas the carriers themselves don want to service.
Recent actions, like Comcast decision to arbitrarily charge more for modem rentals, illustrates the alternative scenario this is
Google argument essentially rests on the idea that as a would-be competitor itself, access to these preexisting networks would allow it to deliver substantially better rates and lower prices to its customers.
Historically, that been the case and the currently situation in which America faces a dwindling number of carriers
#New graphene display creates LEDS at an atomic level Graphene has had a rough go of it of late.
After years of breathless reporting on its potential as a long-term solution for logic circuits (computer processors and memory), interest as waned as fundamental research problems have refused to resolve.
This doesn mean that graphene has no electronics applications, however, and a research team from the University of Manchester has published a report detailing how flexible 2d graphene arrays could be used in the next-generation of LED screens.
This new project differs from earlier demonstrations of graphene technology. In September the Cambridge Graphene Centre demonstrated a display that incorporated a graphene electrode.
The new LEDS built by the University of Manchester in this experiment were engineered apparently at an atomic level from multiple layers of crystal lattice as shown below.
This type of structure implements multiple layers of materials horizontally, but because each lattice is only a few atoms thick,
the final display is semitransparent, extremely thin, and according to the research team, at least semi-flexible and durable.
The near-term applications of this technology could be in optoelectronics. Electron movement is controlled via quantum wells (a quantum well is a layer of material that constricts the movements of electrons to particular dimensions to ensure energy arrives where it meant to go).
) One of the major downsides to working with many advanced materials has been their stability wee covered several promising developments that decay so rapidly as to make any type of manufacturing quite difficult.
the University of Manchester team certified that the graphene-based LEDS have remained robust and continued to emit light for weeks.
The team claims that these graphene-based LEDS can emit light across their entire surface (apparently obviating
and have reached efficiencies that are already comparable to organic LEDS in terms of quantum efficiency (photons emitted per electron injected).
Whether or not that means graphene-based LED TECHNOLOGY can supplant OLED is, of course, an open question.
While OLEDS have become popular in certain Samsung displays, the OLED revolution in mainstream television has yet to occur.
What was predicted once as The next Big Thing after 1080p has been supplanted largely by conventional LCD technology at higher 4k resolutions.
Right now. OLED has just one major vendor LG offering serious support, and that not enough to drive long-term R&d for continuing the technology in large panels.
It not clear if graphene LEDS can drive the rich, vibrant colors that have made OLEDS desirable,
but if they can, it possible that TV manufacturers will finally be able to deliver the promise of OLED in a different technology.
Of course, given the long lead time between research and commercialization, wee still talking about advances that could take five to ten years to hit the market i
#Microsoft tries to thwart Google by investing in Cyanogen Windows phone still hasn set the world on fire,
so it seems Microsoft is investigating other ways to compete against Google and Apple in the mobile market.
Reports are coming in that Microsoft will participate in a round of funding for Cyanogen, Inc. the commercial enterprise that formed out of the Cyanogenmod community.
This will only give Microsoft a minority stake in the company, but this could hint at large changes for one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Over at the Wall street journal a few nuggets of information have come to light regarding Microsoft decision to help fund this fork of Android.
Details are slim, but sources claim that Microsoft will be a inority investorin Cyanogen latest round of funding (estimated at $70 million).
At the very least, this is Microsoft hedging its bets. On the other hand, maybe there more to this story.
Microsoft might just be laying the groundwork for a future without Windows phone. Cyanogen Earlier this week, Microsoft released the first stable version of Office on Android.
Similarly, the brand new mobile version of Outlook debuted on ios. Microsoft is well aware
of which way the wind is blowing, and it seems increasingly focused on delivering top-tier support to competing platforms.
Since Windows phone reportedly only has 3%of mobile marketshare, it easy to see why Redmond has shifted its priorities.
Over the last few years Cyanogen has been busy partnering with hardware manufacturers across the globe.
Specifically, this small company is focused on expanding in emerging markets where the established players haven taken over yet.
By Strategy Analyticsaccount, roughly 37%of Android devices worldwide are using off-brand forks, so there obviously a lot of money at stake here.
If Microsoft can get a piece of that massive pie, all the better for its shareholders. With free access to Office and free upgrades to Windows 10, Microsoft is bowing to market realities.
Google docs and OS X make it increasingly difficult for Microsoft to sell its products outright. Instead money has to come from subscriptions services and support contracts.
None of that is inherently bad, but clearly the Microsoft of 2015 shows little resemblance to the Microsoft of ten or twenty years ago.
This news serves as a stark reminder that the old grey mare just ain what she used to be
#Flexible nanogenerator harvests muscle movement to power mobile devices The consumer world is becoming powered by mobile devices,
but those devices are powered still by being tethered to a wall or a reserve power pack. What if you could generate power for your mobile devices simply by moving your body,
and the power source was almost unnoticeable? A new device developed at the National University of Singapore aims to fulfill both of those requirements.
The flexible nanogenerator resembles a small, stamp-sized patch that attaches to your skin. It uses your skin as a source of static electricity,
and converts it to electrical energy reportedly enough to power a small electronic device, like a wearable.
The device, presented at the MEMS 2015 conference last week, can generate 90 volts of open-circuit voltage when tapped by a finger.
The researchers presented the patch as a self-powered device that can track the wearer motion.
Electricity The power generates thanks to the triboelectric effect which is when certain types of materials can become electrically charged through contact and friction with another material in this case,
the patch gains the charge through fiction with human skin. When the two materials are pulled apart,
An electrode is needed in order to harvest the current, so the research team installed a 50nm-thick gold film to get the job done.
Thanks to the triboelectric effect creating the device is easier as well the skin is one of the triboelectric layers that helps produce the effect,
so that layer doesn need to be built into the device itself, saving time, money, and materials. It also removes something that can go wrong with the device having one less layer built in means that one less part that can Break in the researcherstest,
a finger-tap on the device was able to generate enough current to power 12 commercial LEDS.
Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to, in theory, indefinitely power a device so long as you keep moving,
this type of generator could remove the need for batteries in certain mobile devices your smartwatch
Who knows one day this type of generator could even generate enough energy to power your smartphone,
perhaps even removing the battery entirely, which is one of the biggest constraints to smartphone development and design o
#USB 3. 1 shows big gains over USB 3. 0 early tests indicate USB 3. 1 was a hot topic at CES this year,
with multiple vendors talking up the standard performance and new, reversible connector. Shipping hardware is still some months away,
but early performance data is looking solid particularly given that third-party controllers tend to improve over time.
Anandtech has teamed up with MSI and Asmedia to benchmark USB 3. 1 and compare it against third-party solutions from VIA as well as Intel own native solution.
The results vary, but many metrics are quite impressive particularly comparing random read performance at queue depth 32 between the USB 3. 1 Asmedia and native Intel USB 3. 0 performance.
Even compared to the VIA controller, which does quite well here, USB 3. 1 is 27%faster.
Compared to Intel, it 1. 7 times faster. In real-world file copy tests, the Asmedia USB 3. 1 controller completes the work in 75%of the time it takes the Intel integrated USB 3. 0 controller and half the time of the VIA solution.
Intel has demonstrated solutions capable of up to 800mb/s in RAID connected via USB 3. 1;
Anandtech early hardware hit 650-700mb/s in analogous testing. Generally speaking, Intel controllers tend to outperform third party controllers for a given standard,
but they also tend to ship later and it not clear when Intel will add USB 3. 1. Looking back to USB 3. 0,
Intel was remarkably late to add direct chipset support for the new standard it took the company three years to deploy its own USB 3. 0 solution after the first motherboards shipped with third-party controllers in 2009.
At the time, it was believed widely that Intel dragged its feet on USB 3. 0 hoping to replace it with Thunderbolt as the mainstream peripheral interconnect on most devices
but that never materialized. Intel has yet to announce when it might add USB 3. 1 support
and AMD hasn announced it either, but I expect a similar third-party support situation to evolve.
Companies like Via, Renesas, Marvell, and Asmedia will add the capability first, with integrated chipsets following after.
What more interesting, at least to me, is improved what storage performance could eventually mean for the venerable SATA connection.
Currently, most motherboards sport an array of 4-12 SATA ports, but features like M. 2 and msata allow for an SSD to be integrated directly on the motherboard.
Combine this option with fast external storage and youe got a set of solutions that could obviate the need for SATA ports at all or,
at the very least, reduce the number of additional connectors to 1-2 for expansion purposes.
Right now that a nonstarter USB 3. 1 doesn support features like TRIM but in the long run, USB 3. 1, future iterations of Thunderbolt,
and PCI Express-based storage directly on-motherboard could eliminate most of the need for internal storage cabling at all t
#New aluminum air battery could blow past lithium-ion runs on water As battery technologies go,
On the one hand, breakthroughs in Li-ion designs and construction are responsible for the Tesla Model S, new installations, green energy research,
and the modern smartphone. On the other hand, lithium-ion limitations are the reason why most EVS have a range of 40-60 miles, the Model S costs upwards of $80, 000,
and why your smartphone can last all day on a single charge. For all its promise and capability
which is why a new announcement from Fuji Pigment is so interesting. The company is claiming that its new aluminum-air batteries can run for up to two weeks
and be refilled with normal water. How an aluminum-air battery works First, some basics. The problem with battery technology isn
whether or not we can build better batteries as the chart below shows, we can build batteries that blow traditional lithium-ion out of the water.
Keep in mind that the chart below is exponential, meaning that fuel cell technology has 10 times the energy density of a typical cobalt-Li ion battery.
The various etal-Airbatteries including zinc-air, aluminum-air, and lithium-air, have some of the highest energy densities its possible to build.
The difficulties with aluminum-air construction, in particular, has been rapid degradation of the anode and, in early models of Al-Air, the release of hydrogen gas.
Fuji Pigment new announcement makes repeated reference to the work of Ryohei Mori, and while the referenced papers aren available for free,
the abstracts are online. The studies in question are aimed all at enhancing the performance of Al-air batteries
while extending their useful lifetimes typically, Al-air solutions begin to degrade immediately after the first charge cycle.
According to Mori work creating a secondary aluminum-air battery adjacent to the primary buffered the accumulation of byproducts that normally prevent the battery from working properly over the long term.
The echargabilityof Al-air batteries requires some explanation. Al-air batteries are primary cells, which means they can be recharged via conventional means.
As the aluminum anode is consumed by contact with oxygen, hydrated aluminum forms as a byproduct.
That material can be recycled and used to create a new aluminum anode, which is why the batteries are referred to as rechargeable.
Periodically, the aluminum anode will have to be replaced it not clear how often the Fuji Pigment battery would need servicing of this sort.
Could Al-air be the next big thing? New battery technologies and announcements are a dime a dozen,
but there reason to think that a workable Al-air technology could deploy within the next 2-5 years.
Multiple manufacturers are working on commercializing designs (Alcoa partnered with Phinergy in 2013 with plans for a 2017 debut),
and aluminum is abundant and relatively cheap. Al-air batteries have actually been used in specialized military applications for years,
which is important it means there some preexisting expertise and known characteristics that can be leveraged to create additional capacity.
That said, there are question, too. The hydrated aluminum oxide solution produced during the battery normal operation would need to be recycled in some fashion
it not clear that fresh water is as effective an aqueous solution as saltwater (meaning there might be need specific for one particular kind of solution.
The final price is also unknown, though previous estimations had put the cost of an Al-air system at roughly $1. 1 per kg of aluminum anode.
This was given not in precise terms relative to the cost of gasoline (and the weight of the aluminum anode in these batteries is unknown),
but the team that performed that analysis noted that proper recycling would put Al-air in the same cost range as conventional internal combustion engines.
Fuji Pigment has stated that it intends to commercialize this technology as early as this year,
which means we could see test demonstrations and proof of concepts by 2016. Whether auto manufacturers will jump for the technology remains to be seen car companies tend to be conservative
and Tesla has thrown already its weight behind the further use of lithium-ion technology u
#New microprocessor claims 10x energy improvement As power consumption has become one of the most important metrics of CPU design,
wee seen a variety of methods proposed for lowering CPU TDP. Intel makes extensive use of dynamic voltage
and frequency scaling, ARM has big. Little, and multiple companies are researching topics like near threshold voltage (NTV) scaling as well as variable precision for CPU and GPU operations.
Now, one small embedded company, Ambiq Micro, is claiming to have made a breakthrough in CPU design by building a chip designed for subthreshold voltage operation with dramatic results.
Ambiq new design strategy could be critical to the long-term evolution of the wearables market the Internet of things,
and for embedded computing designs in general if the company technology approach can scale to address to a wide range of products.
Subthreshold and near-threshold voltage operation The threshold voltage of a transistor is the voltage point required to create a conducting path between the source and drain terminals.
In simplest terms, this is the point at which the transistor turns n. The voltage threshold is not an absolute,
however operation is possible in both the near-threshold and subthreshold regions. The problem with NTV and subthreshold designs is that they tend to suffer from high amounts of leakage current
as shown above, and are capable of only very low operating frequencies within these voltage ranges.
the total amount of energy a chip leaks can result in higher power consumption than would result
The eye will tend to combine the two shades into a single perceived hue this fact is used widely in Twisted Nematic (TN) monitors to produce simulated 8-bit color using fast 6-bit panels.
Red 250 the monitor will alternate between Red 246 and Red 254. Flip between these two shades quickly enough
Ambiq is claiming that its Apollo microcontroller, which is based on the ARM Cortex-M4 design with FPU,
can deliver power consumption equivalent to a Cortex-M0+part without compromising its M4 with FPU performance.
and floating-point capabilities ran the tests 12 to 174 times faster than the ARM Cortex-M0 core and consumed 2x to 9x more power.
In other words, a subthreshold version of the Cortex-M4 with Cortex-M0 power consumption would be embedded an chip that meshed the best of both worlds incredible power efficiency
While there still a vast gulf between even a high-powered embedded chip like the Cortex-M4 and a Cortex-A7 smartphone class CPU, the only way to close that gap is to continue to push embedded performance per watt
or if it can boost higher-end hardware is still unknown, but approaches like this could revolutionize embedded hardware
and make all-day smartwatch battery life a reality in the long run t
#Lasers create surface so hydrophobic that water bounces off like a ball In the study of hydrophobic surfaces,
researchers are focusing more on modifying the physical nature of the surface rather than relying on the tried-and-true method of applying a hydrophobic coating.
Recently, UCLA engineers created a superomniphobic surface that repelled all known liquids using by modifying a surface made of nanoscopic nails rather than applying some kind of special omniphobic coating.
Now, researchers at the University of Rochester have used lasers to create a surface so hydrophobic that a single droplet of water can bounce up and down on it multiple times like a ball.
but would save money in the long run. While it not glass, the University of Rochester researchers have discovered a simple technique to make metal surfaces inherently superhydrophobic:
shoot it with lasers. Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev of the University Institute of Optics discovered a laser-patterning technique that etch nanoscopic structures onto a surface.
As you can see from the above video, the surface etched pattern is so hydrophobic that water literally bounces off,
#This cloudy-day black silicon solar cell can hit a record 22.1%efficiency When most people think of solar power,
theye usually thinking of warmer climates with lots of sun . Despite all the huge advances solar has made in recent years,
Researchers at Finland Aalto University have achieved a record-breaking 22.1%efficiency for a nanostructured silicon, or black, solar cell.
They accomplished this by overlaying a thin, passivating film on the nanostructures by a process known as atomic layer deposition,
and by integrating all of the metal contacts on the cell back side. Perhaps the best part:
Black solar cells work really well on cloudy days. his is an advantage particularly in the north,
said professor Hele Savin from Aalto University, who coordinated the study, in a statement. e have demonstrated that in winter Helsinki,
black cells generate considerably more electricity than traditional cells, even though both cells have identical efficiency values. sing the aforementioned process,
the black silicon isn limiting energy conversion efficiency. And thanks to the inherent properties of black solar cells, they can capture solar radiation at low angles,
generating more electricity over the full duration of a day as compared with traditional cells. ur record cells were fabricated using p-type silicon,
which is known to suffer from impurity-related degradation. There is no reason why even higher efficiencies could not be reached using n-type silicon or more advanced cell structures
The data shows the use of black silicon can result in a 3%increase in daily energy production
The Aalto University team results were published in Nature Nanotechnology s
#Quantum signatures of electronic transport in graphene discovered The key to making useful nanoelectronic devices from graphene is to first understand,
and then be able to control, the flow of electrons through tiny snippets of the material.
The absence of a bandgap in pure graphene means that although its electrical conductivity is the highest of any material bar none,
it is nearly impossible to shut it off completely. Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have figured recently out
not only how to build precisely defined bandgaps into composites of graphene and boron nitride, but they have uncovered also the deeper electronic structure of the material
What the MIT researchers basically did was take single layers of hexagonal graphene and stack them up against single layers of hexagonal boron nitride.
In order to coax the graphene-boron honeycomb into exposing its hidden behaviors, some additional outside influence needs to be imposed.
and add a massive, out-of-plane magnetic field. When you do that it becomes possible to see
when the electronic energy levels of the material are plotted against the applied magnetic field. Originally proposed by Douglass Hofstadler in 1976,
In the present case, the researchers used fields up to 45 Tesla that were available at the National High Magnetic field Laboratory in Tallahassee.
As a graphical representation of the fractal structure of the energy spectrum for electrons in a magnetic field,
When the graphene-boron honeycombs are stacked out of alignment, they create something known as a oire pattern
The researchers previously demonstrated something known as a uantum spin Hall statewhen they applied a magnetic field with an in-plane orientation.
In contrast to the unidirectional current flow of electrons in a regular metal, a material that behaves as a opological insulatorwould be useful in several spintronic applications.
electrons in graphene composites configured with just the right alignment can flow at significantly greater speeds,
Bending light with a microchip The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has demonstrated solid-state optical phased array technology in a microchip bringing the ability to bend light to the battlefront.
from battleship radar to beamforming in mobile communications. Essentially, the aim is the same: to shape the wavefront of light (dynamically
But in the former case, radar antennas are used as the electrically tunable element. So what the big deal here?
and frequencies in the GHZ, phased array optics is based on operating in the visible, with much smaller wavelengths and oscillations much faster (hundreds of nanometers and many hundreds of THZ,
thanks to problems with liquid crystal pixel scaling 1-2. These factors have limited the widespread adoption of current technologies for military and commercial use.
DARPA breakthrough 3 uses a microchip to control the light, vastly different to existing methods.
and manufacturable through standard semiconductor processing. DARPA Short-range Wide-field-of-view Extremely agile Electronically steered Photonic Emitter (SWEEPER) program has integrated successfully nonmechanical optical scanning technology onto a microchip.
The SWEEPER technology has demonstrated that it can sweep a laser back and forth more than 100 000 times per second, 10,000 times faster than current state-of-the-art mechanical systems.
the widest field of view ever achieved by a chip-scale optical scanning system. DARPA foresees this technology will open up a new class of miniaturized, extremely low-cost, robust laser-scanning technologies (LIDAR),
which could lead to greatly enhanced capabilities for numerous military and commercial applications ncluding autonomous vehicles, robotics, sensors and high-data-rate communications.
See the featured image on top as an example of implementation on the battlefront. Thanks to the secrecy behind DARPA exact achievements, there is a lack of technical details coming out of the defense agency.
which last year published strikingly similar work 4 to this press release, with reference to LIDAR TECHNOLOGY, in the form of a silicon chip able to bend light
Those researchers built a series of pipes for light (phase shifters) on a microchip, which is able to slows down
lectronic data from a computer are converted into multiple electrical currents; by applying stronger or weaker currents to the light within the phase shifter, the number of electrons within each light path changeshich, in turn,
The timed light waves are delivered then to tiny array elements within a grid on the chip.
The light is projected then from each array in the grid, the individual array beams combining coherently in the air to form a single light beam and a spot on the screen. herefore, thanks to the complexity of the task at hand,
it not unreasonable to speculate that the DARPA technology is an extension of this work,
but for more specific battlefront demands. If so, it means that phased array optical technology has reached finally silicon-processing-level integration a significant landmark in its development e
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