Semiconductors are building blocks of Technology and gadgets and the limiting factor of Silicon chips has always been heat dissipation: More efficiently we can remove heat from semiconductor chips, higher clock they can run on.

LASERs are here to save the future, as they pave way to building most effective, efficient means of cooling Semiconductors.

How LASER Cooling works

Ironically, cooling is observed by actually heating the material. Using lasers, researchers cooled membrane fluctuations to minus 269 degrees C with fractions of energy utilization.

“In experiments, we succeeded in achieving a new and efficient cooling of a solid material by using lasers. We have produced a semiconductor membrane with a thickness of 160 nanometers and an unprecedented surface area of 1 by 1 millimeter,” explained Koji Usami, associate professor at Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute. “In the experiments, we let the membrane interact with the laser light in such a way that its mechanical movements affected the light that hit it. We carefully examined the physics and discovered that a certain oscillation mode of the membrane cooled from room temperature down to minus 269 degrees C, which was a result of the complex and fascinating interplay between the movement of the membrane, the properties of the semiconductor and the optical resonances.

What is worth noting here is that even though the membrane is getting a little bit warmer overall, the membrane is cooled at a certain oscillation and the cooling can be controlled with laser light. So it is cooling by warming! Laser cooling of atoms has been work in progress for years in the institute and they have successfully cooled gas clouds of cesium atoms down to near absolute zero i.e. minus 273 degrees C – using focused lasers – while creating entanglement between two atomic systems.

This is like rocket science, but they make it sound so easy.

What it means for Science & Computing

It Opens entirely new possibilities for a new field of Science called Optomechanics, which is the interaction between light, and a mechanical motion. Optomechanics could pave the way for cooling components in quantum computers, computers of the Future.

This invention could also lead to the development of new sensors for electric current and mechanical forces. Such cooling in some cases could replace expensive cryogenic cooling, which is used today and could result in extremely sensitive sensors that are only limited by quantum fluctuations. The possibilities are endless, you could hold a supercomputer  without melting your hands in the future, thanks to Laser cooling.

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You can get started with a Arduino project with a easy to setup USB-based development board like Teensy. Other than being good at programming, you would have to tinker a couple of solders to get connections for peripherals which may not be handy for all.

Teagueduino is an open source electronic board and interface that allows you to realize creative ideas without soldering or knowing how to code, while teaching you the ropes of programming and embedded development (like arduino). Teagueduino is designed to help you discover your inner techno-geek and embrace the awesomeness of making things in realtime — even if you’ve only ever programmed your VCR.

Teagueduino can prevent all the soldering trouble, replacing intimidating code with simple drop-down menus, which you can adjust in realtime, giving you instant feedback as you make adjustments to your ‘coding’ handiwork. Teagueduino board includes snap-enabled inputs and outputs.

Teaguedino is a protoype as of the time of writing but  would be available soon for  $160 to get a fully assembled kit, and the second mode with extra I/O ports for $260. As of now they are catching up their funding goals and once done, they would be available in November.

Game example:

Related: Arduino Alternative : Android based DIY projects

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When your LCD screen backlight burn out, you might have to get them replaced or do something even better: DIY Replace LCD with LED backlight. Not only is this solution cheaper, but also easier to find in the market. A sub $10 LED strip could replace the CFL backlight without any trouble.

How to Replace LCD backlight with LED – Transform LCD Display to LED

Warning: If you have no background on opening displays, seekout expert help on this before you unscrew your display.

HowTo: Carefully take apart the screen with clean hands making sure that the LCD, filters, and Fresnel lenses stay clean, untouched. If you happen to touch them, make sure you clean them well afterwards. You might have to use a mild cleaner, don’t use any toxic and/or heavy duty cleaners can destroy the plastic. Use a damp clean paper towel to do the initial wet wipe then use a dry but slightly damp paper towel to dry streaks immediately (using the wax on, wax off technique).

If you do it nicely, the brightness should be close to your existing LCD CCFL display, but only whiter. The only drawback you would get with a LED strip is the bright spots where LED is present and minor darker gaps. But this difference is not all that noticeable as light is diffused nicely on the screen.

credits filear

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IOIO (pronounced yoyo) is capable of doing almost everything that a Arduino could, including a retro-style alarm clock that can ring when you get messages.

And there’s a Wall Printer which uses seven Sharpie-style market pens hooked up to servos for an old-school printer effect controlled by an Android phone.

These are just some early samples, the potential is huge.

Why Android instead of regular Arduino?

• High cost.
• Complicated. Especially so for complete beginners.
• High latency.
• Low bandwidth.
• Required replacement of the Android device OS.
• Large physical size.

Definitely worth considering if you’re into Android and electronics; you can pre-order the IOIO for Android here, for $49.95.

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Accelerometers were once the sole way of sensing smartphone’s orientation, motion. iPhone 4 changed the trend, making Gyroscope eternal part of today’s smartphones. Accelerometers work great in its own domain, but it doesnt address enough “degrees of freedom” to sense a Full 360 degree motion, orientation.

The explanation of “How Gyroscopes work” isnt that easy and this is the reason why most online tutorials have failed to explain the real behavior. When I first leant about it, the more I read, the more I was confused. Here is some basic explanation of how it works, its meant to be easy if you know basic Physics.

How Gyroscopes Work:

Gyroscope can balance on almost on any surface with single contact: It can be a finger or even a string. They can resist motion about the spin axis in very odd ways; but the most interesting effect is that gravity-defying part which is called Precession.

Newton’s first law of motion states that “a body on motion continues to move at constant speed, along a straight line, unless acted upon by an external/unbalanced force”. A rotating object has angular momentum that tends to rotate the object continuously. So Once the wheel of a gyroscope starts rotating, it resists any change in its axis of rotation (due to angular momentum). If we apply an external force that tries to change it, there is an opposite reaction (Newton’s 3rd law) that pushes it in the opposite direction. This force is always tangential (perpendicular), and because this point of the wheel is rotating, the force tends to balance itself in a circular motion, which also holds the gyroscope spinning against gravity with a single point of contact.

Here is a video that would make every bit of the above explanation clear:

iPhone’s Digital Gyroscope:

Of course, Gadgets cant afford to have a spinning wheel, it would be way too powerhog and huge. Smartphones employ a electronic stripped down version which essentially works on the same concepts, but in a slimmer, meaner packages.

A microelectromechanical system (MEMS) is an embedded system that integrates electronic and mechanical components at a very small scale. A basic MEMS device consists of an ASIC and a micro-machined silicon sensor. The AGD1 2022 FP6AQ chip found in the iPhone 4 is a MEMS gyroscope, designed by STMicroelectronics.

MEMS gyroscope found inside the iPhone 4 is nearly identical to an off-the-shelf STMicroelectronics L3G4200D gyroscope.  It comprises of of a plate, called the “proof mass,” that vibrates (oscillates) when a drive signal is applied to set of drive capacitor plates. When a user rotates the phone, the proof mass gets displaced in the X, Y, and Z directions by Coriolis forces. An ASIC processor senses the proof mass’ displacement through capacitor plates located underneath the proof mass, as well as finger capacitors at the edges of the package.

The V654A ASIC die converts the tiny capacitive signals from the GK10A MEMS die into a digital signal which is fed into the iPhone 4. Then this data is used to steer the wheel of the car in the Game, etc.

Its complex in implementation, the design involves high precision design & electronics.

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Ben Heck’s has made a clever hand-crank mobile charger, which can be of a great help when your smartphones is not easy on battery.

If you have the basic know how of electronics and hardware, its pretty easy and straight forward. A USB port provides five volts of power which is why the crank worked with the HTC EVO and should work with practically any smartphone.

And if you are not geek enough, you can always buy a crank charger, works with all USB phones/devices.

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The new technology computes an image in much smarter way. Adobe uses new Plenoptic lenses to capture a series of images over certain depth range when camera is clicked. The images taken by this method capture various focus levels ( right from too much IN to too much OUT), capturing just enough data to produce perfectly focussed image during Post-processing , a method of taking pictures so that any part of a photo can be brought into focus after the fact.

Adobe demoed this Revolutionary Technology at the Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference.  While the technology is still a good ways from being commercialized, it’s an interesting look into the future of photography. By using a bunch of tiny lenses and some rendering software, users will be able to select what they want in focus, even after the photo has been taken. This technology will let users create Stereoscopic 3D images on the fly as well.

How Plenoptic Lenses Work

Plenoptic lens consists of hundreds of tiny lenses kept together–in between a camera’s lens and the image sensor.

Here’s what the plenoptic lens looks like. The lens is on the left; that large round object is a pin head:

With the Plenoptic lens in-place, the camera’s sensor records what looks like a bunch of fragmented images, but in reality, each fragment contains more information about individual light rays entering the camera.

To understand this better, lets recall how a traditional camera works and then compare the difference

With traditional or current generation cameras, a ray of light enters the lens and gets recorded on a specific spot, as illustrated below:

Plenoptic lens adds magic to it, the same light ray passes through several lenses before making it to the sensor, so it’s getting recorded from several different perspectives.

Because there’s all these tiny little lenses in front of the sensor, the resulting image looks like a pixelated image with several 1000s of tiny images, which when post-processed yields images with any focus. but, when these iamges are processed, they give you vital information about the image with different Focus levels.

Watch the Video to get a closer look:

Indeed, a very intriguing demonstration. While the technology has yet to be miniaturized so that it can fit into modern cameras, the potential is huge for power Photography professionals. And not to forget a simpler approach for amateurs.

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Developed by PS3 game console hacker-modder Mathieu Hervais, and PS3 Hacking community folks, PSGroove open source code requires purchasing a a small silicon chip to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 gaming console. Its is totally a DIY project for the Electronics Hardware geeks.

Note: If you’re looking for “Easy jailbreak”, then this method is not meant for you.

PSGroove aims on jailbreaking PS3 game console is to run unsigned (non Sony approved) applications and  Games on PS3 console.

PSGroove’s source code is available at Github Repository which requires the hardware – Teensy++ USB Development Board with Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) microcontroller built along with AT90USB key.

And with that code compiled one could even flash it to a Teensy++ USB Development Board ($24) or anAT90USBKEY($31).
Teensy++ is geek’s favorite USB Development Board chip and micro-controller key (ATB90USB and others) that executes the open-source PSGroove code. Teensy++ can do lots of custom USB hacks n Mods including Hacking a PC without touching it. If you plan on working with it, here is some basic stuff from Readme:

This is the PSGroove, an open-source reimplementation of the psjailbreak exploit for AT90USB and related microcontrollers.

It should work on:

AT90USB162
AT90USB646
AT90USB647
AT90USB1286
AT90USB1287
ATMEGA32U4
…and maybe more.

Although, the first thing that comes to the  mind is piracy, this software is not intended to enable it, PS JailBreak isn’t just about backups and to show the strong emotions associated with the cause, such features have been disabled. Only execution of unsigned third-party apps and games is allowed, which is an attempt to make the system “More Open”.

The PS3 hacking community celebrates its brave attempt to release an open-source version of PS3 jailbreak. However, this might not be up for mass adoption and application since it’s a DIY method. No matter where this project heads, guys back at Sony might be already looking to fix the vulnerability.

Read the full README.

In case you need any assistance, Follow Mathieulh and RichDevX on twitter, the masterminds behind the hack.

Update: These BlackcatUSB boards work too.

Source: ps3wiki.lan.st | psgroove (source code @ github)

This concept has already taken flight and is being used in commercial applications TED Talks and also in a Sony prototype. Imagine the world where all the wires just go off, all the clutter will be cleared. If you have no idea of this, watch this video first.

How it works:

Basically, power is fed to a ring made of magnet wire. When electricity is passed from this loop, it creates Electro magnetic field. Inductive Coupling uses magnetic fields to transfer power. There is a primary coil, which generates a magnetic field. Then there is another secondary coil which is composed of a capacitor and a coil, the capacitor creates a resonant circuit with the primary and secondary coils. A smaller loop is attached to the system that you want to power and picked up from the base unit. The concept can be tailored for your purposes such as an inductive charging pad. We’d like to see a hack that incorporates the base into a mouse pad (or the desk itself) and the receiver into the body of a wireless mouse.

You can Read the DIY Tutorial here.

Moore’s Law predicts that the amount of memory that can fit on a given area of silicon, for a fixed cost doubles every 12-18 months. The limit of this prediction is being tested as components get ever smaller and their computationally useful properties become less reliable.

Researchers have managed to create a transistor made from just seven atoms. When such technology is used to design computers, the processor would be 1/100th of the size it is today, making it possible to package more transistors on a single chip, and hence increasing the power of computing by several times. The scientists believe that it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.

Basically, Transistors acts as a  tiny switch which becomes the building block of all silicon chips.  However, this transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors, but the latter was never demonstrated to work as effectively as the current one.

The paper is entitled “Spectroscopy of Few-Electron Single-Crystal Silicon Quantum Dots“.

“We are manipulating individual atoms and placing them with atomic precision, in order to make a working electronic device,” elaborated Simmons. “We have replaced just seven individual silicon atoms with phosphorus atoms. That is amazing exactness”.

Modern Chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms wide. The working transistor was created by replacing seven atoms in a silicon crystal with phosphorus atoms.

This is the world’s first electronic device in silicon systematically created on the scale of individual atoms as per Professor Michelle Simmons, lead researcher on the project at the University of New South Wales.

If an entire chip could be made with every one of its billions of transistors made from the silicon crystals, it could mean an “exponential” leap in processing power.

When?

There’s a long way before these chips commercialize, The current tiny transistor they created was handmade using a scanning tunnelling microscope to move the phosphorus atoms into place.

Although it was first developed in 1981, it uses extremely challenging techniques that require highly clean and stable surfaces, exceptional vibration control, and sophisticated electronics. Simmons’ team is now applying those techniques towards their first quantum computer.

Quantum computing is expected to be the next big scientific leap, and could revolutionize cryptography, weather forecasting, and nuclear modeling amongst other fields.

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The memristor is a device as fundamental as the resistor, inductor and capacitor, but is based on the relationship between flux and charge, rather than between voltage and charge.

Memristors retain memory states even when no current is being passed through them and they can be used not just as a memory device, but also to perform computations. That means computation could be performed on chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialised processing unit. The current gen computers link the processor and memory unit by a high-speed bus which introduces delays of the order of few 100s of nanoseconds(assuming large data transfers). With the new Memristors, the delay would theoretically be brought down to zero.

Instant-on PCs: As memristors retain memory in the absence of power, they would help creating the computers that can power-on to the last state in split-seconds.

Building More Capable Mobile, Supercomputers: Apart from what is said, HP claims that within 5 years memristor-based computing could be used to create handheld devices with 10 times the embedded memory possible today, or to power supercomputers that could reach speeds faster than what Moore’s Law suggests is possible using current technologies.

Memristors are more powerful and capable than what it may look like. They can behave as a digital as well as analogue device which brings them a step closer to Human brain. Since our brains are made of memristors, the floodgate is now open for commercialisation of computers that would compute like human brains, much faster, which is a giant leap ahead of current Neumann architecture.

Advantages of Memristors over Solid State Semiconductors

Inherently, Memristors require less energy to operate, and are still faster than current solid-state storage technologies including SSDs, flash memory. As they are not semiconductors, they are immune to radiations. The problem with traditional silicon chips is that when the size gets too small, it gets more prone to slightest radiations raising the error beyond tolerable limits. With Memristors, this would be overcome, miniaturization would be much more easier and hence cheaper.

We don’t doubt the potential of memristors, they can bring out new possibilities. The only question is when? HP claims that it has created architectures for memory chips using memristors, and believes memristor-based devices could come to market “within the next few years”.

via electroiq

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Google with it’s Google Energy, is trying a similar approach.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live, details at the end

The future is all about generating your own cheap electricity in greener ways, and a US startup believes that they have found a solution – “Powerhouse in a Box”.

Bloom energy, formerly “Ion America”,  comes-up with something that is truly powerful, and revolutionary. K.R. Sridhar has built what he claims to be a fuel cell that can power a typical US home for a year with zero emission. This equals 2 European and 4 Asian houses 24/7 x 365 days, that’s alot of energy.

KR had worked previously with NASA to build a handy device that could actually produce Oxygen for Mars. But the idea was dropped by the agency, and KR reversed the invention to make it a fuel cell.

Currently, these boxes cost $700,000-$800,000, but eventually in 5-10 years, there will be one in every home – and Sridhar thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen.

Two of these boxes combined together makeup to a size of a brick, and they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas)of upto size of refrigerator.

The fact  is that they’re already installed at datacenters in companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. Four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past 9 months.

Watch the Video Coverage from CBS:

The technology will be unveiled to public on wednesday, 24th feb, the countdown is already clicking on their website. Stay tuned for the unveiling, we will keep you updated @taranfx.

Update: BloomEnergy is now Live

Energy Saver: Built with our patented solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom’s Energy Server™ is a new class of distributed power generator, producing clean, reliable, affordable electricity at the customer site.

Fuel cells are devices that convert fuel into electricity through a clean electro-chemical process rather than dirty combustion. They are like batteries except that they always run. Our particular type of fuel cell technology is different than legacy “hydrogen” fuel cells in four main ways:

1. Low cost materials – our cells use a common sand-like powder instead of precious
   metals like platinum or corrosive materials like acids.
2. High electrical efficiency – we can convert fuel into electricity at nearly twice the
   rate of some legacy technologies
3. Fuel flexibility – our systems are capable of using either renewable or fossil fuels
4. Reversible – our technology is capable of both energy generation and storage

Each Bloom Energy Server provides 100kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 100 average homes or a small office building… day and night, in roughly the footprint of a standard parking space. For more power simply add more energy servers.

At the heart of every Energy Server™ is Bloom’s patented solid oxide fuel cell technology.

Each Energy Server consists of thousands of Bloom’s fuel cells. Each cell is a flat solid ceramic square made from a common sand-like “powder.”

Each Bloom Energy fuel cell is capable of producing about 25W… enough to power a light bulb. For more power, the cells are sandwiched, along with metal interconnect plates into a fuel cell “stack”. A few stacks, together about the size of a loaf of bread, is enough to power an average home.

In an Energy Server, multiple stacks are aggregated together into a “power module”, and then multiple power modules, along with a common fuel input and electrical output are assembled as a complete system.

For more power, multiple Energy Server systems can be deployed side by side.

In addition to Bloom’s unmatched performance, this modular architecture offers…

• easy and fast deployment
• inherent redundancy for fault tolerance
• high availability (one power module can be serviced while all others continue to operate)
• mobility

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“number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years”

Over the years scientists and chip industry evangelists have argued that Moore’s law is still valid as we enter the era of Multi-core processors. But, the latest revelation from IBM can give the the Moore’s law a permanent backseat. IBM’s technology takes a step backward (by creating 6x times bigger transistor) and still a giant-leap ahead (by creating much higher Operating clock and hence the speed).

IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of ultra-high-speed transistor design, creating a 100GHz graphene-based wafer-scale device. What this means is that they manufactured a whole wafer of the the things at once, rather than one researcher hovering over a microscope to painstakingly construct one or a handful of transistors.

The transistor that the researchers have developed is a relatively large one, with a gate length of 240nm (a typical desktop processor is 45nm) – speeds should increase as the gate length shrinks. Hence, 100Ghz is just the beginning.

The FET (field-effect transistor) that the IBM team developed exploits “very high carrier mobilities” of graphene based on a paper published in the journal Science. It employs a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms grown on a silicon substrate.

The high carrier mobility of graphene has been exploited in field-effect transistors that operate at high frequencies. Transistors were fabricated on epitaxial graphene synthesized on the silicon face of a silicon carbide wafer, achieving a cutoff frequency of 100 gigahertz for a gate length of 240 nanometers. The high-frequency performance of these epitaxial graphene transistors exceeds that of state-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length.

This extraordinarily thin sheet is created in an ordered crystaline structure on top of another crystaline structure (ol’ garden-variety silicon). The graphene sheet has a hexagonal, honeycombed structure.

A long gate length means plenty of room for speed improvements

Why Graphene?

In Contrast with Silicon, Graphene has an exceptional electron mobility, but it has remained stubbornly resistant to the creation of band gaps — the electron-free zones necessary for transistors to funtion as on/off switches. And IBM’s research team made this possible.

In an IBM Research statement, vice president for science and technology, said:

“A key advantage of graphene lies in the very high speeds in which electrons propagate, which is essential for achieving high-speed, high-performance next generation transistors. The breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.”

Key to the breakthrough is what the paper calls a “interfacial polymer layer” that separates the graphene sheet from its metal gate dialectric. And although the gate length is a hefty 240nm, IBM notes that there is “plenty of space for further optimization of its performance by scaling down the gate length.”

But even at this gate length and at this early stage of their development, IBM’s graphene transistors can already achieve speeds of 250 percent (i.e. 100Ghz) of those achievable by “state-of-the-art” silicon metal-oxide semiconductor FETs of the same gate length (40Ghz).

Notably, there are two breakthroughs this processor prototype will go through:

1. All test were conducted at room temperature. IBM claims if this is done at a lower temperature, performance can be scaled to much higher levels (roughly 40%)
2. Gate size: Right now the gate size is 240nm nearly 6x times more than current generation PCs. As the research advances, these graphene chips can be compressed further thereby reducing the distance and delay, improving the performance multiple times.

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The transistor is basically benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, behaves just like a silicon transistor.

The molecule’s different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it. Now molecular transistors could escalate the next step of developing nano-machines that would take just a few atoms to perform complex calculations, enabling massive parallel computers to be built.

The challenges they have faced include being able to fabricate the electrical contacts on such small scales, identifying the molecules to use, and figuring out where to place them and how to connect them to the contacts.

Despite the significance of the latest breakthrough, practical applications such as smaller and faster molecular computers could be decades away, says Reed.

This is an incredible achievement because of the potential applications in nanomachines since a few atoms would be enough to “perform complex calculations.” It will take some time before we would see the technology taking real life applications, but when it does, I wont be surprised to see a supercomputer of a size of normal PC processor.

via [Wired]

Well what you are about to read could be HARMFUL to us, again.

WARNING: Do not proceed if you intend to exploit this. The sole purpose of the original author of the hack is for educational purposes only.

Magnetic spoofers have been around for a while. The one you see in movies,  a kid hacks CCs with a piece of hardware, is very much possible.

We’re getting close to that kind of magic with card spoofer that is button-programmable.

Jarek, the author of the Hack, accomplished this by interfacing a 16-button keyboard and a LCD with an AVR ATmega168 microcontroller. Card codes can be entered with the buttons and verified on the LCD. Of course this is still dependent on you knowing the code in the first place.

As you know, credit cards use this technology. It’s literally not possible to use this over shops, stores coz this thing doesn’t looks like credit card at all. But there is another potential area where it raises concern :The same technoloy is also used for building access in Offices, Universities, and hotels.

The basic concept is pretty simple. It has a electromagnet which is adjusted by the voltage controlled the microcontroller. It sends out just right voltage to get the right magnetic pattern on the end of the plate, pretending it to be a card.

You can read the complete guide here.

The scope is pretty much unlimited, and the purpose of this post is to raise awareness among the authorities to move away from this technology.

With chip makers such as IBM and Intel aiming to shrink the manufacturing process to 22 nanometers and smaller, the push is on to develop ways to improve performance and energy efficiency. Scientists with IBM Research and the California Institute of Technology are working on ways to use DNA molecules as the basis for building tiny circuit boards. As shown in these images from IBM Research, the DNA can be put into various shapes and used as a sort of scaffolding, where millions of nanotubes can be deposited onto the sticky DNA and then self-assemble into the precise patterns.
All this makes DNA an ideal “scaffolding” that chip designers can use to create origami-like complex patterns on top of which they can add carbon nanotubes, nanowires, and other microscopic materials that control the flow of electronics across a computer chip.

“The cost involved in shrinking features to improve performance is a limiting factor in keeping pace with Moore’s Law and a concern across the semiconductor industry,” said Spike Narayan, Science & Technology manager at IBM’s Almaden research lab in San Jose, CA.

Moore’s Law holds that computing power at a given cost doubles every two years. Gains in chip speeds over the past two decades have largely been obtained by shrinking components. But with some parts now at microscopic levels, engineers are having an increasingly difficult time building on previous work.

Narayan said IBM and Caltech’s breakthrough in DNA-based chip design could help maintain Moore’s Law well into the future.

“The combination of this directed self-assembly with today’s fabrication technology could lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip-making process,” said Narayan.

IBM plans to publish a paper on the research in the September issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

IBM scientists say the DNA process can be used to increase performance, speed and energy efficiency in microchips, where feature sizes are 22 nm or smaller, and that these next-generation microprocessors can be less expensive to manufacture.

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The chip giant said in a statement that it will pay  $11.50 a share in cash for Wind River, which closed at $8 on Wednesday.

The purchase is interesting on a few fronts:

• Wind River bolsters Intel’s embedded software strategy;
• The purchase indicates that Intel thinks its future growth is in embedded devices such as smartphones, in-car systems and mobile Internet devices;
• And “Intel everywhere” is going to include software that runs behind the scenes to connect devices.
• With Wind River, Intel will have customers in the aerospace, industrial, networking equipment and consumer electronics verticals.

Wind River has about 1,600 employees and annual sales of $359.7 million. The company’s operating system, VxWorks, goes with middleware and design tools used for embedded devices. Wind River counts BMW, Boeing, NASA, Northrop Grumman, Sony and others as customers.

Those industrial strength customers will give Intel new markets to target. Wind River will also give Intel a broader competitive set. Notably, Intel will now compete with Microsoft. From Wind River’s annual report:

Our primary competition comes from internal research and development departments of companies that develop device systems in-house. In many cases, companies that develop device systems in-house have already made significant investments of time and effort in developing their own internal systems, making acceptance of our products as a replacement more difficult. Additionally, many of these in-house departments may increasingly choose to use open-source software, such as the Linux operating system. We also compete with independent software vendors and, to a limited extent, with open-source software vendors. Some of the companies that develop device systems in-house and some of these independent software vendors, such as Microsoft Corporation, have significantly greater financial, technical, marketing, sales and other resources and significantly greater name recognition than we do.

It’s also unclear how the Intel purchase will affect Wind River’s partnerships with chip makers. Wind River in its annual report touted its strategic relationships with chip makers such as ARM Holdings, Broadcom, Freescale, IBM, NEC, Qualcomm, Sun, Texas Instruments and Xilinx. Many of Wind River’s partners compete with Intel.

In any case, Intel’s heft may be able to turbocharge Wind River’s growth as the embedded software market grows. Here’s a look at Wind River’s financial results for the last five years: