When it comes to data storage, density and durability have always moved in opposite directions — the greater the density the shorter the durability. For example, information carved in stone is not dense but can last thousands of years, whereas today’s silicon memory chips can hold their information for only a few decades. Researchers with [...]

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We’re now moving into a client-cloud era where “space is indeed the new frontier”. That’s the verdict of the head of Microsoft’s Research lab in Cambridge.
“Computing, on about a 10-15 year cycle completely reinvents itself,” said Dr Andrew Herbert, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge in a keynote speech today attended by TechRadar. “Obviously the [...]

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Diamond could play the same role for quantum computers that silicon does for conventional ones.
Quantum computers will one day make today’s supercomputers look like children’s toys, so great is their processing potential. And yet the quantum computers built so far have had little more processing power than a handheld calculator.
The difficulty is in being [...]

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Most tech gurus can’t wait for the day when fuel cells are available to replace the batteries in the gadgets and electronics we carry around. With today’s batteries runtimes measured in hours, the fuel cells of tomorrow promise to measure runtime in days.
One of the firms putting lots of research and money into fuel cell [...]

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Chips with a thickness of below 60 microns could enable manufacturers to design garment with integrated electronic circuits for applications such as health and comfort monitoring. The Belgian research center IMEC has presented a process to manufacture such ultra-thin chips.
The process has been developed by IMEC and an associated laboratory at the Ghent University and [...]

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NEC Corporation announced today the development of chip-stacked flexible memory, which can be used to achieve a new system-on-chip (SoC) architecture. The new SoC’s architecture consists of separate logic (excluding embedded memory cores) and memory chips (chip-stacked flexible memory) that are closely stacked by using a three-dimensional packaging technology
NEC developed both a reconfigurable-memory technology that [...]

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With the limits of traditional computing being pushed to the brink, Moore’s Law may soon expire. CPU manufacturers are preparing to launch 32 nm circuits late this year or early next year, and 22 nm is also in the works. However, past about 10 nm, using traditional light etching techniques begin to fail. [...]

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Source: NewScientist
The world’s smallest working fuel cell has been created by US chemical engineers, at just 3 millimetres across. Future versions of the tiny hydrogen-fuelled power pack could replace batteries in portable gadgets.
While batteries are used to do that today, fuel cells are able to store more energy in the same space. Even the most [...]

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Femtocell specialist Ubiquisys Ltd (Swindon, England) is readying an upgrade of its ZoneGate residential and enterprise device that will use processors from both picoChip (Bath, England), the company’s traditional supplier of SoCs, and from Israeli group Percello (Raanana, Israel).
The W-CDMA focused femtocell will be ready for trials in the second half of next year, Will [...]

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Gheorghe Stefanescu, Camelia Chira write a paper titled, “New parallel programming language design: a bridge between brain models and multi-core/many-core computers?”, which will be published in “From Natural Language to Soft Computing: New Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence,”, L.A. Zadeh et.al (Eds.), Editing House of Romanian Academy, 2008.
Here’s the abstract of the paper.
“The recurrent theme of [...]

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The promise of quantum computing is that it will dramatically outshine traditional computers in tackling certain key problems: searching large databases, factoring large numbers, creating uncrackable codes and simulating the atomic structure of materials.
A quantum step in that direction has been taken by Stanford University researchers. Working in the Ginzton Laboratory, they’ve employed ultrafast lasers [...]

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Today is AMD’s Financial Analyst Day at AMD’s campus in Sunnyvale, CA. AnandTech’s Anand writes some useful tidbits that are coming out of the presentations today. Obviously the focus at AMD these days is returning to profitability and with the planned spinoff of its manufacturing business, this should be possible.
“Manufacturing is going to be an [...]

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Author: Jean J. Labrosse, President of Micrium for Embedded.com
“Embedded systems have brought about and enabled the very necessary change that took place in one of the shortest technological transition periods in modern history.
Every new year, I find myself reminiscing about the past. This time, as I was going through my box of “artifacts,” I found [...]

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For as long as anyone can remember, chip developers have longed for simple design tools. The “holy grail” has been to enable a bright 12-year-old to design a deep sub-nanometer processor using a hodge-podge of open-source drawing programs and spoken commands. Unfortunately, this vision has yet to pan out, but Microsoft subsidiary Google has surely [...]

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Is the smartphone the new computer? That’s a point that has been argued back and forth extensively but it misses the point, which is that the smartphone isn’t really a traditional computer at all.
Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP, a feature earlier found only on servers and more recently on PCs will soon find its way to [...]

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In 2028, instead of thinking about computers with a small number of processors sharing an infinite memory, we now think of systems with an infinite number of processors each with its own memory.
“It’s now almost 20 years since the emergence of components designed to enable system design using concurrent communicating processes–an idea that actually originated [...]

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Aviza Technology Inc. has rolled out what the company claims is the world’s first 300-mm ion beam deposition system. The first tool, dubbed the StratIon fxP, was shipped to CEA-Leti-Minatec, an R&D organization in Grenoble, France. The tool will be used to develop magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) devices for use in MRAMs, hard-disk drive read [...]

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Solar breakthroughs are relatively commonplace. However, typically they are iterative — small increases by a percent or two in efficiency. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have invented a new solar cell that is anything but iterative as it blows away past offerings by a large margin; something RPI calls a “game-changer” for [...]

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Author: Jack Ganssle for Embedded.com
“In 2008, embedded systems engineers still struggled with development issues. Welcome to the year 2028–life isn’t perfect, but it’s better.
Welcome to the 40th anniversary issue of Embedded Systems Design “magazine.” That last word is an anachronism only oldsters recognize. For three decades ESD produced a magazine, which, in its early years, [...]

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A newly developed quantum computing technique has been used to store quantum information in silicon for a record-breaking length of time.
The so-called ‘hybrid’ system utilizes two separate quantum magnets to store and access information, allowing researchers to manipulate delicate quantum information without destroying it.
Information is accessed via one quantum magnet — an electron, which scientists [...]

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