MANHASSET, NY — ConEdison Solutions has launched, together with Viridity of Philadelphia, a demand response process for its customers to generate revenue during periods other than when utilities and independent system operators send out reduction appeals.
The new offering transforms energy users into virtual energy generators by triggering usage reductions when prices rise. Participants sell pre-contracted commodity back into the marketplace when market prices significantly exceed the original price the user had paid.
Similar energy plans exist with other utilities and ISOs.
“For many years, we have worked with smart energy users to help them benefit from price shifts in commodity prices or savings from energy management programs,” said Jorge J. Lopez, President and CEO of ConEdison Solutions, in a statement. “This offering brings in dollars for customers by turning users into suppliers.”
ConEdison Solutions, a subsidiary of Consolidated Edison, Inc., develops strategies with individual energy users to maximize their value of energy and minimize their cost.
ConEdison Solutions and Viridity worked with the Drexel university campus with an annual electricity bill exceeding $4.2 million and a peak demand of 10.5 MW. The campus has over the years made significant energy investments including back-up generation and thermal storage systems (see pdf here).
Using Viridity’s VPower optimization software the university receives a day ahead forecast of wholesale electricity market opportunities. Should they elect to participate in a given day, they implement their automated load reduction solution during a specific window, which shifts variable energy usage outside of high-priced market hours.
VPower takes into consideration overall load forecast and generation forecasts, energy prices, and the attributes and matches these operating features against market pricing forecasts for generating an optimal schedule to use the least amount of energy when prices are high, and shifting variable energy load to when prices are low.
The university relationship began as a demonstration and continues to grow in stages.
Initially with three buildings, it expanded to six buildings within the campus infrastructure. The revenue and savings at these buildings resulted in over ten percent of the annual electricity spend for those buildings—or about $53,000 from an approximately $435,000 annual bill. If implemented campus-wise the university is position itself for the smart-grid risk free with no upfront out of pocket cost, according to ConEdison Solutions.
A recent Viridity white paper on the implementation of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order 745, which provides the DR opportunity for consumers, can be read here.
ConEd Solutions partners with Viridity on road to ‘smart grid’
LONDON – YouTube has a video that shows the results of a number of “tug-of-war” matches between MEMS electrothermal actuators belonging to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Kyoto University.An electrothermal actuator is also known as a heatuator.
The basic rules were that to win a MEMS heatuator should pull its rival by 8-microns and hold for at least one minute with a maximum powers supply voltage of 100-V.
As you can see the battle was from 2011 but I’d like to know who won, apart from G4, that is. HKUST or Kyoto?
For more MEMS matter go to EE Times’ MEMS Buzz.
EE Times is working on a MEMS Sector Profile and Database report. If you would be interested in being advised when copies are available, please send an email to peter.clarke@ubm.com
MEMS acutuators fight robot tug-of-war
Bacillus stratosphericus — a microbe commonly found in high concentrations in the stratosphere — is a key component of a new ‘super’ biofilm that has been engineered by a team of scientists from Newcastle University.
Isolating 75 different species of bacteria from the Wear Estuary, Country Durham, UK, the team tested the power-generation of each one using a microbial fuel cell (MFC).
By selecting the best species of bacteria, a kind of microbial "pick and mix," they were able to create an artificial biofilm, doubling the electrical output of the MFC from 105 Watts per cubic metre to 200 Watts per cubic metre.
While still relatively low, this would be enough power to run an electric light and could provide a much needed power source in parts of the world without electricity.
Among the ‘super’ bugs was B. stratosphericus, a microbe normally found in the atmosphere but brought down to Earth as a result of atmospheric cycling processes and isolated by the team from the bed of the River Wear.
Publishing their findings Feb. 21 in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Environmental Science and Technology,
Grant Burgess, Professor of Marine Biotechnology at Newcastle University, said the research demonstrated the "potential power of the technique."
"What we have done is deliberately manipulate the microbial mix to engineer a biofilm that is more efficient at generating electricity," he explains.
"This is the first time individual microbes have been studied and selected in this way. Finding B. stratosphericus was quite a surprise but what it demonstrates is the potential of this technique for the future — there are billions of microbes out there with the potential to generate power."
The use of microbes to generate electricity is not a new concept and has been used in the treatment of waste water and sewage plants.
Microbial fuel cells, which work in a similar way to a battery, use bacteria to convert organic compounds directly into electricity by a process known as bio-catalytic oxidation.
A biofilm — or ‘slime’ — coats the carbon electrodes of the MFC and as the bacteria feed, they produce electrons which pass into the electrodes and generate electricity.
Until now, the biofilm has been allowed to grow un-checked but this new study shows for the first time that by manipulating the biofilm you can significantly increase the electrical output of the fuel cell.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the study identified a number of electricity-generating bacteria.
As well as B. stratosphericus, other electricity-generating bugs in the mix were Bacillus altitudinis — another bug from the upper atmosphere — and a new member of the phylum Bacteroidetes.
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Stratospheric superbugs offer new source of power
TAG:Microbes and More Bacteria Electricity Energy Technology Energy and the Environment Renewable Energy
LONDON – Fabless chip company Dialog Semiconductor plc has reported strong financial results for fourth quarter, as expected, and has forecast a strong first quarter of 2012.
Dialog (Kirchheim-unter-Teck, Germany), which makes integrated power management, audio and short range wireless ICs reported a net profit of $19.1 million on sales of $172.1 million. The quarterly revenue represents a sequential increase of 22.4 percent on the $140.6 million of revenue delivered in 3Q11 and an increase of 96.5 percent over the $87.6 million delivered in the comparative period last year.
The revenue growth was driven primarily driven by the success of customers in the smartphone and tablet computer market, Dialog said.
For the financial year 2011 revenue was $527.3 million: an increase of 77.8 percent over FY 2010.
“2011 was a very successful year for Dialog, where we led the industry in terms of integrated power management market share for smartphones and tablet pcs, while achieving our management goal of breaking through $500 million in annual revenue. Through a very difficult supply chain period, I am particularly proud that we increased unit shipments by 61 percent across the company and offered our customers higher value solutions,” said Jalal Bagherli, CEO, in a statement.
“We executed on our first significant acquisition, adding short range wireless technology to our portfolio and achieved earnings accretion just one quarter after closing the acquisition. As a result, Dialog is well positioned with a much stronger portfolio to take further advantage of opportunities in the emerging high growth personal portable connected device market,” he added.
Looking forward Dialog said that 1Q11 revenue would be between $160 million and $166 million, representing a strong year-on-year growth and less of a sequential decline than normal. In addition the company expects gross margin to improve through 2012.
Related links and articles:
www.diasemi.com
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Actions, Dialog raise Q3 forecasts
Dialog on a mobile roll sees strong Q1
TAG:Dialog PMIC semiconductor wireless audio smartphone tablet computer
Feb 12
22
Smart roles high endurance MLC drive
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Smart Storage Systems officially debuted as a standalone company focused on solid-state drives for business systems, rolling out its latest product, the Optimus Ultra a high-end serial-attached SCSI drive.
Smart Storage claims the Optimus Ultra can deliver 25 full drives writes per day for five years using multi-level cell (MLC) flash, an endurance level typically limited to single-level cell flash. The drive, available in capacities ranging from 150 GBytes to 1.2 TBytes, can execute up to 100,000 read operations per second and up to 60,000 writes.
Separately, Avnet Memec and Avnet Embedded agreed to distribute Smart’s existing Xceed solid-state drives (SSDs).
Smart Storage is part of the former Smart Modular Technologies holding company, taken private by Silver Lake Partners and Silver Lake Sumeru in August 2011. The parent company began investing in solid-state drive technology in 2008 with its acquisition of Adtron.
Smart Storage enters a hotly competitive SSD market with dozens of suppliers including industry giants such as Hitachi, Micron, Samsung and Toshiba. The company claims its Guardian software gives it an edge in creating MLC drives with long life times and says it has unique capabilities to help top tier OEMs qualify SSDs.
“You can’t underestimate the importance of test because OEM qualifications can take six to nine months and cost millions of dollars,” said John Scaramuzzo, president of Smart Storage.
The company expects in 2013 to expand its serial ATA and SAS offerings to include 12 Gbit/s and multi-link SAS drives as well as PCI Express drives. Multi-link SAS “has all the capabilities of PCI Express in speed and high availability, but PCI Express is sort of the prettiest girl at the dance right now,” said Scaramuzzo.
The SSD company hopes to grow at rates as high as 150 percent over the next two years to hit revenues in the range of $100 to $200 million.
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TAG:Smart Storage Systems Solid State Drives Flash Drives Optimus Ultra SSDs Smart Drives Storage
PARIS – The Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM SA) has launched a four-year, 14.2 million euro ($18.8 million) project that aims to develop highly efficient, long-lasting, cheap and environmentally friendly printed organic photovoltaics (OPV).
The project, dubbed SUstainable Novel FLexible Organic Watts Efficiently Reliable (Sunflower), gathers 17 partner institutions from science and industry, including Agfa, BASF, DuPont Teijin Films, Amcor Flexible Kreuzlingen, as well as the photovoltaic pioneer Konarka Technologies and European research institutes and universities.
The Sunflower consortium said it expects to produce printed organic PV panels with high efficiency architectures such as tandem cells and dedicated light management structures. The performance of the photo active and passive barrier materials is expected to be much higher including process controlled morphology, partners said.
Project partners said they intend to deliver solutions for cost effective flexible substrates, diffusion barriers and conductors. In the near future, they said they expect to have a deeper knowledge of the device physics, an elucidation of degradation mechanisms and an estimate of the environmental impact of the main materials and processes.
The consortium noted that the requirements for the project prototype include: High module efficiency to be competitive with other photovoltaic (PV) technologies; Multilayer structure (“tandem”) to achieve high efficiency; Cost effective barriers and getters to achieve long lifetime; as well as roll-to-roll atmospheric printing processes to lower costs [where costs include fabrication (Eur) and environmental impact (kgCO2)].
EU project boosts OPV for solar power generation
TAG:Sunflower Photovoltaics Organic Project Europe CSEM Solar PV
Fashioniste, fashion blogger e amanti del lusso, segnatevi un appuntamento da non perdere: a Marzo ci sarà l’inaugurazione di Private Griffe, il primo esclusivo private marketplace online in Italia.
Ciò che contraddistingue Private Griffe dagli altri outlet online è il suo carattere “private”. PG infatti è un marketplace esclusivamente per privati.
Un altro punto d’innovazione di PG, raccontano Leonardo Cucchiarini e Maria Cecilia Andretta è il suo carattere “social”. Su Private Griffe, infatti, Seller ed acquirenti oltre a vendere ed acquistare i prodotti potranno interagire tra loro e scambiarsi consigli. Le Seller, inoltre, attraverso le loro boutique virtuali potranno esprimere il proprio look.
Chi vuole diventare una Seller, comunicano Leonardo Cucchiarini e Maria Cecilia Andrettta, può già da ora candidarsi tramite la Cooming Soon del sito.
Tutto ciò che dovranno fare le seller sarà proporre i propri capi fashion, che saranno selezionati dal Team di PG per verificare che si tratti di capi autentici, di alto livello e in buone condizioni. Il team di PG, penserà poi a tutto il servizio di intermediazione, dalla spedizione dei prodotti dalle seller alle acquirenti alla gestione dei pagamenti in maniera sicura.
Private Griffe, raccontano Leonardo Cucchiarini e Maria Cecilia Andretta non sarà solo “shopping online” ma si tratterà di una vera e propria “shopping experience” ad alto tasso fashion. Dove amanti della moda, amanti del lusso e fashion blogger, potranno proporre i propri look e lanciare nuove tendenze. Non solo un e-commerce quindi, ma una vera e propria community.
Un’iniziativa che ha alle spalle 3 professionisti esperti dell’ambito web e dei settori del lusso: Leonardo Cucchiarini, Maria Cecilia Andretta e Francesca Bongiovanni, e che ha già riscontrato il parere favorevole di numerosi fan e seller pronte a vendere i propri capi, rigorosamente fashion.
Leonardo Cucchiarini e Maria Cecilia Andretta presentano Private Griffe
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Celebrities, Designer Dresses and Most recent On Style Look
Oscar, Golden Globes and It’s Influence on Our Style Look.
With the 2009 award shows such as the Oscars approaching and the Golden Globes just passing by, we wonder how the likes of Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett and several others stars who we like, manage to look stunning every time.
The 66th annual Golden Globes this year was totally Glam, Chic, and definitely The most Classy 1. Females of any age had been after simplicity, elegance and class. Take a look at very best supporting actress winner for “The Reader” Kate Winslet, in Yves Saint Laurent and Chopard, Penelope Cruz in Giorgio Armani Prive and Chopard, Anne Hathaway in Giorgio Armani Prive and Van Cleef & Arpels. The list would never end…
Each show commands a different style look, and each look is on full display for the critics to dissect. It’s sufficient to make the average person crawl in a hole if put in the same position, whilst the star wants superhero powers to make it through – or at least a team of the finest in the enterprise.
You may possibly think that if you had a crew to look following yourself, you’d look like a million dollar as well. Envision if you needed to present an award at the Oscars, how would you want to look? Understanding that your stylist would have your finest interest at hand, she would need to head to your favorite designer’s studio to pick the most dazzling looks. While the jobs of Rachel Zoe and other stylists to the stars are surely stressful this time of year, it should be a dream come accurate to be the first to view some of these collections. Becoming a fashion insider like Zoe would be as inspiring as it is wonderful.
It would be difficult to decide on the 1 outfit, but I know that sometimes 3 or much more are set aside for the star to choose on, occasionally waiting up to the day of the event. Of course, fit is taken into consideration, and every piece will be ready, regardless if it is worn. There is sanctity in understanding that no 1 else will show up with the same dress. The jewels, the shoes, the handbag are all precisely chosen, ready to go.
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HARVARD researchers have developed a bulk-machined MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) process, termed Printed Circuit MEMS (PC-MEMS), for creating mesoscale machines up to several centimetres in dimension.
MEMS manufacturing has thus far been developed for the length scales of millimetres to nanometres, and MEMS are used in various electronics devices from accelerometers to pressure sensors to displays, and more intricate devices such as electrostatic motors and miniaturized gas turbines.
However, standard MEMS techniques are often inappropriate for producing larger machines with complex three dimensional topology and varied constituent materials.
The researchers aimed to fill this “mesoscale gap” between conventional manufacturing and MEMs. The case study they chose was a flapping wing robotic insect (the Harvard Monolithic Bee, or Mobee) with a mass target of 100mg, which requires advanced structural materials, actuators, and topologies.
Previous attempts to manufacture such devices have relied on highly skilled manual process steps, while others chose to piggyback off existing insects by using electronics to modify the behaviour of real insects.
In contrast with conventional MEMS techniques, which arose from integrated circuit fabrication technology, PC-MEMS draws inspiration from printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing.
The Harvard researchers, having previously demonstrated folding three dimensional assembly and self-assembly in laminated MEMS devices, extended the techniques to include pick-and-place components, ‘locking’ through wave soldering, scaffold-assisted assembly, increased material variety, and integrated actuation.
The final product of the research was a manufacturing process which can be used to create an actuated, fully three dimensional millimetre-scale machines.
PC-MEMS machines can incorporate micron-scale mechanical features, piezoelectric actuators, integrated circuitry, and a wide variety of materials in true three-dimensional topologies.
The Mobee has a mass of 90mg, and is a flapping wing insect robot with 39mm wingspan, measuring 18mm long and an out-of-plane height of 2.4mm. It is produced as a flat board, then “popped up” into a 3D structure, with well-placed hinges and locking mechanisms ensuring the proper assembly of the device quickly and easily. The assembly is then locked through the dip soldering, where brass-plated tabs are adhered together with solder.
The PC-MEMs process starts with material layers typically 1μm to 250μm thick and consists of four basic operations: additive lamination, subtractive micromachining, folding, and locking.
A fifth operation, pick-and-place, allows inclusion of discrete components, such as sensors, actuators, integrated circuits, and other MEMS or PC-MEMS devices, that do not topologically form full layers.
A sequence of micromachining and lamination steps fabricates flat multilayer laminates from individual material layers. Combining rigid and flexible materials enables flexure-based mechanical joints for articulated machine components and folding assembly.
The final fabrication micromachining step releases all folding joints, which are coupled into a single assembly degree of freedom, allowing three dimensional machines to rise through precise ‘pop-up’ assembly.
Wave soldering is used to apply solder to strategic brass-plated parts, locking the assembled machine components together to complete assembly. The machine is then released from the frame, with micromachining all active degrees of freedom of the articulated machine.
A wide variety of materials including metals, plastics, ceramics, and composites are compatible with PC-MEMS.
This same mass-production technique could be used for other tightly integrated electromechanical devices that have parts on the scale of micrometers to centimetres.
As the layering process builds on the manufacturing process currently used to make printed circuit boards, the tools needed to create such pop-up devices are already common and abundant in the industry.
All abuzz over small pop-up machines with Printed Circuit MEMS
TAG:MEMS PCBs printed circuits electronics design research and development
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SAN FRANCISCO – Samsung gave an early peek at its first quad-core mobile application processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here. The unannounced chip is Samsung’s first to use its 32 nm high-k metal gate process and sports advances in performance and battery life over its existing 45 nm Exynos chips.
The new chip comes in versions using two or four ARM Cortex A9 cores running at rates from 200 MHz to 1.5 GHz along with a 64-bit ARM Neon media processing block. The cores share a 1 Mbyte L2 cache with a snoop control unit. The chip does not include an integrated baseband.
Samsung is using the latest version of its own graphics unit for the chip. It includes four pixel processors and one geometry engine with a dedicated 128 KByte L2 cache. The graphics support the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and can generate up to 57 Mpolygons/s.
The chip supports two LPDDR2 or DDR3 interfaces running up to 400 MHz for a total memory bandwidth of up to 6.4 Gbytes/s.
Thanks both to the 32 nm process and a handful of power and thermal management techniques, the chip can deliver up to 26 percent more performance overall than Samsung’s current Exynos chip made in a 45 nm polysilicon process. It also can deliver improvements in battery life ranging from 34 to 50 percent, depending on the application.
Samsung said the new chip delivers up to 26.3 percent improvements in video frame rates. In a demo, Samsung showed the chip using 48 percent less power on 3-D calculations and 45 percent less power in CPU jobs than the 45 nm chip.
The Samsung 32 nm HKMG process keep transistor and gate leakage nearly to the levels of the company’s 45 nm polysilicon process, much lower than expected for 32 nm polysilicon technology. Samsung tuned the process to a sweet spot somewhere between its potential for delivering 40 percent more performance or a tenth the leakage, said Se-Hyung Yang, a principal engineer for SoC development at Samsung Electronics who presented the paper.
The chip has four independent power domains and several power sub-domains. Each ARM core and up to a half of the cache memory can be turned off or on independently. A set of media accelerator blocks are similarly power gated independently.
The chip dynamically uses either forward or reverse body-biasing on n-wells to improve performance or reduce leakage as needed. It also uses thermal monitors and a thermal management unit to trigger power management actions including shutting down blocks as needed to protect devices from over-heating and keep a handset below a fixed surface temperature set by handset makers.
“Recently power consumption for mobile devices have increased a lot and mobile devices have limited cooling capability,” said Yang, underlining a growing problem in smartphone design.
Samsung optimized its 45 nm processor for performance first and later found it could not get its full performance without exceeding power consumption limits. The 32 nm chip was optimized first for power consumption, said Yang.
Samsung will formally announce the product soon, said Yang, presumably at next week’s Mobile World Congress. Nvidia grabbed the lead in rolling out a quad-core mobile chip last year.
Samsung gives peek at quad-core mobile CPU
TAG:Mobile Applications Processors Mobile Processors Samsung Exynos Mobile Processors Nvidia ISSCC
SAN FRANCISCO–Samsung touted its new 32-nm high-k metal gate (HKMG) process at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here Tuesday (Feb. 21), showing features it hopes might win customers over from a supply constrained TSMC.
While ostensibly presenting its upcoming 32-nm quad-core mobile processor, Samsung spent much of the time presenting its new process, which as well as boasting HKMG, also uses dynamic thermal management and body bias techniques, for a significant 40 percent performance increase over its 45-nm Exynos chip.
Intel and Globalfoundries have been shipping chips with HKMG for a while now, but with Samsung and TSMC joining the fray, the fab playing field is somewhat equalized.
With the industry bracing itself for a tight supply of 28-nm from TSMC, Samsung’s 32-nm process and excess capacity manufacturing facilities could prove an attractive alternative to the likes of Nvidia, or even AMD.
Analysts believe TSMC would give priority to customers like Apple or Qualcomm for the 28-nm process, which would make it difficult for smaller players to get the supply they needed. Samsung is not supply constrained, and the difference between a 28-nm process and a 32-nm process using HKMG is fairly marginal in terms of the end result.
On the other hand, some in the industry still have qualms over using Samsung as a foundry, largely because the firm competes with almost every one of its potential customers.
Samsung’s chip-building capabilities were being put under the microscope on Tuesday, with the firm also talking up its dynamic thermal management system for mobile SoCs, as well as power gate technology for every CPU and even inside the GPU, allowing power to be switched off, cutting leakage at the source.
Body Biasing, too, would give Samsung a differentiating factor from the likes of Intel, which doesn’t use the technology. Body Biasing can be used to either speed up a transistor when full throttle is needed, increasing leakiness slightly, or it can slow the transistor down, stemming leakage for a more optimal low power state.
Whether customers will be enticed, however, remains to be seen.
Samsung positions its fab to take on TSMC
The study by Karen Christman and colleagues appears in the Feb. 21 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Christman is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and has co-founded a company, Ventrix, Inc., to bring the gel to clinical trials within the next year.
Therapies like the hydrogel would be a welcome development, Christman explained, since there are an estimated 785,000 new heart attack cases in the United States each year, with no established treatment for repairing the resulting damage to cardiac tissue.
The hydrogel is made from cardiac connective tissue that is stripped of heart muscle cells through a cleansing process, freeze-dried and milled into powder form, and then liquefied into a fluid that can be easily injected into the heart. Once it hits body temperature, the liquid turns into a semi-solid, porous gel that encourages cells to repopulate areas of damaged cardiac tissue and to preserve heart function, according to Christman. The hydrogel forms a scaffold to repair the tissue and possibly provides biochemical signals that prevent further deterioration in the surrounding tissues.
"It helps to promote a positive remodeling-type response, not a pro-inflammatory one in the damaged heart," Christman said.
What’s more, the researchers’ experiments show that the gel also can be injected through a catheter, a method that is minimally invasive and does not require surgery or general anesthesia.
New, unpublished work by her research team suggests that the gel can improve heart function in pigs with cardiac damage, which brings this potential therapy one step closer to humans, said Christman.
There are few injectable cardiac therapies in development designed to be used in large animals such as pigs, which have a heart that is similar in size and anatomy to the human heart, Christman explained. "Most of the materials that people have looked at have been tested in rats or mice, and they are injectable via a needle and syringe. However, almost all of them are not compatible with catheter delivery and would gel too quickly, clogging the catheter during the procedure.
In experiments with rats, the gel was not rejected by the body and did not trigger arrhythmic heart beating, providing some assurance that the gel will be similarly safe for humans, the researchers note.
Christman has an equity interest in Ventrix, Inc., a company that may potentially benefit from the research results, and also serves on the company’s Scientific Advisory Board. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
The study’s co-authors include Jennifer Singelyn, Priya Sundaramurthy, Todd Johnson, Pamela Schup-Magoffin, Diane Hu, Denver Faulk, Jean Wang, and Kristine M. Mayle in the Department of Bioengineering; Kendra Bartels, Anthony N. DeMaria, and Nabil Dib of the UC San Diego School of Medicine; and Michael Salvatore and Adam M. Kinsey of Ventrix, Inc. The research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award Program (part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research), the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
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Injectable gel could repair tissue damaged by heart attack
TAG:Heart Disease Vioxx Stroke Prevention Medical Technology Weapons Technology Biochemistry
SAN FRANCISCO–Analysts are predicting that Apple will launch a smaller, more affordable iPad tablet in 2012 in addition to its high end iPad 3, due out next quarter.
Brett Simpson and Richard Kramer of Arete Research said they expected to see Apple launch “a 7-inch iPad with a low-end specification,” in or around the third quarter of the year at a price point of about $299.
“Given the iPad 3 aims to use higher spec parts (quad-core CPU, higher resolution display, LTE, and improved camera) there is plenty of scope to offer a cost down model supporting ~$100 lower bill of materials,” said the pair.
The late Steve Jobs had famously blasted the 7-inch form factor on Apple’s Q4 2010 financial results conference call, calling the form factor “too small,” but analysts believe the new management is revisiting the idea.
The pent-up demand for iPad 3 and the buzz around Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 devices make the conditions ripe for a more mid-range offering, said the analysts, positing that the price of the iPad 2 would also be reduced, creating three different price tiers.
“If offered at around $299, it will spur far greater adoption,” said Arete, noting that the educational and emerging market segments would be prime targets for such a device.
Arete said it believed Apple was poised to take some 64 percent of the overall tablet market in 2012, shipping a predicted 69 million iPads, more than five times that of its top OEM competitors, Samsung and Amazon.
“With Microsoft demanding a ~$10 royalty for every Android tablet, and Apple positioning its iPad mini to oust rivals in the low-end, we see little opportunity for OEMs to scale and make money this year,” said Arete, giving a gloomy outlook to other tablet hopefuls.
Arete predicted that given the situation, Google would also attempt to deepen its efforts to scale up in tablets by leveraging Motorola as its anchor OEM.
“Other vendors should be indifferent for lack of gross margin dollars in the space,” said the firm.
Apple to release 7-inch mini iPad, say analysts
The idea of sympatric speciation (one lineage diverging into two or more species with no physical or mechanical barriers keeping them apart) is controversial and tricky to prove, especially in microbes, said University of Illinois microbiology professor Rachel Whitaker, who led the study.
"One of the big questions, from Darwin on, is how do species diverge if they are living together?" she said. "That question really hasn’t been answered very well, even in the macro-organisms that we’ve studied for hundreds of years."
Bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins the archaea (are-KEY-uh) are even more difficult to study because they have so many ways to share genetic information, Whitaker said. The microbes divide to conquer, producing exact or near-exact clones of themselves. If this were their only way of getting established, their genetic diversity would be quite low, the result of a few random copy errors and mutations, Whitaker said. But they also can link up with each other to pass genes back and forth, suck up random genetic elements from the environment and acquire new genes from the viruses that infect them and their neighbors.
Before scientists were able to dissect the genetic endowment of individual microbes, they had a hard time telling the bugs apart — so much so that they once confused bacteria and archaea. Researchers now know that the archaea belong to third domain of life — as different from bacteria as plants and animals are.
"Every time we look, everywhere we look we see variation in microbial populations using these molecular tools," Whitaker said. "You have to use these molecules, these DNA sequences, to tell the difference between species." But even with new sequencing technologies, the task of studying microbial evolution is daunting.
Whitaker and her colleagues focused on Sulfolobus islandicus, a heat-loving organism from the archaeal domain of life, because it is one of few microorganisms that live in distinct "island" populations created by geothermal hot springs. (Watch a movie of a hot spring in Yellowstone Park that is similar to the one the scientists sampled.)
"We’re looking at an environment that’s not very complex in microbial terms," Whitaker said. "There are not that many organisms that can handle it, and the ones that can don’t successfully move around very often."
The researchers sequenced the genomes of 12 strains of S. islandicus from a single hot spring in the Mutnovsky Volcano region of Kamchatka. By comparing sequences at multiple sites on the microbes’ single (circular) chromosome using new software programs ClonalFrame and ClonalOrigin, the researchers were able to reconstruct the genetic history of each of the strains.
The analysis revealed two distinct groups of S. islandicus among the 12 strains. The microbes were swapping genes with members of their own group more than expected, but sharing genes with the other group less than expected, Whitaker said. And the exchange of genetic material between the two groups was decreasing over time.
This indicates that the two groups are already separate species, even though they share the same habitat, Whitaker said. The differences between the two groups were slight, but speciation was clearly under way, she said.
Peering more closely at the patterns of change, the researchers saw a mosaic of differences along the chromosome, with vast "continents" of variation and smaller "islands" of stability. Those islands likely represent regions that are under selective pressure, Whitaker said; something in their environment is weeding out the microbes that don’t have those genes or sets of genes. The variable regions are more fluid, with genes coming and going (a process called recombination) and mutations increasing diversity.
The findings provide the first evidence that sympatric speciation occurs in a microbe, Whitaker said.
"We caught them speciating," she said. "They do exchange some genes — just not very many. So now we know you don’t have to have a (geographic or mechanical) barrier to recombination for speciation to occur. All you have to have is selection pulling the two groups apart, which nobody knew before."
This study provides a glimpse of the profound genetic diversity that likely occurs everywhere in wild microbial populations, Whitaker said.
"What we see as two different species are 0.35 percent different across the chromosome; that’s about one-third of the distance between human and chimp," she said. The two distinct groups of microbes are "orders of magnitude" more similar to each other than groups normally considered separate species, she said.
"That means there are orders of magnitude more species of microbes than we ever thought there were," she said. "And that’s kind of mind-boggling."
The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology. The research team included scientists from Arizona State University, the University of California at Davis, and the University of Oxford.
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Caught in the act: Scientists discover microbes speciating
TAG:Microbes and More Evolutionary Biology New Species Exotic Species Ecology Biodiversity
ELEMENT14’s online poll of its global electronics community has revealed interesting trends about the future of electronics design engineering.
element14 conducted polls across all its social media channels, with over 4500 responses.
Sensing was voted as the biggest technology with the potential to revolutionise electronics in the future, followed closely by LED lighting, robotics and medical electronics.
Sensing technology is driving new ways of interfacing with technology. From the then-revolutionary touch scroll wheel of the iPod, to then multi-touch capacitive touch screen interfaces and voice gesture technologies of today, new sensing capabilities help drive device miniaturisation.
The technology is also significant for industrial applications, and will also help drive non-invaisve diagnosis and treatment.
The majority of respondents chose embedded technology as the highlight for 2012, followed by sensing, green IT and mobile and wireless.
Sensing, LEDs and robots to revolutionise electronics
TAG:Sensing LEDs embedded technology consumer electronics robotics element14
Over the next five years, wireless connectivity to mobile devices and the Internet will redefine the mainstream products within the home audio market. Despite differences in capabilities, form factors, and usage scenarios, a variety of home audio products will all increasingly incorporate wireless functionality in order to play audio streamed from mobile devices, home networks, and the Internet.
In recent years the home audio industry has been challenged to adapt to changing trends in consumers’ media consumption habits and the proliferation of Internet-based streaming audio services. As a result, consumer home audio is rapidly evolving by integrating wireless connectivity into devices such as A/V receivers, soundbars, standalone speaker docks, and home theater in a box (HTIB) systems.
The soundbar and speaker dock categories have seen growth thanks to consumers trending towards mobile devices, streaming services, and less-expensive intermediate audio solutions, driven by current economic conditions. This is in large part to address the lackluster audio of thin-bezel HDTVs. Though these same trends have challenged the market for traditional A/V receivers and HTIBs, the inclusion of wireless connectivity is expected to aid both product categories going forward.
According to the IMS Research report, “A/V Receivers and Advanced Home Audio – 2012 Edition,” in 2016 over 60 million audio devices will ship with WiFi and/or Bluetooth connectivity, including AV receivers, speaker docks, HTIB systems, and soundbars. Indicative of trends taking place in the consumer marketplace, the majority of this volume will be driven by speaker docks and soundbars.
According to IMS Research, as wireless home networking increases along with consumer expectations of wireless connectivity in consumer electronics, the use of wireless streaming in audio playback is expected to naturally rise on a complementary basis. Though connectivity to mobile devices is expected to be a major driver, the growing popularity of services such as Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, iCloud, and Google Music drives the need for direct Internet connectivity in some of these home audio products as well.
In the opinion of Paul Erickson, senior analyst at IMS Research, “With the move towards smartphone- and tablet-centric media consumption, and the proliferation of Internet-based music services, the home audio market is gradually adapting to meet the needs of consumers. We’re clearly headed for a future where various forms of wireless streaming will be cornerstones of the audio experience in the home.”
http://imsresearch.com.
This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.
Wireless will redefine the home audio market as we know it
TAG:Wireless audio streaming audio home audio audio networking home networking Pandora iCloud Google Music
Bacillus stratosphericus — a microbe commonly found in high concentrations in the stratosphere orbiting Earth with the satellites — is a key component of a new ‘super’ biofilm that has been engineered by a team of scientists from Newcastle University.
Isolating 75 different species of bacteria from the Wear Estuary, Country Durham, UK, the team tested the power-generation of each one using a Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC).
By selecting the best species of bacteria, a kind of microbial "pick and mix," they were able to create an artificial biofilm, doubling the electrical output of the MFC from 105 Watts per cubic metre to 200 Watts per cubic metre.
While still relatively low, this would be enough power to run an electric light and could provide a much needed power source in parts of the world without electricity.
Among the ‘super’ bugs was B. Stratosphericus, a microbe normally found in the atmosphere but brought down to earth as a result of atmospheric cycling processes and isolated by the team from the bed of the River Wear.
Publishing their findings February 21 in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Environmental Science and Technology,
Grant Burgess, Professor of Marine Biotechnology at Newcastle University, said the research demonstrated the "potential power of the technique."
"What we have done is deliberately manipulate the microbial mix to engineer a biofilm that is more efficient at generating electricity," he explains.
"This is the first time individual microbes have been studied and selected in this way. Finding B.Stratosphericus was quite a surprise but what it demonstrates is the potential of this technique for the future — there are billions of microbes out there with the potential to generate power."
The use of microbes to generate electricity is not a new concept and has been used in the treatment of waste water and sewage plants.
Microbial Fuel Cells, which work in a similar way to a battery, use bacteria to convert organic compounds directly into electricity by a process known as bio-catalytic oxidation.
A biofilm — or ‘slime’ — coats the carbon electrodes of the MFC and as the bacteria feed, they produce electrons which pass into the electrodes and generate electricity.
Until now, the biofilm has been allowed to grow un-checked but this new study shows for the first time that by manipulating the biofilm you can significantly increase the electrical output of the fuel cell.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the study identified a number of electricity-generating bacteria.
As well as B. Stratosphericus, other electricity-generating bugs in the mix were Bacillus altitudinis – another bug from the upper atmosphere — and a new member of the phylum Bacteroidetes.
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Superbugs from space offer new source of power
TAG:Microbes and More Bacteria Electricity Energy Technology Energy and the Environment Renewable Energy
At the fourth MOST Forum on March 20, 2012 in Stuttgart/Esslingen (Germany), the MOST Cooperation (MOSTCO) will again participate as knowledge partner and exhibitor to showcase the latest technology highlights. The theme of this year’s exhibit is ‘MOST150 Rolls Off the Line’, describing the third generation of MOST Technology hitting the road in 2012.
Christian Thiel, Administrator of the MOST Cooperation as the standardization organization for the leading automotive multimedia network Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), highlights that through MOST150, Ethernet inherently also goes into series production. “MOST150 meets the requirements not only for the traditional areas of entertainment and information, but also for the new domains of mobile connectivity, connected services, and driver assistance,” Thiel said.
In addition to transporting high Quality of Service (QoS) audio and video, this technology also provides an automotive-ready physical layer for Ethernet protocols within the car. MOST is thus equivalent to an IEEE802.x network.
Besides exhibiting, MOSTCO Technical Coordinator Wolfgang Bott will speak on MOST application in driver assistance systems. In his presentation at 14:30 on March 20, 2012, Bott will give evidence supporting the need for seamless integration of infotainment and driver assistance.
Both hard real-time and high bandwidth requirements must be met. A multi-channel network approach with inherent synchronicity will be the first choice. If then additional advantages such as maturity, cost efficiency and flexible topology come along with an appropriate safety integrity level, MOST is proven to fit best from a system solution perspective.
More information on the MOST Forum can be found at http://www.mostcooperation.com.
This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.
MOST150 from MOST Cooperation hits the road
TAG:MOST Forum In Vehicle Infotainment automotove networking MOST Network Ethernet MOST150 Automotive Infotainment Network MOST Cooperation
Paul Keim, Regents’ professor and director of NAU’s Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, and Lance Price, NAU faculty member and director of the Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, collaborated with scientists at 20 institutions around the world on the study recently published in the online journal mBio.
The TGen-led research utilized whole genome sequencing to study 89 genomes from humans and animals — including turkeys, chickens and pigs — with samples from 19 countries on four continents.
The research focused on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus CC398, also known as pig MRSA or livestock-associated MRSA because it most often infects people with direct exposure to swine or other livestock. It is likely that MRSA CC398 started as an antibiotic-susceptible strain in humans before it jumped to livestock.
After transferring to livestock, MRSA CC398 became resistant to two important antibiotics, tetracycline and methicillin, which are used for treating staph infections. The resistance likely is a result of the routine antibiotic use that characterizes modern food-animal production. The animals commonly are given antibiotics to prevent infection and promote growth.
Keim, who also serves as director of TGen’s Pathogenic Genomics Division, said the study describes evolution in action. "The most powerful force in evolution is selection. And in this case, humans have supplied a strong force through the excessive use of antibiotic drugs in farm animal production. It is that inappropriate use of antibiotics that is now coming back to haunt us."
Price, the study’s lead author, said the research was "like watching the birth of a superbug — it is simultaneously fascinating and disconcerting." He said that while this strain of MRSA was discovered less than a decade ago it appears to be spreading very quickly.
"Our findings underscore the potential public health risks of widespread antibiotic use in food animal production," Price said. "Staph thrives in crowded and unsanitary conditions. Add antibiotics to that environment and you’re going to create a public health problem."
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Evolution of staph ‘superbug’ traced between humans and livestock
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Pfefferkorn, a professor in Penn’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science, collaborated on the work with three Chinese colleagues: Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Zhang of Shenyang Normal University and Zhuo Feng of Yunnan University.
Their paper was published this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study site, located near Wuda, China, is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest in the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.
"It’s marvelously preserved," Pfefferkorn said. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting."
The researchers also found some smaller trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones intact, preserved in their entirety.
Due to nearby coal-mining activities unearthing large tracts of rock, the size of the researchers’ study plots is also unusual. They were able to examine a total of 1,000 m2 of the ash layer in three different sites located near one another, an area considered large enough to meaningfully characterize the local paleoecology.
The fact that the coal beds exist is a legacy of the ancient forests, which were peat-depositing tropical forests. The peat beds, pressurized over time, transformed into the coal deposits.
The scientists were able to date the ash layer to approximately 298 million years ago. That falls at the beginning of a geologic period called the Permian, during which Earth’s continental plates were still moving toward each other to form the supercontinent Pangea. North America and Europe were fused together, and China existed as two smaller continents. All overlapped the equator and thus had tropical climates.
At that time, Earth’s climate was comparable to what it is today, making it of interest to researchers like Pfefferkorn who look at ancient climate patterns to help understand contemporary climate variations.
In each of the three study sites, Pfefferkorn and collaborators counted and mapped the fossilized plants they encountered.In all, they identified six groups of trees. Tree ferns formed a lower canopy while much taller trees — Sigillaria and Cordaites — soared to 80 feet above the ground. The researchers also found nearly complete specimens of a group of trees called Noeggerathiales. These extinct spore-bearing trees, relatives of ferns, had been identified from sites in North America and Europe but appeared to be much more common in these Asian sites.
They also observed that the three sites were somewhat different from one another in plant composition. In one site, for example, Noeggerathiales were fairly uncommon, while they made up the dominant plant type in another site. The researchers worked with painter Ren Yugao to depict accurate reconstructions of all three sites.
"This is now the baseline," Pfefferkorn said. "Any other finds, which are normally much less complete, have to be evaluated based on what we determined here."
The findings are indeed "firsts" on many counts.
"This is the first such forest reconstruction in Asia for any time interval, it’s the first of a peat forest for this time interval and it’s the first with Noeggerathiales as a dominant group," Pfefferkorn said.
Because the site captures just one moment in Earth’s history, Pfefferkorn noted that it alone cannot explain how climate changes affected life on Earth. But it helps provide valuable context.
"It’s like Pompeii: Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn’t say anything about Roman history in and of itself," Pfefferkorn said. "But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It’s a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better."
The study was supported by the Chinese Academy of Science, the National Basic Research Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the University of Pennsylvania.
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300-million-year-old forest discovered preserved in volanic ash
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"Technology in paleontology hasn’t changed in about 150 years," said Drexel paleontologist Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. "We use shovels and pickaxes and burlap and plaster. It hasn’t changed — until right now."
3-D Printing Technology in Paleontology
Lacovara has begun creating 3-D scans of giant dinosaur bones and other fossils in his lab. The 3-D scan puts a virtual image in a digital workspace that researchers can manipulate and analyze. To bring these scans to life, Lacovara is also teaming up with mechanical engineer Dr. James Tangorra, an assistant professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, to use 3-D printing technology to create and test scale models of fossil bones.
A 3-D printer is a technology for rapid prototyping and manufacturing objects based on a digital design. Common models work by repeatedly extruding extremely thin layers of a resin or other material, building up strata to create a physical object.
"It’s kind of like Star Trek technology, where you can press a button and the object pops out," Lacovara said. A six-inch model of a dinosaur bone can be printed in a few hours using current technology.
Using 3-D printing can aid paleontology in several ways: • To create exact-size replicas for museum display, without the limitation on the number of copies made and materials and storage hassles of traditional casting methods. • To create small-scale models for educational use. • To create small-scale models for modeling and testing hypotheses about the mechanics of how long-extinct animals moved and behaved.
This biologically-derived modeling to test possible movements of extinct species is the major focus of Lacovara and Tangorra’s collaboration.
Robotic Models to Test Mechanics of Dinosaur Movement
"We don’t know a lot about the way dinosaurs move," Lacovara said. "How did they stand? How did they ambulate? Did they run or trot? How did they reproduce? It’s all a bit mysterious," especially when it comes to the largest dinosaurs. Paleontologists’ current methods of understanding such mechanics rely heavily on guesswork and common sense about what types of movements seem possible. With new technology, researchers can begin testing their predictions for the first time.
Lacovara has been part of scientific teams unearthing some of the largest known giant sauropod dinosaur specimens, including the new species Paralititan stromeri found in Egypt in 2000, which is the second-most-massive known dinosaur species and a new giant from Patagonia. Such giant sauropod dinosaurs could reach weights of 60 to 80 tons, which is 12 to 14 times heavier than a large modern elephant.
When working with enormous dinosaur fossils, Lacovara said, it’s simply physically impossible to manipulate the bones to test theories about mechanics and movement. That’s why scaled-down replicas that preserve the exact shape and proportion of the bones can help. Researchers can also digitally reshape the models to correct for changes that may have occurred over millions of years of fossilization and compression.
Lacovara and Tangorra will work together to create robotic models of giant sauropod dinosaurs, attaching artificial muscles and tendons to perform comprehensive tests of how the animal’s body could have handled physical stresses of the environment. This work is similar to Tangorra’s ongoing work modeling and manufacturing robotic fish. "We extract features from biological species and create software-based or robotic testing systems. It’s easier to test a biorobotic model than a biological system," Tangorra said. This work relies on studies of the fish’s movements, biomechanics and fluid mechanics to ensure that the robot reflects the biological system. Tangorra noted that because the dinosaur species they are modeling are extinct, any robotic reconstructions will be more speculative.
Lacovara predicts that they will have a working robotic dinosaur limb constructed by the end of 2012. A complete robotic dinosaur replica will take one to two years to create.
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It’s scenes like this that neurosurgeon Jason Huang, M.D., confronts every day. Severe damage to nerves is one of the most challenging wounds to treat for Huang and colleagues. It’s a type of wound suffered by people who are the victims of gunshots or stabbings, by those who have been involved in car accidents — or by soldiers injured on the battlefield, like those whom Huang treated in Iraq.
Now, back in his university laboratory, Huang and his team have taken a step forward toward the goal of repairing nerves in such patients more effectively. In a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, Huang and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center report that a surprising set of cells may hold potential for nerve transplants.
In a study in rats, Huang’s group found that dorsal root ganglion neurons, or DRG cells, help create thick, healthy nerves, without provoking unwanted attention from the immune system.
The finding is one step toward better treatment for the more than 350,000 patients each year in the United States who have serious injuries to their peripheral nerves. Huang’s laboratory is one of a handful developing new technologies to treat such wounds.
"These are very serious injuries, and patients really suffer, many for a very long time," said Huang, associate professor of Neurosurgery and chief of Neurosurgery at Highland Hospital, an affiliate of the University of Rochester Medical Center. "There are a variety of options, but none of them is ideal.
"Our long-term goal is to grow living nerves in the laboratory, then transplant them into patients and cut down the amount of time it takes for those nerves to work," added Huang, whose project was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and by the University of Rochester Medical Center.
For a damaged nerve to repair itself, the two disconnected but healthy portions of the nerve must somehow find each other through a maze of tissue and connect together. This happens naturally for a very small wound — much like our skin grows back over a small cut — but for some nerve injuries, the gap is simply too large, and the nerve won’t grow back without intervention.
For surgeons like Huang, the preferred option is to transplant nerve tissue from elsewhere in the patient’s own body — for instance, a section of a nerve in the leg — into the wounded area. The transplanted nerve serves as scaffolding, a guide of sorts for a new nerve to grow and bridge the gap. Since the tissue comes from the patient, the body accepts the new nerve and doesn’t attack it.
But for many patients, this treatment isn’t an option. They might have severe wounds to other parts of the body, so that extra nerve tissue isn’t available. Alternatives can include a nerve transplant from a cadaver or an animal, but those bring other challenges, such as the lifelong need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs, and are rarely used.
One technology used by Huang and other neurosurgeons is the NeuraGen Nerve Guide, a hollow, absorbable collagen tube through which nerve fibers can grow and find each other. The technology is often used to repair nerve damage over short distances less than half an inch long.
In the PLoS One study, Huang’s team compared several methods to try to bridge a nerve gap of about half an inch in rats. The team transplanted nerve cells from a different type of rat into the wound site and compared results when the NeuraGen technology was was used alone or when it was paired with DRG cells or with other cells known as Schwann cells.
After four months, the team found that the tubes equipped with either DRG or Schwann cells helped bring about healthier nerves. In addition, the DRG cells provoked less unwanted attention from the immune system than the Schwann cells, which attracted twice as many macrophages and more of the immune compound interferon gamma.
While both Schwann and DRG cells are known players in nerve regeneration, Schwann cells have been considered more often as potential partners in the nerve transplantation process, even though they pose considerable challenges because of the immune system’s response to them.
"The conventional wisdom has been that Schwann cells play a critical role in the regenerative process," said Huang, who is a scientist in the Center for Neural Development and Disease. "While we know this is true, we have shown that DRG cells can play an important role also. We think DRG cells could be a rich resource for nerve regeneration."
In a related line of research, Huang along with colleagues in the laboratory of Douglas H. Smith, M.D. , at the University of Pennsylvania are creating DRG cells in the laboratory by stretching them, which coaxes them to grow about one inch every three weeks. The idea is to grow nerves several inches long in the laboratory, then transplant them into the patient, instead of waiting months after surgery for the nerve endings to travel that distance within the patient to ultimately hook up.
The first author of the PLoS One paper is research associate Weimin Liu, Ph.D. Other authors, in addition to Huang and Smith, are graduate students Yi Ren and Xiaowei Wang; post-doctoral associate Samantha Dayawansa, Ph.D.; undergraduate Adam Bossert; neurologist Handy Gelbard, M.D., Ph.D.; Jing Tong, M.D., formerly of the Huang laboratory and now a neurosurgeon at Hebei Medical University in China, and Xiaoshen He, M.D., a neurosurgeon at Fourth Military Medical University in China.
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Researchers from St. Michael’s Hospital reviewed more than 40 published studies on whether the fructose molecule itself causes weight gain.
In 31 "isocaloric" trials they reviewed, participants ate a similar number of calories, but one group ate pure fructose and the other ate non-fructose carbohydrates. The fructose group did not gain weight.
In 10 "hypercaloric" trials, one group consumed their usual diet and the other added excess calories in the form of pure fructose to their usual diet or a control diet. Those who consumed the extra calories as fructose did gain weight.
However, all that could mean is that one calorie is simply the same as another, and when we consume too many calories we gain weight, said the lead author, Dr. John Sievenpiper.
His research was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
"Fructose may not be to blame for obesity," he said. "It may just be calories from any food source. Overconsumption is the issue."
Fructose is naturally found in fruits, vegetables and honey. Participants in the studies examined by Dr. Sievenpiper ate fructose in the form of free crystalline fructose, which was either baked into food or sprinkled on cereals or beverages.
The studies did not look at high-fructose corn syrup, which has been singled out as the main culprit for weight gain. It is only 55 per cent fructose, along with water and glucose.
Dr. Sievenpiper said the majority of studies they examined were small, of short-duration and of poor quality, so there is a need for larger, longer and better quality studies.
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Today, stars and planetary bodies bear traces of these elements, having formed from the gas enriched by these supernovas over time. For the past 50 years, scientists have been analyzing stars of various ages, looking to chart the evolution of chemical elements in the universe and to identify the astrophysical phenomena that created them.
Now a team of researchers from institutions including MIT has detected the element tellurium for the first time in three ancient stars. The researchers found traces of this brittle, semiconducting element — which is very rare on Earth — in stars that are nearly 12 billion years old. The finding supports the theory that tellurium, along with even heavier elements in the periodic table, likely originated from a very rare type of supernova during a rapid process of nuclear fusion. The researchers published their findings online in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"We want to understand the evolution of tellurium — and by extension any other element — from the Big Bang to today," says Anna Frebel, an assistant professor of astrophysics at MIT and a co-author on the paper. "Here on Earth, everything’s made from carbon and various other elements, and we want to understand how tellurium on Earth came about."
‘In the halo of the Milky Way,’ a rare element found
The team analyzed the chemical composition of three bright stars located a few thousand light-years away, "in the halo of the Milky Way," Frebel says. The researchers looked at data obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope’s spectrograph, an instrument that splits light from a star into a spectrum of wavelengths. If an element is present in a star, the atoms of that element absorb starlight at specific wavelengths; scientists can observe this absorption as dips in the spectrograph’s data.
Frebel and her colleagues detected dips in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum — at a wavelength that matched tellurium’s natural light absorption — providing evidence that this element does indeed exist in space, and was likely created more than 12 billion years ago, at the time when all three stars formed.
The researchers also compared the abundance of tellurium to that of other heavy elements such as barium and strontium, finding that the ratio of elements was the same in all three stars. Frebel says the matching ratios support a theory of chemical-element synthesis: namely, that a rare type of supernova may have created the heavier elements in the bottom half of the periodic table, including tellurium.
No ordinary supernova
According to theoretical predictions, elements heavier than iron may have formed as part of the collapsing core of a supernova, when atomic nuclei collided with huge amounts of neutrons in a nuclear fusion process. For 50 years, astronomers and nuclear physicists have modeled this rapid process, named the r-process, in order to unravel the cosmic history of the elements.
Frebel’s team found that the ratios of heavy elements observed in the three stars matched the ratios predicted by these theoretical models. The findings, she says, confirm the theory that heavier elements likely formed from a rare, extremely rapid supernova.
"You can make iron and nickel in any ordinary supernova, anywhere in the universe," Frebel says. "But these heavy elements seem to only be made in specialized supernovas. Adding more elements to the observed elemental patterns will help us understand the astrophysical and environmental conditions needed for this process to operate."
Jennifer Johnson, an associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, says tellurium has been a "tough" element to detect, since it absorbs light in the ultraviolet spectrum, which is impossible for ground-based telescopes to spot. The team’s findings, she says, are a first step in identifying some of the most elusive elements in the universe.
"If you look at the periodic table, tellurium is right in the middle of these elements that are hard for us to measure," Johnson says. "If we need to understand how [the r-process] works in the universe, we really have to measure this part of the periodic table. It’s really cool that they got this element in this sea of unknown-ness."
Frebel is continuing the search for heavy elements in space. For example, selenium — which is similar to tellurium — has yet to be detected in the universe. Tin, Frebel says, is also a difficult element to spot, as are many elements along the same row as tellurium in the periodic table.
"There are still quite a few holes," Frebel says. "Every now and then, we can add an element, and it adds another data point that makes our work easier."
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SAN FRANCISCO – Samsung gave an early peak at its first quad-core mobile application processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here. The unannounced chip is Samsung’s first to use a 32 nm high-k metal gate process and sports advances in performance and battery life over its existing 45 nm Exynos chips.
The new chip comes in versions using two or four ARM Cortex A9 cores running at rates from 200 MHz to 1.5 GHz along with a 64-bit ARM Neon media processing block. The cores share a 1 Mbyte L2 cache with a snoop control unit.
Samsung designed its own graphics unit for the chip. It includes four pixel processors and one geometry engine with a dedicated 128 KByte L2 cache. The graphics support the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and can generate up to 57 Mpolygons/s.
The chip supports two LPDDR2 or DDR3 interfaces running up to 400 MHz for a total memory bandwidth of up to 6.4 Gbytes/s.
Thanks both to the 32 nm process and a handful of power and thermal management techniques, the chip can deliver up to 26 percent more performance overall than Samsung’s current Exynos chip made in a 45 nm polysilicon process. It also can deliver improvements in battery life ranging from 34 to 50 percent, depending on the application.
Samsung said the new chip delivers up to 26.3 percent improvements in video frame rates. In a demo, Samsung showed the chip using 48 percent less power on 3-D calculations and 45 percent less power in CPU jobs than the 45 nm chip.
The 32 nm HKMG process keep transistor and gate leakage nearly to the levels of the company’s 45 nm polysilicon process, much lower than expected for 32 nm polysilicon technology. Samsung tuned the process to a sweet spot somewhere between its potential for delivering 40 percent more performance or a tenth the leakage, said Se-Hyung Yang, a principal engineer for SoC development at Samsung Electronics who presented the paper.
The chip has four independent power domains and several power sub-domains. Each ARM core and up to a half of the cache memory can be turned off or on independently. A set of media accelerator blocks are similarly power gated independently.
The chip dynamically uses either forward or reverse body-biasing on n-wells to improve performance or reduce leakage as needed. It also uses thermal monitors and a thermal management unit to trigger power management actions including shutting down blocks as needed to protect devices from over-heating and keep a handset below a fixed surface temperature set by handset makers.
“Recently power consumption for mobile devices have increased a lot and mobile devices have limited cooling capability,” said Yang, underlining a growing problem in smartphone design.
Samsung will formally announce the product soon, said Yang, presumably at next week’s Mobile World Congress. Nvidia grabbed the lead in rolling out a quad-core mobile chip last year.
Samsung gives peak at quad-core mobile CPU
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The record-breaking wind is moving about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This is nearly 10 times faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole.
Stellar-mass black holes are born when extremely massive stars collapse. They typically weigh between five and 10 times the mass of the Sun. The stellar-mass black hole powering this super wind is known as IGR J17091-3624, or IGR J17091 for short.
"This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five hurricane," said Ashley King from the University of Michigan, lead author of the study published in the Feb. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We weren’t expecting to see such powerful winds from a black hole like this."
The wind speed in IGR J17091 matches some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes, objects millions or billions of times more massive.
"It’s a surprise this small black hole is able to muster the wind speeds we typically only see in the giant black holes," said co-author Jon M. Miller, also from the University of Michigan. "In other words, this black hole is performing well above its weight class."
Another unanticipated finding is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be carrying away more material than the black hole is capturing.
"Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091 is expelled by the wind," King said.
Unlike winds from hurricanes on Earth, the wind from IGR J17091 is blowing in many different directions. This pattern also distinguishes it from a jet, where material flows in highly focused beams perpendicular to the disk, often at nearly the speed of light.
Simultaneous observations made with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Expanded Very Large Array showed a radio jet from the black hole was not present when the ultra-fast wind was seen, although a radio jet is seen at other times. This agrees with observations of other stellar-mass black holes, providing further evidence the production of winds can stifle jets.
The high speed for the wind was estimated from a spectrum made by Chandra in 2011. Ions emit and absorb distinct features in spectra, which allow scientists to monitor them and their behavior. A Chandra spectrum of iron ions made two months earlier showed no evidence of the high-speed wind, meaning the wind likely turns on and off over time.
Astronomers believe that magnetic fields in the disks of black holes are responsible for producing both winds and jets. The geometry of the magnetic fields and rate at which material falls towards the black hole must influence whether jets or winds are produced.
IGR J17091 is a binary system in which a Sun-like star orbits the black hole. It is found in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy, about 28,000 light-years away from Earth.
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LONDON – A number of factors are likely to have contributed to soft January chip sales according to Bruce Diesen, an analyst at Carnegie Group (Oslo, Norway).
The net effect would have been that January’s actual global chip sales were 15 percent below what they were in January 2011. However, as one of the influences is the movement of the Chinese New Year from February in 2011 to January 2012 there is hope of a better-than-usual February to follow.
However, other factors remain problematic. These factors include: PC weakness and higher costs due to the continued aftermath of flooding in Thailand and observed weakness in the mobile phone handset and automotive business sectors.
The three-month average of global chip sales for January, as reported by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization, is likely to be $22.7 billion, according to Diesen’s data models. This would compare with a three-month average of $23.83 billion reported by WSTS for December 2011. Actual sales in January are set to be between 15 and 16 percent below where they were in January 2011, Diesen said.
“Although several chip makers indicated the inventory correction in Q4 has ended, our early indicator indicates that it continued into Q1,” Diesen said.
Diesen said that both South Korea’s broader technology exports and Japan’s chip exports were down sharply in January. Korean handset exports were down 39 percent year-on-year partly due to the holiday shift from February in 2011 to January in 2012.
Diesen’s forecast for growth in the semiconductor market in U.S. dollar terms in 2012 is a 2 percent increase.
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NEW YORK – Times are tough for communication chip vendors who need to keep up, as a dizzying array of wireless standards continues to evolve at breathless speed.
Just when you thought you’d finally nailed LTE modem functions in your next generation of mobile SoC chips, here comes what? LTE-Advanced.
Connectivity networks are also growing exponentially. In the WiFi realm alone, handling comfortable old friends like 802.11 n and 802.11a/b/g/p is the fast track to the old folks’ home. As we speak, Broadcom is promoting – heavily – the emergence of 802.11ab.
So, what is to be done?
CEVA, Inc. is announcing Tuesday (Feb. 21st, 2012) a new family of “universal advanced communications engines,” called CEVA-XC4000. It’s designed as an answer to chip suppliers serving the ever-growing cellular, broadcast and connectivity markets, under pressure to roll out new communication chips in a timely manner, while preserving investments in the development of generations of products, if possible.
Eyal Bergman, director of product marketing at CEVA, goes so far as to claim that the CEVA XC4000 family supports “the most complete array of communication standards.”
Let’s break it down.
CEVA’s XC4000 processors, while maintaining backward compatibility with the company’s previous communication processors (i.e. XC321 and XC323), are based on a single, newly designed low-power DSP framework.
The new XC4000 family, which comes in six different processors, can cover a broad range of wireless and wired applications, according to CEVA.
They include everything from cellular (LTE-A, LTE, HSPA+, W-CDMA. TD-SCDMA, GSM/GPRS/EDGDE), connectivity (802.11ac, 802.11n, 802.11a/b/g/p, WiFi Direct, GNSS, Bluetooth, Peer2Peer) to DTV demodulation (DVB-T/2, DVB-S/2, DVB-C/2, ISDB-T, ATSC, DTMB) and others such as White Space, MoCA, DSL, G.hn, PLC and 802.15.4/g, according to CEVA.
Each XC4000 processor, which comes with a varying number of vector units, is designed to be scalable. The variations range from a single vector unit and 16 MACs to 4 vector units and 128 MACs. “Our customers can mix and match these different XC4000 processors to address a wide range of communications markets,” said CEVA’s Bergman.
You might say that this is just the kind of “communication-centric DSP” pitch you’d expect to get from CEVA, a pioneer in software-defined radio (SDR). After all, programmability and flexibility in DSPs are the key to unlocking the conundrum of infinitely growing communication standards.
But this time around, CEVA’s pitch doesn’t stop there. CEVA wants you to know that the company has taken a few roads significantly less-traveled than with the company’s previous communication processors.
First, the XC4000 isn’t a single advanced communication processor like XC321 or XC323 were. The XC4000 family is not just flexible but “it’s also scalable,” Bergman explained, thus making it easier for chip vendors to “scale up or down” their products’ designs.
Second, CEVA’s engineering team took extra steps to make noticeable improvements in power management and die size in designing the new XC4000 architecture.
Bergman said the new XC4000 architecture features better “software and hardware partitioning.” He pointed out that this is “truly optimized for power,” thus making the family of XC4000 processors “highly competitive” with other communication chips on the market.
Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, finds XC4000 unique, because of its ability to “provide greater performance at lower power and in smaller silicon.” He noted that XC4000 family, presumably offers “over 50% silicon size reduction for LTE-A PHY, compared with CEVA-XC323 based PHY, both at 28nm. The scalability among XC4000 family of processors is another big improvement over CEVA’s previous products, in Strauss’ opinion. But above all, the strength of XC4000 lies in its “improved power management capability over the [CEVA’s previous communication processor] XC323,” he added.
Scott Gardner, a senior analyst at The Linley Group, agreed on the issue of power management. Gardner singled out “tightly-coupled extensions (TCEs)” included in the new CEVA family of DSPs as XC4000’s big differentiator.
Gardner explained that TCEs “use hardware acceleration of functions as a way to save power and CPU cycles.” In his view, “This design approach recognizes that customers want the best wireless baseband solution, and the DSP doesn’t need to be as flexible for the algorithms” as they move into hardware.
How CEVA is winning thus far
So far, with its previous generation communication processor IPs, CEVA claims that it’s picked up 15 design wins for LTE baseband processing. Among licensees are Intel, Broadcom, Mindspeed, Samsung and NEC, according to Gardner. Forward Concepts’ Strauss noted that Mindspeed last year sampled pico cells based on CEVA’s XC processor at the Mobile World Congress.
Gardner also believes CEVA has references design wins with a tier-1 wireless infrastructure OEM, network processor vendors, and smart-grid chip suppliers, although he declined to speculate on who those companies are, or the production status of the designs.
There’s no question that CEVA is “on a roll,” as Gardner put it. He said, quoting CEVA, its DSPs were in 40% of the handsets shipped worldwide during 2011.
CEVA’s total revenue for 2011 was $60.2 million—up about 34% from the prior year. Royalty revenue for 2011 was a record high $36.4 million, representing an increase of 59% compared to $22.9 million reported for 2010. Licensing revenue for 2011 was $20.2 million, an increase of 10% over that of 2010.
However, there are still enough chip vendors out there, sticking to the hardwired modem blocks they pioneered years ago and milking their lead.
It remains to be seen how many of those hardwired modem houses, and those who compete against them, might eventually convert to CEVA’s XC4000.
Linley Group’s Gardner believes it’s just a matter of time. He said, “High-end standards are still changing too fast to support a hardwired solution. In many cases, a multimode, hardwired design would require multiple blocks of logic with very little reuse between operating modes. These extra hardware blocks add to the cost.” He added, “With CEVA’s approach, many of the low-level algorithms have been baked into hardware LTEs, which gives them the best of both worlds.”
Asked why chip companies should consider licensing XC4000, Forward Concepts’ Strauss said, “First, CEVA has the most experience in licensing DSP cores than anyone else. Second, they have a good reputation for good architectures and good support (including C compilers and development tools). Third, they have developed a good ecosystem of 3rd party suppliers (hardware and software).”
If you are already a CEVA licensee with its previous-generation communication DSP cores, “you can continue to use the compatible programming model and instruction set architecture you are familiar with, while leveraging the same, CEVA-developed tools,” said CEVA’s marketing vice president Eran Briman. “Licensees can scale their products, while preserving their investment.”
The “uncompromising” modem quality XC4000 offers should be another draw for new licensees, according to CEVA. Gardner, in fact, pointed out the significance of higher precision arithmetic and unique floating-point-precision instruction set architecture (ISA) CEVA now offers in its XC4000. Its advantage is that it combines the benefits of floating point precision with fixed point performance and power consumption. “The use of de-normalized numbers for addition/subtraction allows CEVA to speed up processing while retaining precision,” Gardner noted.
Together with its XC4000 architecture announcement, CEVA is also rolling out reference architectures for LTE-A Rel-10 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac (supporting up to 1.7 Gbps).
CEVA launches new low-power DSP cores for the broadest comms standards
Feb 12
21
Terahertz CMOS debuts at ISSCC
PORTLAND, Ore.—Downsizing big bulky terahertz (THz) detectors for integration on CMOS image chips has been accomplished by the University of Texas (Dallas) with funding from the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC). Accomplished under SRC’s Focus Research Program, the demonstration of terahertz speeds on standard CMOS opens a door for a new slew of consumer devices that can see through solid objects.
“We can now build a CMOS image chip for a cell-phone-sized camera module that sees in the terahertz range,” said Ken O, a professor and lead researcher for SRC’s program at UT Dallas and a key investigator in the Center for Circuit and System Solutions, a part of SRC’s Focus Center Research Program.
Today terahertz cameras are used, for instance, in the airport to see inside luggage and under clothing to detect hidden weapons, but the devices require expensive discrete components. By downsizing terahertz sensors for standard CMOS chips, the terahertz camera can be both size and cost reduced in the extreme.
“Inexpensive handheld terahertz cameras could be used to detect counterfeit money or documents, to see inside envelopes or packages, or to find where the studs, wires and pipes are in walls,” said O.
A one-pixel CMOS terahertz image chip (left) can see through solid objects, here showing the inner workings of an old-school floppy disk.
Terahertz CMOS debuts at ISSCC
TAG:CMOS Complementary metal oxide semiconductor semiconductor sensor imager terahertz THz
SAN FRANCISCO—Thermal diffusivity based sensors are the future, according to professor Kofi Makinwa of Delft University of Technology, speaking at the International Solid States Circuits Conference here Monday (Feb. 20).
Makinwa said he has been working on the technology for six years and that their importance was increasing owing to the fact thermal sensors are to be found in practically any computer system.
“Systems would self-destruct if you let them have their own way,” he noted, explaining the need for a more practical heatsink.
With systems becoming increasingly multi-core, hot spots throughout the processor are increasing, said Makinwa. The problem is becoming progressively complex because the hot spots move dynamically based on various processes, he said.
“SoC monitoring needs a fast conversion rate since thermal transients can have milisecond time constraints,” said Makinwa, adding that they also needed to be very small and consume as little power as possible, though they didn’t necessarily need to be highly accurate.
Since most properties of silicon are temperature dependent, Makinwa said band gap temperature sensors were simply not good enough and that a different approach was needed.
“Heat diffusion is a mechanical process,” said Makinwa, noting that this needed to be more about phonons than electrons.
The system works by measuring the thermal delay between an on-chip heater and an on-chip relative temperature sensor. That delay can then be digitized or used to define the output frequency of an oscillator.
“Thermal diffusivity of silicon is strongly temperature dependent,” said Makinwa, noting that thermal diffusivity based sensors were fully CMOS compatible, were insensitive to doping variations, packaging stress and could operate at higher temperatures, even up to 250 degrees centigrade. They also have performance accuracy and speed that scales with process, said Makinwa.
Makinwa said proof-of-concept thermal diffusivity sensors have already been fabricated in 0.7μm and 0.18μm bulk CMOS, as well as in 0.5μm SOI technology and were found to work over a wide temperature range from -70°C to 170°C.
An implementation in 0.18μm bulk CMOS achieved an untrimmed inaccuracy of ±0.2°C (3σ) from -55°C to 125°C, said Makinwa, concluding that therefore, TD sensors were the best solution for thermal management in nanometer CMOS.
Thermal Diffusivity Sensors: Temperature Sensors that Scale
Feb 12
20
Welding nanowires with light
RESEARCH at Stanford School of Engineering have found a way to weld together meshes of nanowires with light.
A lot of work is currently being done on nanoelectronics, and one of these is the creation of electrically conductive meshes made of metal nanowires. These meshes could one day be used in touchscreens, displays, LEDs and thin-film solar cells.
However, to create such a mesh, nanowires must be melded together in a crisscross pattern. Pressing them together or heating them damages the nanowires.
The Stanford engineers utilised plasmonics to fuse the wires using light. Plasmonics is the physics behind the interaction of light and metal in which the light flows across the surface of the metal in waves.
If two nanowires are placed to criss-cross each other, light generates Plasmon waves at the intersection, creating a hot spot. This fuses the nanowires, after which the hot spot disappears, preventing damage from residual heat.
This light-based, self-limiting, highly precise heating increases the control, speed and energy efficiency of nanoscale welding, easing the creation of nanowire meshes.
According to the researchers, the new technique could also allow mesh electrodes to be bound to flexible or transparent plastics and polymers. For example, they sprayed a solution containing silver nanowires in suspension on a plastic wrap and dried it.
Upon inspection after illumination, the spray had left an ultrathin layer of welded nanowires. The wrap was balled up, and found to maintain its electrical properties upon unwrapping. It also maintained most of its transparency.
Prior to the plasmonics approach, the plastic wrap holding the nanowires would have had to be heated to weld them together, destroying the substrate.
SAN FRANCISCO – Intel gave its first details public look into Ivy Bridge, the first processors to use its 22 nm tri-gate technology. Intel plans at least four major variants of the chip which packs 1.4 billion transistors into 160mm2 in its largest version.
Ivy Bridge packs 20 channels of PCI Express Gen 3 interconnect and a Displayport controller, Intel’s first chip to integrate PCIe. The move marks one small step into the long term quest of what an Intel executive called terascale-class clients.
The first Ivy Bridge chip targets a range of desktop, notebook, embedded and single-socket server systems with up to 8 Mbytes cache. Like previous Intel parts it integrates a memory controller and graphics, now upgraded to support DDR3L DRAMs and Microsoft DirectX 11.0 graphics APIs.
“We spent a lot of time on the modularity of this die to create different flavors of it very quickly,” said Scott Siers, an Intel engineer who presented a paper on the chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here.
Specifically the largest die includes four x86 cores and a large graphics block. It can be chopped along its x- and/or y-axis using automated generation tools to create versions with two cores or a smaller graphics block.
Siers said Ivy Bridge is Intel’s first client chip to support low power 1.35V DDR3L and DDR power gating in standby mode. It handles up to 1,600 MTransfers/s as well as 1.5V DDR3. A new write assist cache circuit provides an average 100 millivolt power reduction.
The Displayport block supports three simultaneous displays including one 1.6 GHz and two 2.7 GHz links with four lanes each.
The PCIe receiver uses a continuous time linear equalizer with 32 gain control levels and a transmitter with a three-tap digital FIR filter. The PCIe block also supports on die testing for jitter as well as timing and voltage margin measurements.
The chip’s x86 and graphics cores can scale in data rates at 100 and 50 MHz increments respectively. Overall, the chip supports five power planes and 180 clock islands that can be separately gated.
In a separate ISSCC keynote, Dadi Perlmutter, chief product officer for Intel, scoped out a long term vision of terahertz-class clients. Terahertz systems consume as much as three kilowatts today but could be reduced to 20W by the end of the decade using a broad variety of techniques, he said.
The techniques include optimizing chips to work at near threshold voltage levels, a subject of several Intel papers at ISSCC. Lower power internal and external interconnects are also needed, he said.
3-D IC packaging will be needed to lower power memory, Permutter said. Toward that end Intel is working with Micron and others on its Hypercube stacked memory design, he said. The design could boost memory bandwidth ten-fold while cutting power to eight pico-joules per bit, down from 50-75 pj/bit in today’s DDR3, he added.
In addition, “voltage regulation has to go into the IC itself because inductance is too big off chip or even on package,” Perlmutter said. “When you have a lot of voltage regulators to turn on and off it becomes very complex to do on a package, so we are working on getting power regulators into the ICs,” he said.
Perlmutter said he sees another 30 years of engineering needed in computing. “For people who thought they could retire from this industry, I say there’s a lot more to do,” he said.
Dadi Perlmutter scoped out challenges to get to terahertz clients.
Intel gives deeper look into Ivy Bridge
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