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Google PowerMeter allows consumers to access their power consumption data through a secure, Web-based iGoogle™ gadget. As a Strategic Partner, Microchip incorporated the recently announced Google PowerMeter API to create a Reference Implementation, which makes it much easier to develop products that are compatible with Google PowerMeter. Microchip's Reference Implementation demonstrates the device's activation, data transmission and status messages using readily available Microchip development tools. It can be used as a template for developers' own designs.

Three-dimensional microchip designs are making their way to market to help pack more transistors on a chip as traditional scaling slows down. By stacking logic chips on top of one another other or combining logic chips with memory or RF with logic, chipmakers hope to sidestep Moore's Law, increasing the functionality of smartphones and other gadgets not by shrinking a chip's transistors but the distance between them. "There's a big demand for smaller packages in the consumer market, especially for the footprint of a mobile phone, or for improving the memory bandwidth of your GPU," says Pol Marchal, a principal scientist of 3-D integration at European microelectronics R&D center Imec. On 9 February, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), in San Francisco, Imec engineers presented some key design challenges facing 3-D chips made by stacking layers of silicon circuits using vertical copper interconnects called through-silicon vias (TSVs). These design constraints will have to be dealt with before TSVs can be widely used in advanced microchip architectures, Marchal says.

Nothing is ever simple in IT, and nanotechnology is no different. For a start, the term nanotechnology can mean different things to different people. For purists, it refers to a microscopic structure equal to or less than one nanometre (nm) in size – about a billionth of a metre. But many vendors and regulators (see How EC rules affect nanotechnology, page 2) believe the term nanotechnology can be applied to any structure between 1nm and 100nm in size, which means various nanoscale silicon components and microchips already inhabit many of the computers and other electrical and electronic devices we use today.

At first glance, D-Wave Systems looks like any other well-appointed office, with an open reception area and conventional cubicles. But one glance at the wall beside the receptionist and you know the average IQ here is intimidatingly high — it’s literally covered in plaques from the U.S. patent office featuring 19th century lettering and incongruously describing patents for superconducting qubit-based microchips.

When Pantelis Georgiou and his fellow biomedical engineers at Imperial College London decided to design an intelligent insulin pump for diabetes patients, they started at the source. "We asked ourselves, what does a pancreas do to control blood glucose?" Georgiou recalls. The answer is pretty well known: The organ relies primarily on two populations of cells—beta cells, to secrete insulin when blood glucose is high, and alpha cells, which release a hormone called glucagon when glucose levels are low. "We simulated them both in microchip form," Georgiou says. This biomimetic approach diverges from today's dominant method of delivering only insulin using a relatively simple control system.