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Just as photographic film was mostly replaced by silicon image chips, now quantum film threats to replace the conventional CMOS image sensors in digital cameras. Made from materials similar to conventional film—a polymer with embedded particles—instead of silver grains like photographic film the embedded particles are quantum dots. Quantum films can image scenes with more pixel resolution, according to their inventors, InVisage Inc., offering four-times better sensitivity for ultra-high resolution sensors that are cheaper to manufacture.

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based thin film transistors (TFTs) could be at the core of next-generation flexible electronics – displays, electronic circuits, sensors, memory chips, and other applications that are transitioning from rigid substrates, such as silicon and glass, to flexible substrates. What's holding back commercial applications is that industrial-type manufacturing of large scale SWCNT-based nanoelectronic devices isn't practical yet because controlling the morphology of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still causing headaches for materials engineers.

March has seen two significant announcements from FPGA start-ups with innovative architectures: Tabula, with their time-domain-multiplexed architecture, and TierLogic, implementing their routing switches in a layer of thin-film transistors. Both approaches promise to significantly reduce the die size and cost of high-end FPGAs. But before these announcements broke, a relatively unnoticed paper at February's International Symposium on FPGAs described what may be the most radical technology of them all: FPGAs using electromechanical relays. No, this is not an early April Fool's joke, nor is it one of those "let's see if anyone will publish this one" academic exercises. The paper presented work by professors and students at the Stanford University departments of electrical engineering and computer science, and researchers at Altera Corp. The work was supported in part by DARPA funding.

Sony Corp. has developed a highly flexible OLED display that can be rolled around a pencil and continue to operate. The 4.1-inch diagonal isplay is 80-microns thick and offers 432 by 240 by RGB pixels resolution at 121 pixels per inch. It is an organic LED full color display driven by an organic thin-film transistor matrix.