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Tiny semiconductor dots could lead to a new type of circuit based on magnetism rather than current flow. At least that’s the hope of researchers who’ve made the dots and are hoping to build them into a workable device. ”We want to make it into a so-called nonvolatile transistor,” says Kang Wang, head of the Device Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Such a ”spintronic” transistor would retain its logic state in the absence of current and require less power to switch a bit, reducing the electrical power required by a computer chip by as much as 99 percent. Wang’s research, supported in part by Intel, was published in March in the online version of Nature Materials. Where electronic transistors rely on the presence or absence of current to register the ones and zeros of digital logic, spintronic transistors depend on ”spin,” a quantum characteristic of the electron. Picture the electron as a rotating globe. When the north pole is pointing upward, that’s spin up; when pointing the other way, it’s spin down. When the spins of most electrons are aligned, the material is magnetic. When their spins are random, the material isn’t. An applied current can align or randomize the spins, allowing for spin-based switches.

(Nanowerk News) While the laws of physics weren’t made to be broken, sometimes they need revision. A major current law has been rewritten thanks to the three-port transistor laser, developed by Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak Jr. at the University of Illinois.

Having the lowest system power allows customers to achieve their design objectives, whether it be for longer battery life, higher product performance or lower system cost. The Si100x/1x wireless MCU family features the industry’s lowest active mode current consumption, which saves power when the application is running. It also has the industry’s lowest current consumption sleep modes that save power when the device is sleeping, which is typically the majority of time in most battery powered applications.

By using a simple value process it is possible to speed up the analysis and help identify the best approach to take when developing a constant current regulation scheme for automotive interior LED lighting systems. Various approaches exist to address this particular design challenge that may result in a slowdown of the design process while engineering analysis can be performed to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the different options.

Ozmo Devices, the leading provider of low-power Wi-Fi Personal Area Network (Wi-Fi PAN) solutions, announced today that it started sampling its OZMO2000 chip to select peripheral manufacturers.  This is the first Wi-Fi solution to overcome the battery life, cost and compatibility issues that have limited the broad adoption of Wi-Fi for HID (human interface device) applications.  The OZMO2000 is currently available for use in Wi-Fi mouse, keyboard and remote control designs.  Furthermore, the solution is compatible with all Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks and desktops that are compatible with Windows 7.

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

Researchers at CMU and Intel are attempting to map and understand human brain activity well enough that individual words can be detected. Currently, giant MRI machines are being used but the future holds smaller devices that can be worn like a helmet according to Dean Pomerleau, senior researcher at Intel. The efficiency and productivity of word detection will be superior to existing technology that allows an operator to simply control a cursor. This technology will no doubt make its way into robotic telepresence applications including remote surgery and construction in dangerous environments such as the ocean and space.

At three separate industry events last week, engineers said they are gearing up to deliver in 2011 chips that can handle serial data streams running at 25 Gbits/second to drive next-generation 100 and 400 Gbit/second networks. But they say it's still a mystery how—or if—they can deliver follow-on components for the terabit networks today's Internet data centers are already demanding. The kinds of jobs required to run today's Web 2.0 services such as Google and Facebook can completely overwhelm current 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links in the warehouse-sized data centers those companies use. Such data centers could use hundreds of 100 Gbit/s Ethernet links today, although standards for such networks are still being completed.

DSP core licensor Ceva Inc. is due to unveil a software-programmable multimedia video processor architecture at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The multicore architecture, called MM3000, which comes complete with C compilers, power management provision and an RTOS/multithreading scheduler is intended to be able to process any and all video codecs up to the highest resolutions and frame rates currently available as well as future codecs for things like 3-D video.

Verification of algorithm-intensive systems is a long, costly process. Studies show that the majority of flaws in embedded systems are introduced at the specification stage, but are not detected until late in the development process. These flaws are the dominant cause of project delays and a major contributor to engineering costs. For algorithm-intensive systems —including systems with communications, audio, video, imaging, and navigation functions— these delays and costs are exploding as system complexity increases. It doesn't have to be this way. Many designers of algorithm-intensive systems already have the tools they need to get verification under control. Engineers can use these same tools to build system models that help them find and correct problems earlier in the development process. This can not only reduce verification time, but also improves the performance of their designs. In this article, we'll explain three practical approaches to early verification that make this possible. First, let's examine why the current algorithm verification process is inefficient and error-prone. In a typical workflow, designs start with algorithm developers, who pass the design to hardware and software teams using specification documents.

In 2008 a team of physicists from Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and other institutions stumbled upon an odd phenomenon. They called it superinsulation, because in many ways it was the opposite of superconductivity. Now they’ve worked out the theory behind it, potentially opening the doors to better batteries, supersensitive sensors, and strange new circuits. Superconductors lose all resistance once they fall below a certain temperature. In superinsulators, on the other hand, the resistance to the flow of electricity becomes infinite at very low temperatures, preventing any flow of electric current.

Experimental microbial fuel cells could turn bacteria into batteries that generate electricity from biomass. The key to this technology is the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to their surroundings—for example, to the anode of a microbial fuel cell. But if the organisms have to be in direct contact with the anode, such devices would have to have extremely large surface areas. Researchers from Aarhus University, in Denmark, report today in the journal Nature that bacteria appear to conduct electricity while separated by several millimeters, at least a thousand times as far apart than previously demonstrated. The naturally occurring electric currents, if confirmed, would allow bacteria spaced at least 12 millimeters apart to communicate electrically. The discovery might lead to new paths to treating infection and a better understanding of microbial ecosystems.

LED luminaires require precise power and heat management because LEDs convert most of the electrical energy they receive into heat rather than light. Without adequate thermal management, this heat can degrade the LED's life span and affect color output. Also, LEDs can fail short because they are silicon devices, so they may require fail-safe backup in the form of overcurrent protection. Resettable PPTC (polymeric-positive-temperature-coefficient) circuit-protection devices have demonstrated their effectiveness in a variety of LED-lighting applications. Like traditional fuses, they limit current after they exceed specified limits. However, unlike fuses, PPTC devices can reset after the fault clears and the power cycles.

ON Semiconductor has expanded its multiplexer product line with devices that are designed to function at high input rates/clock frequencies. The NB6VQ572M, NB6LQ572, NB7L572, NB6L572M, NB7LQ572, NB6LQ572M, NB7VQ58M and NB7V58M mux/fanout devices are targeted at SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel, backplane and other clock/data distribution applications. The NB6VQ572M and NB6LQ572M differential 4:1 clock/data input multiplexers with 1:2 current mode logic (CML) clock/data fanout buffers operate at up to 6 GHz/8 Gbps from a 1.8 V, 2.5 V or 3.3 V power supply. The new devices have a data dependent jitter of <10 ps and random clock jitter of less than 0.8 ps RMS.

The design of a generator system requires many hours of detailed planning with the goal of creating an extremely reliable backup power source. Properly installed, the system will deliver the intended level of reliability. However, if incorrectly wired, the system can become a problem for both the owner and the manufacturer. While the generator installation can be handled by a range of people, from a trained technician to the typical homeowner, wiring mistakes can occur. Installation includes working with 120 VAC split phase, 240 V line voltage, along with low-voltage signals below 50 V. A small and easily made mistake, such as miswiring high voltage to low voltage, will destroy sensitive electronics quickly and may render the equipment inoperable. Thus, a resettable overcurrent and overvoltage solution capable of handling line voltage, electrostatic discharge (ESD), electrical fast transients (EFT), and current surge is required to protect low voltage interface circuits against this problem.