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4 January 2010—Though flexible devices such as roll-up displays have been promised for several years, their commercialization has been stalled by a missing ingredient: a flexible form of flash memory. But researchers at the University of Tokyo have recently developed an organic, floating-gate nonvolatile memory that behaves like flash memory, which may solve that problem. While silicon-based flash memory is fine for the mass data storage found in cellphones, digital music players, and thumb drives, fabricating it requires high processing temperatures, thus ruling out its production on flexible substrates like plastic. Organic semiconductors, however, can be processed at temperatures well below the melting point of most plastics. What's more, "the cost of flash memory is too high to use in applications that require large arrays of memory," says Tsuyoshi Sekitani, an assistant professor in the University of Tokyo's department of electrical and electronic engineering and one of the researchers who developed the new memory. "But we can print our organic memory on flexible substrates and over large areas using inkjet printers. So costs will be low."

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.

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has launched a programmable product for data communication over existing power lines. The Powerline Communication product leverages the programmable analog and digital resources of Cypress's PSoC programmable system-on-a-chip architecture. It integrates multiple functions beyond communication, such as power measurement, system management and LCD drive. In addition to its flexibility and integration, the product offers greater than 97% packet success rates without retries and 100% success rates with retries built into the solution's coding, according to Cypress. It also offers the flexibility to communicate over high-voltage and low-voltage power lines for lighting and industrial control, home automation, automatic meter reading and smart energy management applications.

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) present an efficient and inexpensive alternative when it comes to implementing complete embedded systems along with important peripheral functions. The reconfigurable logic circuitry of an FPGA offers tremendous flexibility. A lesser known feature is that the outputs of a digital FPGA also permit various analogue applications.

In separate keynote addresses in Silicon Valley, two Internet pioneers gave different takes on the future of the network of networks Monday (May 24). Vint Cerf, co-developer of the Net's TCP/IP protocol, shared his thoughts with developers of the smart electric grid, seen as a massive embedded extension to the Internet. Larry Roberts, who helped launch the forerunner of the Internet, explained his ideas for remedying the growing congestion that plagues the Web today. Smart grid developers can learn from the lessons of the Internet, Cerf told attendees at Connectivity Week here. They should follow the model of the Net in creating a layered architecture with plenty of room for flexibility in areas that cannot be anticipated today, he said in a keynote at Connectivity Week.

The ARM Cortex™-M4 processor is the latest embedded processor by ARM specifically developed to address digital signal control markets that demand an efficient, easy-to-use blend of control and signal processing capabilities. The combination of high-efficiency signal processing functionality with the low-power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits of the Cortex-M family of processors is designed to satisfy the emerging category of flexible solutions specifically targeting the motor control, automotive, power management, embedded audio and industrial automation markets. The Cortex-M4 processor features extended single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions, optimized SIMD arithmetic, saturating arithmetic instructions and an optional single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU). These features build upon the innovative technology that characterizes the ARM Cortex-M series processors…

In a recent video, Willow Garage researcher Eitan Marder-Eppstein describes the open-source navigation stack they've released as version 1.0. The code, available at http://ros.org/wiki/navigation, was designed to be flexible and cross-platform, he says, and could be used in anything from a small iRobot Create-based bot to a large multi-sensor robot like Willow's own PR2 (which Spectrum has covered in detail here and here).

Breadboarding a new circuit is a key skill and an important step in many projects—especially early on, when you need to move wires around and substitute components. But that very flexibility also makes it easy to knock wires out. Eventually, if your project is a keeper, you’re going to want something with a bit more permanence. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) solve all those shortcomings. But most people don’t even consider translating a one-off project into a PCB design. For one thing, PCB fabrication has traditionally been expensive, viable only in commercial quantities. (One alternative is to do it yourself with etches and silk screens, a messy and time-consuming process.) Also, there are technical constraints involved with PCB designs that are daunting to the casual hobbyist. But it turns out that nowadays you can produce a professional PCB very inexpensively.

Xilinx Inc. today introduced the architecture for a new Extensible Processing Platform they claim will deliver unrivaled levels of system performance, flexibility and integration to developers of a wide variety of embedded systems. The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor-based platform enables system architects and embedded software developers to apply a combination of serial and parallel processing to address the challenges they face in designing today's embedded systems, which must meet ever-growing demands to perform highly complex functions. The Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform offers embedded systems designers a processor-centric design and development approach for achieving the compute and processing horsepower required to drive tasks involving high-speed access to real-time inputs, high-performance processing and complex digital signal processing - or any combination thereof - needed to meet their application-specific requirements, including lower cost and power.

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.