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Gary Edwards

The End of the Battery - Getting All Charged Up over Supercapacitors - Casey Research - 0 views

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    Very interesting article describing the near market ready potential of "supercapacitor" batteries.   This is truly game changer stuff, and very interesting to me since i've been following the research and development of "graphene technologies" for some time.  The graphene superconductor targets the future of both energy and computing.  But graphene is also at the cutting edge of "faster, better, cheaper" water desalinization!  Nor does it take a rocket scientist to see that a graphene nano latice will have an enormous impact on methods of separating water (H2O) atoms to create an electical current - a cost free flow of electons.   Very well written research! excerpt: "an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap - using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process. You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge - originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can. Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology
Gary Edwards

Who Really Wins From Android's Success? | Casey Research - 0 views

  • Gartner recently reported that smartphone sales grew 46.5% in the second quarter of 2013 and exceeded feature-phone sales for the first time. In other words, we're still at the beginning of the dumbphone conversion cycle, and a global revolution in mobile is really just getting started. This revolution is fueling monstrous growth in a less-known market that goes by "MEMS" (micro-electro-mechanical systems).
  • Interest in the technology grew throughout the 1960s, and a number of companies commercialized silicon pressure sensors. Advancements in micromachining and silicon processing in the early 1970s then led to what could arguably be called the first true MEMS sensors, which had particular geometries that yielded superior performance. It was not until three decades later, however, that MEMS were small enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough to begin penetrating the consumer market. Today, the overall MEMS market is fragmented and has an extremely diverse application set comprised of such things as oscillators, microfluidics, compasses, gyroscopes, accelerometers, microphones, and pressure sensors. For our purposes here, we're mostly concerned with MEMS accelerometers and—even more so—MEMS gyroscopes.
  • MEMS accelerometers have been making cars safer for years by triggering airbags in the event of a crash. But manufacturers of the sensors wanted more: a world filled with gadgets that sense and respond to motion. That's exactly the direction we're going in today. In terms of overall value, the global MEMS market is projected to double from over $10 billion in 2012 to more than $20 billion in 2017. To get a leg up on the competition, consumer-electronics device manufacturers have been eager to adopt new device functionalities and create compelling interactive experiences, such as the touchscreen and, more recently, motion-based functions.
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  • Nintendo's Wii game console made MEMS accelerometer technology somewhat of a household name. The iPhone took the next step, with portrait/landscape orientation and basic motion gaming, which sent production volumes of MEMS accelerometers skyrocketing and competitors scurrying to catch up, copy, and come up with new motion-based functions. MEMS accelerometers are now standard features in smartphones. And the same thing is happening with MEMS gyroscopes. These represent a fresh way for users to interact with their mobile devices, providing a new set of motion-driven commands that bypass certain touchscreen or hard-key commands while promising more reliability than voice commands. MEMS gyroscopes are expected to be the next big thing in smartphones and tablets. Figures from Yole Développement peg MEMS accelerometer penetration of mobile phones at 37%, while MEMS gyroscope penetration of the handset market is a mere 4%. These figures are projected to climb to 64% and 17% respectively by 2015, as the technology is more widely applied to new mobile devices.
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