Electronic Equipment
Holographic TV: The next big thing?
January 24, 2011 3:18 am | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsThe Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was abuzz about a slew of prototype 3D TVs, but if new research from the MIT Media Lab is any indication, holographic TVs could be close behind. A team presented a new system at the SPIE Practical Holography conference that can capture visual information using off-the-shelf electronics, send it over the Internet to a holographic display, and update the image at rates approaching those of feature films.
Probing ancient radio waves for clues about the universe's first light
January 14, 2011 3:18 am | by Morgan Bettex, MIT News Office | News | CommentsRecently, two astronomers conducted an experiment to try to learn more about the Epoch of Reionization, or EOR. Because identifying any light from the earliest galaxies is nearly impossible, the astronomers instead focused their efforts on detecting radio waves emitted by hydrogen that existed between the first galaxies. Some of these radio waves are just reaching us today, and astronomers have theorized that certain characteristics of the waves could hold clues about the EOR.
Coiled nanowires may hold the key to stretchable electronics
January 11, 2011 9:57 am | News | CommentsResearchers at North Carolina State Univ. have created the first coils of silicon nanowire on a substrate that can be stretched to more than double their original length, moving us closer to incorporating stretchable electronic devices into clothing, implantable health-monitoring devices, and a host of other applications.
Expitaxial graphene: Showing promise as a replacement for silicon in electronics
January 10, 2011 3:30 am | News | CommentsMove over silicon. There's a new electronic material in town, and it goes fast. That material is graphene. These layers, sometimes just a single atom thick, conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, very little heat generation—and less power consumption than silicon.
Apple's absence to be felt at CES gadget show
January 4, 2011 5:07 am | by Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsOn Thursday, the largest trade show of any kind will begin in Las Vegas. Apple, typically the elephant in the room at this event, will be absent this year. However, the company’s successful iPad tablet is driving forward a new segment of consumer electronics that in turn is fostering innovation in materials, electronics, and display technology.
2011 Global R & D Funding Forecast - Industrial R & D: Electronics and Computers
December 15, 2010 4:10 am | by Martin Grueber, Research Leader, Batelle, Cleveland, Ohio and Tim Studt, Editor-in-Chief, Advantage Business Media, Elk Grove Village, Illinois | Articles | CommentsElectronic systems and components have been in a constant state of evolution for nearly 50 years. Moore’s Law—the doubling of transistor density every two years—started it all in 1965, and the trend is now expected to continue through 2015 and beyond. Current hardware technology development responds to growth in cloud computing, Internet servers, mobile computing, pervasive wireless, embedded everything, integrated power supplies, satellite-based communications, flexible circuits and displays, many-core processors, carbon nanotube circuits, printed circuits and more.
iTest, iMeasure
December 10, 2010 5:29 am | by Paul Livingstone | Articles | CommentsIn its assessment of a popular smart phone as measurement and diagnostic tool for electric utility applications, the Electric Power Research Institute found a new trend in field testing.
Sharp, seamless 2D and 3D viewing
August 11, 2010 9:40 am | Award WinnersThe i2/3DW, The Next-generation 3D Display Technology with Integral 2D and 3D for the Naked Eye from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute is a next generation 3D display technology that integrates 3D displays for the naked eye with traditional 2D information.
For handling vibration, negative-stiffness isolators can offer big improvement over air tables
June 16, 2010 7:32 am | by Jim McMahon | Application NotesAir tables have been around for the better part of a half-century, their usefulness as an efficient method for vibration isolation is now being seriously challenged by more compact and effective negative-stiffness vibration isolators.
Study evaluates measurement uncertainty in analyzers and reflectometers
May 26, 2010 6:37 am | White PapersW. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. (Gore) has announced results of a study in which they compared the measurement uncertainty between vector network analyzers and time domain reflectometers. They designed an experiment which determined if both instruments possess similar levels of measurement precision.
Sofradir releases multiple wavelength IR detector
March 30, 2010 5:13 am | Product Releases | CommentsDesigned primarily for missile warning systems, the Altair can operate in two mid-IR bandwidths depending on local weather conditions to improve detection levels. More significantly, the dual bands can be fused for even more information because the resulting images are naturally registered.
High precision image-based inspection
March 12, 2010 6:25 am | by Sergei Shirokov, ME, AE, Keyence Corporation of America | Application NotesIn the past few years, high precision inspection and measurement has undergone a revolution in quality and scale. Unfortunately, conventional inspection methods have failed to take advantage of these newer technologies. This app note from Keyence details ways to narrow this gap.
The Bionic Age sparks “100s” recollections
February 3, 2010 6:44 am | Blogs | CommentsI’ve always liked looking at the images in National Geographic . They are always so beautiful or so gut wrenching that I fell in love with the magazine during my college years. I also couldn’t live without going to Borders every Sunday and picking up the New York Times and Time to read as well. I was extremely happy when I found out that my family had subscribed to National Geographic recently, and had seen that our first issue arrived yesterday. In the issue there was an interesting article about bionics—something that I never really thought about until last year.
Understanding Contract Labs
October 21, 2009 4:25 am | by Lindsay Hock, Managing Editor | Articles | CommentsWith pressure to get new products to market, companies are faced with meeting rigorous standards and the time consuming development and testing to make their products market ready. Since the development process is time consuming, taking from months, up to years, there is no doubt that outside, unbiased help could be beneficial. When faced with deadlines, companies turn to contract laboratories to meet their needs.
Contract Laboratory Profile: Indesign LLC
October 21, 2009 4:20 am | Articles | CommentsIndesign provides electronic product design services. This includes full turn-key product development starting with concept development, continuing through detailed product design and prototyping, and finishing with production support. Indesign develops products for clients in a wide range of markets: medical, military, consumer, industrial, communications, and computer peripherals.
Physicists make new discovery in quantum mechanics
September 24, 2009 4:23 am | Product Releases | CommentsPhysicists at UC Santa Barbara have made an important advance in quantum mechanics using a superconducting electrical circuit. The researchers showed that they could detect the quantum correlations in the results of measurements of entangled quantum bits, using a superconducting electrical circuit. The correlations are stronger than can be obtained using classical (non-quantum mechanical) physics, and according to the physicists, this illustrates that the oddities of quantum mechanics clearly extend to macroscopic systems.
Nanotech for Portable Electronics
August 16, 2009 8:00 pm | by Lindsay Hock | Articles | CommentsSmall nanostructures could make a big appearance in major industrial and electronics applications. Although small in size, carbon nanotubes can pack a huge enhancement in strength, power, and cost. These tiny tubes can give batteries a longer shelf life, speed the performance of electronic gadgets, and work in many others applications.
The incredible shrinking camera phone
October 2, 2008 12:46 pm | Award WinnersTessera Technologies, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) bypasses the cumbersome optics and places their OptiML Wafer-Level Camera directly on the wafer, reducing the camera module profile by 50%. The camera optics are manufactured at the wafer level.
Laser alignment made easy
September 25, 2008 12:14 pm | Award WinnersThe Autonomous Alignment Process for Laser Fusion Systems (AAPLF), developed by scientists and engineers at LLNL (Livermore, Calif.), is a revolutionary system of software, signal and image processing, sensors, and actuated optical devices that autonomously directs and aligns all 192 NIF laser beams.
Bye-bye bottleneck
August 31, 2006 8:00 pm | Award WinnersThe volume of data being generated in today’s research schemes has placed ever-increasing demands on the computing infrastructure backing these efforts. Image and visualization data sets, for their part, are by their very nature quite large (i.e., terabytes to petabytes), which makes the task of processing all this data potentially enormous. Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, N.M.) has taken on that challenge with the creation of PixelVizion: An NPU-Embedded Visualization Accelerator for Large Data Sets, the first network processor unit (NPU)-based computer visualization tool.
Better electronic testing
August 31, 2006 8:00 pm | Award WinnersElectronic component and semiconductor device manufacturers depend upon electronic test and measurement platforms to aid them in assessing overall product performance. Even more desirable would be a system that is fast and economical. This is the framework behind the Series 2600 System SourceMeter Instrument, developed by engineers at Keithley Instruments, Inc. (Cleveland, Ohio). This Series 2600 System significantly lowers the cost and time required for tests for a wide range of materials and electronic components, silicon and compound semiconductor devices, passive components, and materials.
Blu-ray hits 50!
August 31, 2005 8:00 pm | Award WinnersLooking to TIVO your favorite shows from HDTV? Researchers at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd, may have a solution with the 50GB Capacity Rewritable Dual-layer Blu-ray Disc Media, Model LM-BRM50. Currently rewritable DVDs feature a capacity of only 4.7GB, corresponding to just over 20 minutes of High-Definition (HDTV) TV programming.
No more pencils, No more books
August 31, 2004 8:00 pm | Award WinnersCombine old-fashioned paperwork with information systems and the result is the D-Pen:Digital Pen Solution, developed by a team from Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Anoto AB, Lund, Sweden, and Hitachi Computer Peripherals Co., Ltd., Kanagawa, Japan. This device converts analog information, such as handwritten characters and drawings, into digital information while enabling an interface with other IT devices.
No more burning laps!
August 31, 2004 8:00 pm | Award WinnersPortable electronic device manufacturers are facing the issue of packaging more computing power into a shrinking space and its associated problem of case overheating. The SpreaderShield for Reducing Hot Spots in Consumer Electronic Applications, created by a group of scientists at GrafTech International Ltd., Parma, Ohio, addresses this challenge by reducing troublesome “hot spots” in consumer electronic devices.
Photon movies help debug ICs
August 31, 2002 8:00 pm | Award WinnersTaking advantage of the natural light emission from switching complimentary metal oxide semiconductor transistors to perform timing analysis, IDS PICA Probe System extracts timing information from integrated circuits (ICs). The innovative technology, developed by NPTest Inc. and Quantar Technology Inc., uses a picosecond-resolution, single-photon-counting camera—a non-invasive method of collecting timing information.
