#MARKETS: "Taiwan brain drain in remission"

For decades a "brain drain" has plagued Taiwan as its most talented engineers stayed in the U.S. after being awarded their doctorates, but the trend appears to be reversing as their best-and-brightest are returning to nix the manufacturing advantage on the mainland by opening innovation labs in Taiwan: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Making playlists was never easier--thanks to a Taiwanese innovation. Just draw a line in the two-dimention space from "calm to excited" (arousal) and "harsh to pleasant" (valence) and a list of songs that match that "mood" are automatically compiled. Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Taiwanese Smartphone/Tablet Apps Excel"

Everybody who has used a smartphone of a tablet knows the routine--yes its fun to use, but frustrating when it does not do what you expect. In Taiwan think tanks they are changing all that by designing apps and add-on hardware that do all the things you wanted you smartphone or tablet to do, but it wouldn't: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Magnetic field detector add-on for iPad allows near-field sensing of styluses and tokens without interference from the users hands.Further Reading

#MARKETS: "Taiwan Moving from Manufacturing to Innovation"

Taiwan already manufactures most of the world's laptops, flat-panel monitors and datacenter servers, but only for other company's designs. In a reversal of trends, however, Taiwanese smarts is being applied to creating their own innovations in hopes of vitalizing its homeland: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Taiwan's university campuses and government-funded research facilities take up more than one percent of the island nation's land area.Further Reading

#CHIPS: "3-D Harnessed by TSMC in Super-Chips"

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) leads the semiconductor foundry world, but now it is aiming to leapfrog ahead with home-grown super-chips that combine SoCs, memory, sensors and all the other chips you need to make a system into a single "super-chip": R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog

Vice president of R&D and cheif technology officer (CTO) Jack Sun reveals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) master plan to conquer the semiconductor world with super-chips.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHM: "Nanoscience Transforms into Nanotech "

The National Nanotechnology Initiative has spend billions of dollars over the last decade preparing the scientific basis for the move to molecular-sized electronics. Now the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corp. have entered the final phase--creating libraries of nano-scale electronic devices for use with standard SPICE simulators. Once done, manufacturing nanoscale electronics will become as easy as drag-and-drop: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


NSF and SRC will enable electronics designers to choose nanoscale devices like this Band-to-Band-Tunneling transistor that is only eight nanometers thick.Further Reading

#ENERGY: "How-to Shave Years Off R&D"

Performing research and development (R&D) on new materials and architectures is the speciality of Intermolecular Inc. (IMI) whose High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) platform just shaved two-years off LED-maker Epistar's production schedule, in return for paying IMI royalties on future products using its newly developed LED process technology: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


IMI's High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) platform speed R&D experimentation up to 100 times using a proprietary technology that reduces trial-and-error to a minimum.Further Reading