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Thursday, February 28, 2002

"PLASTIC HDs: Magnetized polymer eyed as storage medium"
The world's first photo-induced magnetism in a polymer was demonstrated by researchers here at Ohio State University and at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. In the experiment, a blue laser raised the magnetism of the polymer by 50 percent; a green laser brought it back to nominal. The pure-research finding, at 75 K (325�F below zero), could lead to room-temperature storage devices, such as hard disks, that could be written at high densities by laser-based read/write heads, the researchers said.

Audio interviews: http://ampcast.com/RColinJohnson

Interview CDs: http://mp3.com/RColinJohnson

Story in EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020226S0030
"INTEL LONG-VIEW: reveals long-term goals for silicon photonics, sensors"
Intel Corp. chief technology officer Patrick Gelsinger will reveal several research breakthroughs that extend the reach of silicon devices in his keynote address Thursday (Feb. 28) at the Intel Developer Forum. They include wirelessCMOS-radio-based sensor networks, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and photonics chips that compute with photons instead of electrons.

Story in EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020228S0033

Monday, February 25, 2002

"NANOPARTICLES: enable microscopic lasers/on-chip optics"
Munir Nayfeh discusses his method of producing fluorescent red, blue, green and yellow nanoparticles from plain-vanilla silicon wafers. The new materials could yield microscopic lasers. They also hold the promise of putting optical communications on electronic chips.

Audio interview at: http://ampcast.com/RColinJohnson

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Story in EE Times: http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020225S0070

Thursday, February 21, 2002

"PHOTONICS: Material converts IR waves into visible light"
A team from the University of Buffalo has developed an organic material which is capable of absorbing three photons at infrared (IR) wavelengths and re-emitting the light in the visible spectrum. The group, led by Professor Paras Prasad of the university's Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, designed the material specifically with the aim of developing three-photon absorption at 1.3 micrometers, a frequency used for fibre optic communications.

Audio interviews: http://ampcast.com/RColinJohnson

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Story in EE Times: http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020220S0014

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

"NANO-PATENT: HP researchers close to delivering molecular circuits"
Ratcheting up the pace, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories has announced two patents that are said to solve some small but nettlesome problems with a molecular FPGA approach based on a switching molecule called rotaxane. The HP patents detail a practical method for connecting molecular-scale circuits to the outside world and a method for defining circuit sub-blocks in a massive crossbar array of nanowires. A third patent describes an approach to memory arrays using rotaxane.

Story in EE Times: http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020215S0063

Friday, February 08, 2002

"NANO: Glowing nanoparticles offer memory prospects"
A U.S. research team has discovered a family of discrete-sized ultra-bright nanoparticles in the red, green and blue range that could be useful for biomedical tagging, displays, and flash memories. Discrete sizes of 1.0 (Si29), 1.67 (Si123), 2.15, 2.9, and 3.7nm diameters were measured. The smallest four sizes were found to be ultra-bright blue, green, yellow, and red luminescent particles. Reproducibly fabricating size, shape and orientation-controlled fluorescent Si nanoparticles in the range 1 to 3nm could be important to the understanding of nanostructures and would be of interest in fields such as microelectronics, optoelectonics and biomedicine.

Audio interviews: http://ampcast.com/RColinJohnson

Interview CDs: http://mp3.com/RColinJohnson

Story in EE Times: http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020207S0007

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

"ROBOTS: Intel eyes robotic-controller sockets for Xscale"
Intel Corp. may have uncovered a new direction for its chip-making expertise: low-power, high-performance robotic controllers. The interest generated by such products surfaced at a recent symposium that Intel held on the possibilities of robotic uses for its Xscale microarchitecture.

Story in EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020206S0025