#MEMS: "IDT claims first piezoelectric MEMs"

Integrated Device Technology Inc. (IDT) said Wednesday (Nov. 30) it has developed what it claims is the world's first piezoelectric micro-electro-mechanical system (pMEMS).

IDT (San Jose, Calif.) also claimed its new pMEMS process could produce oscillators that operated at higher-frequencies than traditional MEMS, had higher-stability than quartz oscillators, and could be delivered in the world's smallest waferscale package.
Further Reading

#CHIPS: "IBM Aims to Top Supercomputer List"

An enhanced high-end supercomputer ordered by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will aim for 20-petaflop performance--almost twice the performance of today's top supercomputer.



Further Reading

#OPTICS: "Optical diode boosts silicon photonics efforts"

A thin-film optical diode demonstrated recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can be integrated onto a silicon photonic chip along with lasers and waveguides. Previously, a separate, discrete device was required.



Further Reading

#SENSORS: "Self-Powered Cyber-Bug Sensors"

Researchers are crafting self-powered sensors for installation in insect cyborgs, enabling them to perform surveillance, monitor hazardous environments and assist first-responders in search-and-rescue missions.



Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "X-Gen vs. Y-Gen Bifurcates Cyber Monday"

Cyber Monday retailers must diversify their marketing pitches, according to recent business school research released to coincide with Cyber Monday. Generation X and Generation Y make buying decisions for different reasons, with new results only now revealing why.



Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "EU to pursue smart system R&D"

The European Union is launching a three-year, $13 million effort to develop standards for smart systems that will be coordinated by STMicroelectronics.



The initiative comes several weeks after a similar U.S. announcement to pursue smart systems in a national effort coordinated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Further Reading

#CHIPS: "Brain Microchip Faster Than Humans"

By emulating electrical ions in the human nervous systems with the electronic charge in a custom analog microchip, MIT researchers claim to have created an artificial brain technology that learns even faster than the human brain.



Further Reading

#OPTICS: "Digital Cinema Killing 35mm Film"

Digital cinema based on inexpensive MEMS mirror-arrays has fueled a worldwide switchover to the digital cinema format from 35mm celluloid film cinemas, predicted to be complete by 2015. By the end of 2011, 35mm celluloid film use will pass the point of no return as the 50 percent mark is surpassed in digital cinema conversion.



Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Analytics Optimizes Marketing Campaigns"

Managers can now track media campaigns with cloud-based analytics that optimize return on investment in real-time rather than using after-the-fact reports of success or failure.



Further Reading

#MEMS: "Smart Pills Transmit After Being Swallowed"

Smart medicine needs smart tools, and the smart pill will be the "point of the spear," according to presenters at the MEMS Executive Congress.



As the world population ages, smart medicine is coming up with all sorts of monitoring systems for allowing the elderly to remain home instead of being institutionalized. Cloud-based services monitor patients remotely to make sure they are safe, right down to tracking whether they have taken their meds today, by virtue of smart pills.
Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Freescale tips home health hub ref design"

As medical sensors monitoring both people and their environment proliferate, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. aims to reintegrate them with a home health hub (HHH) reference design that handles all popular wired and wireless protocols—a kind of universal router for connecting cloud computers to home health care.

At the Medica conference this week in Dusseldorf, Germany, Freescale will describe how its HHH integrates Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth and ZigBee into a single router that connects medical sensors (inputs), to tablet displays (outputs), to medical analytics in the clouds (processing) and to doctors advise online.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Heads-Up Goggles Smarten Skiing"

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) chips enable skiers, snowboarders and other alpine enthusiasts to quantify their boasts with smart goggles that track and record feats of prowess.


By continuously tracking position, velocity--both vertical descent and horizontal speed--and a dozen other parameters, smart goggle-mounted heads-up displays (HUDs) allow alpine enthusiasts to come clean about their skiing and snowboarding runs with quantifiable metrics that can be compared with the best performances of world-famous skiers and snowboarders.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Medical Privacy Secured on Smartphones"

Anti-cloning encryption technology is being used to secure validated medical data, which can only be accessed by an attending physician or the patient.



The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandated that medical data be standardized for easy exchange between institutions, but was crafted before the proliferation of smartphones and other wireless access devices. To protect standardized medical records from being hacked--while simultaneously securing confidential communications of medical advice to patients on their smartphones--is the aim of a new genre of anti-cloning encryption algorithm.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Sports Analytics Smartens Surfing"

Smarter surf reports contain not only how high the waves are, but also how long the rides last, how fast the surfers are going and even how long it is taking riders to paddle out, thanks to smart wireless sensors surfers can attach to any board.


Motion-capture analytics could revolutionize surfing by transforming data from board-mounted sensors into recreational intelligence--such as, the most likely beach and sweet-spot to paddle out to for the best surfing, according to speakers at the MEMS Executive Congress (Nov. 2-3, 2011, Monterey, Calif.).
Further Reading

#MEMS: "ADI debuts tactical-grade MEMS"

A new tactical-grade inertial-measurement unit (IMU) from Analog Devices Inc. achieves performance rivaling expensive, bulky fiber-optic based units by virtue of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chips that are almost eight-times smaller and over 10-times lighter, according to the company.



The first two members of the new tactical-grade MEMS family, include a 10-degree-of-freedom IMU that combines a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope, a three-axis magnetometer, and a barometric pressure sensor to determine altitude—the 10th dimension. Drift is 6 degrees per hour for a unit that consumes just 0.7 watts.
Further Reading

#MATERIALS: "Superinsulators Self-Heal to Rival Superconductors"

Supercomputers have already helped design superconducting wires that can transmit high-voltage energy for power grids with zero resistance between power stations, and now supercomputers will be used to design superinsulators that self-repair, thereby preventing power losses over the conventional wires that deliver electricity from power stations to residential and industrial users.



Power generation creates megawatts of power, but transmission and distribution lines can siphon off kilowatts during the routing of that power to users. Superconducting wires can be used to transmit megawatts of electricity with virtually no resistance on the first leg of its journey between power stations, but when sending high-voltage transmissions from power stations to users, a significant portion can be lost to the environment due to weaknesses in conventional insulators. Now IBM Research (Zurich), in collaboration with ABB Corporate Research Center, is using supercomputers to design superinsulators that remedy the problem with self-healing.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "In a smart-system world, data’s ‘the new currency’"

We give them human names—Watson, Siri—that suggest how much “like us” they are. Today’s smart systems can intuitively handle tasks that until now have been impossible to automate in real-time.



And by mining the resultant sea of real-time data coming in from billions of streams worldwide, analytics science is creating services that have even more value than the smart systems themselves.

Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Samsung Passes Apple Smartly"

Samsung took over the No. 1 spot in quarterly sales of smartphones from Apple, and the two are currently neck-in-neck for the title of most popular smartphone maker of 2011.



Samsung is the top-selling smartphone worldwide for the first time ever, according to Information Handling Services Inc. The combination of Samsung's growing and Apple's declining during the third quarter of 2011 caused the reversal of fortunes. However, Apple's pent-up demand in the third quarter has been released in the fourth quarter, resulting in a stunning sales record since its recent introduction of the iPhone 4S, putting Apple back on course to outsell Samsung in the fourth quarter. The crown of top 2011 smartphone hangs in the balance, a race that is too close to call, according to IHS.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "On parade at Executive Congress"

MEMS was the word at the MEMS Executive Congress this week, where new improved chips, software and process technologies debuted.



Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Enterprise Mobility Management Soars"

Mobility management services for the enterprise is a fast growing market that includes management of mobile apps, mobile devices, content, network services, expenses, policy, and security.


Enterprise mobility-management is a business-to-business service that got off the ground when employees started using smartphones. Now with the wide proliferation of touch-screen tablets across enterprises worldwide, mobility-management services are taking off. In fact, the market for these services is expected to grow from roughly $1 billion in 2010 to $11 billion by 2016, according to Allied Business Intelligence Inc. (ABI Research, New York City).
Further Reading