#EETimes: "Hybrid Electric/Gasoline Aircraft Recharges its Own Batteries"

The hybrid concept for an electric aircraft makes sense because the gasoline engine can recharge the batteries while its cruising after the electric motors provide the thrust for takeoff: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

The Boeing sponsored glider was retrofit with a gasoline engine and electric motor running in hybrid mode.

FULL STORY AT EE TIMES

#EETIMES: "MEMS Spurred by Industrial IoT"

Industrial for internet-of-things (IoT) is not as big a market as consumer, but it is pushing toward another $1 billion MEMS market by the 2020s: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

A breakdown by application segment of total shipment of hardware for the industrial IoT.

FULL STORY AND COMMENTS AT EE TIMES

#3-D: True 3-D chips build up layers rather than stack die"

True 3-D chips build layer upon layer in the fab rather than just stack die. These researchers through in low-temperature nanotube processing to sandwich two RRAM layers between to layers of logic, with more to come: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

3-D chips from Stanford connect four layers with standard vias, with the bottom being standard CMOS, the top carbon-nanotube logic transistors, and the middle two layers of resistive random access memory (RRAM).

FULL STORY AT EE TIMES

#EETimes: Superconductor Formulae Tells Whether Thin Films will Work

Thin film superconductors could revolutionize computing with fast-as-light speed and ultra-cool operation, extending battery live of mobiles from days to weeks: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

Ultra-thin superconducting film of niobium and nitrogen shows individual atoms, a view that helped MIT discover a universal law of superconductivity.

FULL STORY AND LEAVE COMMENTS AT EE TIMES

#EETIMES: "Superconducting at 140 Degrees F"

Superconducting at up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit has been demonstrated at the U.S. National Accelerator Laboratory, but the catch to room temperature superconducing today is that it only lasts for pico-second pulses, but they hope to extend the time to DC: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times.

Laser causes oxygen atoms (red) to vibrate between layers of copper (blue) oxide that are just two molecules thick in a common high-temperature superconducting material known as YBCO in a way that
likely indicates superconductivity.

FULL STORY AND COMMENTS AT EETIMES

#EETIMES: "Superconductivity Exhibited by New Material with Room Temp Hopes"

A new material may offer a new avenue to room temperature superconductivity according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times.

Brookhaven Lab team, led by Simon Billinge of Brookhaven and Columbia Engineering (seated), also (left to right) Columbia University graduate student Ben Frandsen, Weiguo Yin, Yimei Zhu, and Emil Bozin. Collaborators not shown include Hefei Hu, formerly of Brookhaven Lab and now at Intel; Yasumasa Nozaki and Hiroshi Kageyama of Kyoto University; and Yasutomo Uemura of Columbia University.

FULL TEXT AND COMMENTS AT EE TIMES

#EETIMES: "Quantum Dots Enable Spray on Solar Cells"

Colloidal quantum dots can be sprayed on nearly any surface to turn it into a solar cell according to an IBM backed laboratory in Candada and the University of Toronto: R. Colin Johnson @NetGenLog and EE Times



FULL STORY AND COMMENTS AT EE TIMES

#EETIMES: "Free Watson-Like Artificial Intelligence"

DeepDive is free and open-source software intelligence developed in the same DARPA program in which IBM participated while developing its Watson. Called DeepDive, the program has been made free and open-source which by its primary programmer, Christopher Re, at the University of Wisconsin.

DeepDive (grey) equalled or excelled the indexing tasks given a group of human experts.

FULL STORY AND LEAVE COMMENTS AT EE TIMES

#AI: "Sentient Computers Emulate Skynet"

In the illustration below you can see how artificial sentience is envisioned by Sentient--put thousands or even millions of CPUs to work using evolutionary learning on different segments of Big Data, then pick the best ones and repeat until sentience is achieved: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog and EE Times

One step beyond neural networks: Neural networks are good at learning to recognize particular patterns. The next step consists of evolutionary algorithms (EA), which use mutation to create pools of possible solutions on different servers, each of which ranks its pool of possible solutions. An evolutionary coordinator then compares the solutions and sends the best of the crop for validation against big data sets it has never seen.

FULL STORY at EE Times

#DISPLAYS: "World's Smallest HD Microdisplay Uses DLP | EE Times"

The world's smallest 2 million pixel (1920 x 1080) DLP Pico chipset can be built into ultra-compact applications -- from near-eye displays (think Google Glass), to heads-up displays, to augmented reality, to virtual reality, to gaming, to all sorts of tiny-projector applications, from ones built into what TI calls "screenless TVs" to even some smartphones.

The world's smallest HD display uses Texas Instruments legendary digital light processor (DLP)

FULL STORY AT EE TIMES