"ROBOTS: Self-replicating robots are demonstrated at Cornell"

Robots at Cornell University are making copies of themselves without human intervention. In principle, the machines will thus be able to repair and reproduce themselves in space and other remote environments. "Our self-replicating robots perform very simple tasks compared with intricacies in biological reproduction," said engineer Hod Lipson, a Cornell assistant professor. "But we think they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology." Self-replication is sometimes seen as the holy grail of robotics. The goal of the engineers' work is to draw upon biological principles to enable robots to repair themselves as well as assemble "helpers." Such a capability would be especially useful in space, on the ocean floor or inside a "hot" nuclear reactor after a spill.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163102009

"ANTENNA: Tweak to inductive loading shrinks antenna"

Independent tests appear to support an inventor's claim that his skunk-works antenna design can shrink antenna size by up to 70 percent while maintaining equivalent sensitivity and increasing bandwidth. The four-part antenna cancels out the normal inductive loading in traditional antenna designs, thereby linearizing the energy radiation along its mast and enabling its diminutive size. "When we announced my smaller antenna design last year, I got lots of doubting Thomases worldwide. Now, with the help of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and its antenna test range on Fishers Island, N.Y., we have independent test results to back up our claims," said inventor Rob Vincent, a research engineer in the University of Rhode Island's physics department. Vincent calls his invention a distributed-load monopole (DLM) antenna. The novel design uses a helix plus a load coil to shrink the size of a normal quarter-wave monopole. According to Vincent, his design can shrink the size of every antenna in use today, from the tiny gigahertz units inside cell phones to giant, kilohertz AM antennas. For instance, a 3-inch-long gigahertz antenna could be shrunk to an inch, and a 300-foot-tall AM band antenna could be reduced to 80 feet high. In the tests, various DLM antennas from Vincent's portfolio were tested from 7 to 27 MHz. The results indicated that equivalent performance was achieved with antennas 30 to 70 percent shorter than an ideal quarter-wave antenna. (See the results at www.uri.edu/news/vincent/report05/testreport.pdf).
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163101726

"NANOTECH: Nanowires look promising for plastic circuits"

Silicon nanowires could combine the best features of carbon nanotubes and amorphous silicon to overcome the liabilities of the circuit technologies being explored for large-area flexible substrates, research at Harvard University suggests. Potential applications for such substrates include disposable e-newspapers and wall-hanging displays. Two of the candidates, amorphous silicon and organic semiconductors, are inherently slower than silicon. And while carbon nanotube transistors promise higher electron mobility than is possible with silicon, the tubes have not yet been demonstrated in an integrated circuit. The payoff of the Harvard work, the researchers maintain, will be a material with the electron mobility of nanotubes but with the low-temperature processing of organic semiconductors. The team demonstrated a nanowire-based ring oscillator that operated at 12 MHz. While that is dismally slow by CMOS standards, it's still 20 times faster than today's integrated organic semiconductors. The researchers believe they can scale the approach to CMOS speeds in the future. "We are not exploiting nano to build ultrasmall nanoscale devices; we are exploiting it to bring high-performance devices to an application area where the only competing materials are . . . low-performance or low-mobility materials," said Harvard professor Charles Lieber, who designed the ring oscillator chip with Harvard EE Donhee Ham.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162800186

"NANOTECH: Precise placement of nanotubes demonstrated"

Growing carbon nanotubes on silicon chips could enable nanoscale transistors, but only if designers can specify exactly where the tiny devices grow. Now EEs at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University have demonstrated how to grow nanotubes just precisely where you want them � self-aligned across a wafer and self-welded during growth. The Case Western EEs claim that their nanotube-enabled wafers merely need to be diced and the dice wire-bonded to a chip carrier. If that's indeed the case, the devices could be as reliable and cost-effective as current chips. "The nanotubes grow where you want them to grow � between two electrical posts," said Case Western EE and computer science professor Massood Tabib-Azar
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162100187

"QUANTUM: encryption enters product phase"

Network security systems that rely on the laws of quantum mechanics to create hack-proof networks are arriving in the form of practical products that are easily integrated into optical networks. At the Infosecurity Europe 2005 trade show in London, id Quantique SA (Geneva) announced a turnkey quantum encryption system enabling hack-proof secure bridges between two Fast Ethernet (IEEE 802.3u) networks up to 100 kilometers apart. The move followed a March announcement by MagiQ Technologies Inc. (New York), which rolled a rework of its Quantum Private Network (QPN) 5505 system. The QPN 7505 incorporates Cavium Networks' Nitrox data encryption processors. The id Quantique product is "the first quantum cryptography system designed for network engineers and not for physicists," said CEO Gregoire Ribordy.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161601149

"NANOTECH: Nanoscience makes this chemist see green"

A pioneer in green nanotechnology, University of Oregon professor James Hutchison proposes creating safety-approved nanoscale building blocks � nanoparticle lines and arrays � that would integrate smoothly with existing silicon chip-processing steps. Hutchison is the director of the Materials Science Institute on the university's Eugene campus. Brooks-Cole last year published his book Green Organic Chemistry: Strategies, Tools and Laboratory Experiments. The director of the Green Chemistry Institute, Paul Anastas, has singled out Hutchison's work on what Anastas calls a "conceptual template for designing nanomaterials using green chemistry."
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161501121

"SOFTWARE: Wireless captions empower the deaf"

For more than a quarter-billion of the world's people-including upward of 28 million in the United States-sporting events lack an announcer's commentary and modern multiplexes show only silent movies. But an alliance of private industry and academe in Georgia is promising help for the hearing-impaired and a chance to enjoy public events that depend on sound for communications. To ease the problem wherever it's found-movie theaters, museums, schools, sports arenas, places of worship-Georgia Tech Research Institute developed wearable captioning electronics. Now it's licensed that technology to Peacock Communications Inc. (Marietta, Ga.), which plans to offer the solution to public venues in a software system it calls COMMplements. The system taps into 802.11b wireless capabilities. Offered by more and more public venues to give mobile users easy Internet access, the wireless nodes will transmit text versions of the voices of actors, teachers, sports announcers and clergy. Initially, existing audio will be translated for transmission as text, but eventually all sorts of annotations-statistics during sports events, for example-could be possible. Peacock plans to leverage the growing infrastructure of 802.11 wireless transceivers, already installed in places like stadiums, coffee shops, restaurants and even urban business districts. "Using our system, venues can add text annotations to be received by hearing-impaired patrons on the [patrons'] own personal digital assistants or on special venue-supplied heads-up displays that overlay the captions on, say, a movie," said Leanne West, Georgia Tech Research Institute project director. At the beginning, Peacock Communications plans to market to U.S. venues, such as movie theaters, that already have American-language audio streams running. COMMplements can also translate the audio into multilingual text streams.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161500257

"NANOTECH: Researchers grow self-aligned nanotubes"

Growing carbon nanotubes on silicon could enable nanoscale transistors, but only if designers can specify exactly where the tiny devices grow. Engineers at Case Western Reserve University have demonstrated how to grow nanotubes exactly where designers want them � self-aligned across a wafer.
The researchers also reported that the nanotubes self-welded during growth, and claimed that their nanotube-enabled wafers need only to be diced and wire-bonded to a chip carrier. This would make them as reliable and cost effective as current chips. "Our contribution has been to come up with a technique where the nanotubes grow where you want them to grow � between two electrical posts," said Massood Tabib-Azar, a professor in the electrical engineering department at Case Western (Cleveland).
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161500362