Embedded chipmaker STMicroelectronics (ST) has announced commercial availability of a portable “lab-on-chip” claimed capable of detecting all major influenza types within two hours — including the Avian Flu strain H5N1.
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Five key trends are converging to make unified communications (UC) the “next significant frontier for technology growth,” according to IBM. The company expects the global UC market to be worth $17 billion by 2011, it said in a statement this week.
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MIT’s Technology Review magazine has just published its annual list of the top ten emerging technologies. Dubbed the TR10, these “revolutionary innovations” are “poised to have a dramatic impact” on computing, medicine, nanotechnology, our energy infrastructure, and more, say the magazine’s editors.
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Microsoft showcased “pseudo translucent” display technology last week at its annual TechFest conference. LucidTouch creates the illusion of a semi-transparent device by allowing users to interact with the display from the rear of the device.
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The EU will channel more than 2.5 billion Euros into Europe’s embedded computing industry over the next decade, to compete more effectively against the U.S. and Asia. More than 90 percent of all microprocessors are used in embedded — not desktop — applications, according to the European Commission.
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A Silicon Valley homebrew robotics club has released a video demonstrating its kitchen-cleaning robot. The robot scrapes dishes, loads a dishwasher, and scrubs a counter-top with “human-sized” arms and a few simple tools.
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Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing a “power shirt” capable of running portable electronic gadgets. Clothing woven with fibers containing microscopic “nanogenerators” will use piezoelectric effects to convert the wearer’s movements into electrical energy.
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Polymer Vision is demonstrating a 3G HSDPA tri-band phone with a unique, rollable e-paper display this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The “Readius” device combines normal feature phone functions along with e-reader capabilities.
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Using its Deep Space Network, NASA will beam the Beatles song, “Across the Universe,” into deep space today at 7 p.m. EST. The transmission commemorates both the agency’s 50th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the song’s first recording.
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Intel and Micron Technology have unveiled a high-speed NAND flash memory technology claimed to offer up to five times the performance of conventional flash memory. The new high-speed flash reportedly can achieve read and write speeds of 200MB/sec and 100MB/sec, respectively.
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NXP Semiconductor and Purple Labs have announced a reference design aimed at enabling the manufacture of 3G Linux feature phones that could be sold to mobile operators at under $100. Touted features of the “Purple Magic” phone include video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing, and video streaming.
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The growth in mobile phone shipments will slow slightly this year due to a “tougher” economic environment, but will still increase by 10 percent, to 1.24 billion units, a leading market research firm forecasts.
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The unoccupied radio spectrum between broadcast TV channels may soon become a source of low-cost, ubiquitous broadband connectivity. Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission began Phase II testing of prototype “white space devices” (WSDs), to determine whether they can operate without interfering with the wireless devices commonly used in homes, offices, and public locations.
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Trolltech, the originator of Qt, which forms the basis of the Linux KDE desktop environment, is being acquired by Nokia, the world’s number-one mobile phone vendor. Nokia expects its acquisition of Trolltech to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and to enhance its Internet services business.
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While the x86 architecture reigns supreme in the PC market, a range of other CPU architectures are generally preferred in embedded devices due to cost, space, and power constraints. One of these — the ARM architecture — has now shipped in more than 10 billion devices.
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Via Technologies is readying a compact, storage-oriented mainboard optimized for home server applications. The NAS7800 is powered by a Via C7 processor and is sized to stack with optical and hard disk drives.
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Flash filesystem (FFS) specialist Datalight Inc. will soon release a commercial Linux FFS claimed to provide 400 percent faster write performance and 500 percent faster mount speed compared to JFFS2. The new FFS will target Linux-based mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices.
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Harvard University’s tiny microrobotic fly, hailed by its creators as “the first robotic fly that is able to generate enough thrust to takeoff,” will be showcased at New York’s Museum of Modern Art starting Feb. 24.
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Researchers at the University of Washington have created a contact lens that includes electronic circuitry and LEDs. Eventually, ‘bionic’ contact lenses such as these could provide superhuman vision, or could be used for 3D virtual reality displays.
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Sex with robots? Stephen Colbert, news anchor of Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report,” interviewed the author of a recently published book on this intriguing subject last Thursday.
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DeviceVM demonstrated a Linux-powered PC preboot application environment that lets users instantly run several Internet-based applications — including Web browsing and Skype messaging — at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
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An industry tradeshow focused on multicore microprocessors and related technologies will take place April 1-3 in Santa Clara, Calif. The Multicore Expo will feature keynote talks, panel discussions, in-depth technical sessions, case studies, and a vendor expo.
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Here’s an Open letter from DeviceGuru to Ubuntu Linux project founder Mark Shuttleworth:
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Redpine Signals Inc. has introduced what it claims is the first handheld device-oriented single-chip controller to conform to the IEEE’s 802.11n Draft 2.0 standard. The “Lite-Fi” RS9110 consumes under 250 mW during receive operations at the maximum link rate of 65 Mbps, according to the company.
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The KDE project released version 4.0.0 of the KDE Linux desktop environment on Jan. 11. It’s available as upgrades to several major distributions, and on a special live CD version of Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu.
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