Intel Turns to Light

to Transfer Data Inside PCs

Jul 28, 2010 6:40 am

Intel on Tuesday announced it had developed a prototype interconnect that uses light to speed up data transmission inside computers at the speed of 50 gigabits per second.

Intel researchers said that the optical technology could ultimately replace the use of copper wires and electrons to carry data inside or around computers. An entire high-definition movie can be transmitted each second with the prototype, the researchers said.

The technology will also be able to carry data over longer distances than copper wires, Intel researchers said.

Intel’s chief technology officer Justin Rattner characterized the research prototype as a breakthrough in research as copper wires were reaching their limit. There is a wealth of data that needs to be moved, and transferring data at 10G bps or more over copper wires is becoming a challenge. Even if the data could be transferred over copper wires at that speed, there are distance trade-offs.

Optical interconnects solve that problem by allowing data transfers at much faster rates, and over longer distances, Rattner said on a conference call to discuss the technology.

“Photonics gives us the ability to move those mass quantities of data across the room… in a cost-effective matter,” Rattner said.

The photonics technology could potentially speed up data transfers within PCs or devices such as handhelds, where movies could be downloaded at faster rates, Rattner said.

Laser is already used in devices such as DVD players, and also for applications such as long-distance communication. Laser technology can however be expensive, and Intel wants to bring the technology down to a low-cost point where it can be integrated into everyday devices, Rattner said. The company hopes to raise the speed of the optical interconnect to reach up to 1T bps (bits per second) as it increases the number of channels to improve data transfers.

But for now, the company has demonstrated in principle that it can get the pieces together and put it together in a fab. The next step is to implement it in chips and take it to volume manufacturing. The technology could reach the mass market by the middle of the decade, and could go into PCs, servers or mobile devices.

The technology won’t be implemented at the integrated circuit level in the short term, but could replace copper wires that connect CPU to memory, for example, said Mario Paniccia, an Intel fellow. The optical interconnect will reduce latency, which could result in faster data movement and processing.

“We think it’s going to be perfectly at home in data-center applications,” Rattner said. For consumer applications, an optical interconnect would also help users to down movies to handheld devices at faster rates, Rattner said.

“Once we’re confident we have a high-volume manufacturing capability, then we’ll turn to the business question: what market opportunities are attractive to Intel?” Rattner asked.

The research prototype brings together a number of previous Intel research around devices that emit, manipulate, combine, separate and detect light. The interconnect includes a transmitter chip on a PC board that puts four optical channels on to fiber, and a receiver chip that receives the incoming light, splits the optical signals and converts the photons to electrical data.

Intel is already working on a new optical interconnect to link external storage drives, mobile devices and displays to PCs up to 100 meters away. Called Light Peak, the interconnect helps communicate data at up to 10G bps. Intel sees Light Peak as potential technology to replace USB, which is commonly used to connect storage and other devices to PCs.

Many companies, including Sun, which is now part of Oracle, and IBM have been involved in silicon photonics research.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

WATCH YOUR PHOTOS DON’T GIVE YOU UP

Before you proudly go posting photos of your Ming vase online, you should be aware that computer-savvy burglars can likely use that photo to find out where you live. The same goes for photos or videos of your kids, yourself, or anything else that you don’t want strangers knowing how to locate. The practice of tracking people via their posted images is an example of “cybercasing”, and is possible because many digital cameras and smart phones, including the iPhone, automatically geotag their images by embedding the longitude and latitude at which they were taken. Even when uploaded to a website, the images still retain this information. By plugging the coordinates into a service like Google Street View, getting an address or an identifying landmark is entirely possible.

This disturbing fact was recently announced in a report published by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). Researchers Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer wrote that they successfully obtained the home addresses of people who had posted photos in ads on Craigslist, despite those people having opted to keep their addresses hidden in their postings.

Creepier still, they were also able to obtain addresses where home videos of children had been shot, by searching under the tag “kids” on YouTube. They then proceeded to search for recent videos from those same users, that had been shot over 1,000 miles away. Within 15 minutes, they were able to determine that 13 of these video posters were likely still away on vacation, leaving their homes available for burglary.

While iPhones do geotag by default, it is possible to turn the feature off. The folks over at I Can Stalk U (they’re against stalking, not in favor of it) can show you how. For other phones and cameras, a Googling or a look through your user’s manual should tell you what you need to know.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Press release from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors - 2010-04-28

Powerful LED flash for cell phones

OSLUX now with UX:3 chip technology

The new OSLUX from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is brighter and smaller than ever before and provides extremely uniform light thanks to a chip fabricated in state-of-the-art UX:3 technology. Together with an optimized lens it not only ensures that the LED is 50 percent brighter than the predecessor model but also that the light is much more evenly distributed and can therefore illuminate a wide area.

The new OSLUX has an area of 3.9 mm² and a height of only 2.5 mm (previously 3 mm) but is 50 lx brighter. This takes its output to an impressive 150 lx. The light is uniformly distributed in the flash; the usual round spot in the center is completely absent. “Our OSLUX is therefore perfect for the fast-growing design-based smartphone and cell phone segment”, said Gunnar Klick, Marketing Manager Consumer at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. “Even extremely thin phones can now be equipped with a powerful LED flash so they can deliver pictures of superb quality”.

The LED is available in two versions with different lenses. These are already integrated in the LED and are matched to the beam characteristics of the top-emitting UX:3 chips. The subject of the picture is illuminated in a uniform rectangular pattern. The distribution of the light depends on the lens used: 40% or 20% of the center brightness is possible in the corners. At a distance of one meter the LED flash uniformly illuminates a diagonal of 90 cm, which is sufficient to produce razor-sharp pictures even in low light conditions.

The impressive brightness is the result of new UX:3 chip technology that makes the LED capable of handling high currents and gets even more light from the chip. What’s more, the light is more evenly distributed over the surface compared to previous chip technologies. The new OSLUX is therefore considerably more efficient at high currents than previous LEDs and offers impressive luminous efficacy in a small area.

With the new OSLUX OSRAM’s LED portfolio for flash applications is even better tailored to the latest trends in which mobile slimline terminals require small powerful light sources. For users who want to supply their own lens packages there is the CERAMOS which has no lens.

Press contact:
Marion Reichl
Headquarter, Europe

Tel: +49 (0) 941 – 850 – 16 93
Fax: +49 (0) 941 – 850 – 33 05
Email: marion.reichl@osram-os.com

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 23rd May 2010

Crowdsourcing: Cell Phones That

Protect Against Deadly Chemicals?

Digital Evidence

Cyber Forensic Researchers

Make The Call:

Crime Scene Evidence Is Quickly

Extracted From Mobile Phones

March 7: 1876 : Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention–the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of the telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a “harmonic telegraph,” a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate–called the diaphragm–to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message–the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”–from Bell to his assistant.

Bell’s patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell’s patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 11th March 2010

TATTOO YOUR CELL PHONE ONTO YOUR SKIN

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th Sept 2009

[VLSI] ‘Digital Rosetta Stone’

Passes Down Cultural Heritage to

Future Generations

Japanese researchers prototyped a memory system that can store large volumes of data for more than a thousand years.

The system, “Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS),” was announced June 16, 2009, by Keio University, Sharp Corp and Kyoto University at the 2009 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, which is taking place in Kyoto, Japan (lecture number: C3-3). They stacked wafers mounted with mask ROM and packaged it with SiO₂. Power supply and signal communication are conducted by wireless.

To store various cultural heritage that has so far been created by mankind as digital information and hand it down to posterity, it is necessary to develop a memory system that can store data for more than a thousand years and has a capacity of 1 Tbit or more and a data access speed of 100Mbps or more, according to the researchers.

In the case of HDDs, data could be lost in four to 40 years due to the influence of magnetic field. And data stored in an optical disc could be lost in 30 to 100 years when affected by oxygen or moisture. On the other hand, semiconductor devices can keep data intact for a thousand years or more if the humidity around the chip is kept at 2% or less.

Thus, the researchers proposed the idea of saving data on the mask ROM with electron-beam direct-writing technology, stocking the wafers and packaging them with SiO₂ to form a “slate.” When a wafer (reader) for reading data is attached to the slate, it becomes possible to supply power and communicate signals by wireless.

If four 15-inch wafers made by using 45nm CMOS technology are stacked, the memory capacity will be 2.5 Tbits.

This time, the researchers utilized 0.18?m CMOS technology and prototyped test chips corresponding to the slate and the reader. The size of the test chips is 5 x 5mm. The diameter of the inductor is 2mm for power supply and 0.4mm for data communication. And the capacity of the mask ROM is 1 Mbit.

They succeeded in providing 56mW power to the slate by four-channel wireless transmission when the distance between the slate and the reader is 0.2mm. By this method, a data transmission speed of 150Mbps can be realized.

• [VLSI] Univ of Tokyo Doubles SSD Random Write Speed
• [VLSI] NEC Develops Technology to Slash Write Current of Embedded MRAM

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 1st July 2009

GENETICALLY ENGINEERED MONKEY

GLOWS IN THE DARK??

Oregon researchers have created the first genetically modified monkey. ANDi, a playful, coffee-colored rhesus monkey born on October 2nd 2000, has been engineered to carry a gene from another species. The work demonstrates that a foreign gene can be delivered and inserted into a primate chromosome. The researchers anticipate that gene insertions in the monkey will lead to primate models of human diseases—like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and obesity—that will offer a more robust testing ground for new drugs, gene therapy and modified stem cells. ANDi (DNA inserted spelled backward) is the first transgenic monkey. “Our ultimate goal is to produce human disease models. Primates show human pathology better than mice, which, in many cases, are the only systems we have for modeling human diseases,” says Anthony Chan, of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, in Beaverton. The report is published in this week’s issue of Science. Chan’s goal was to show that a foreign gene can be inserted into a monkey’s chromosome and produce a functional protein. The GFP gene was chosen because the protein it produces emits a fluorescent green glow that can easily be seen through a microscope. Eventually scientists want to insert human disease genes and study disease progression in monkeys, says Chan. Tissue samples taken from ANDi’s cheek, hair, umbilical cord and placenta confirm that the cells contain the GFP gene and corresponding mRNA; the molecule that bridges the gap between DNA and protein. However, when the tissue was examined under the microscope, no green protein could be seen. “Maybe the quantity of protein is too small to be seen or maybe the mRNA is not being translated,” says Chan. The team will continue to monitor ANDi for GFP; Some transgenic animals do not produce any foreign protein until after the first year. (LEFT)Virus particles carrying the GFP gene are injected into the unfertilized egg. The gene (white) is released from the virus and incorporated into the chromosome. (RIGHT)About 6 hours after introducing the virus scientists artificially fertilize the egg by injecting a sperm from a male rhesus. The fertilized egg then begins to grow and divide. Two to three days later when the egg has divided twice and become a four-celled embryo it is implanted into a surrogate mother. Courtesy Oregon Regional Primate Research Cente VIEW THE LINK BELOW FOR MORE

• Introducing ANDi: The first genetically modified monkey
  Oregon researchers have created the first genetically modified monkey. ANDi, a playful, coffee-colored rhesus monkey born on October 2nd 2000, …
  www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/01_01/ANDi.shtml
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• Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 29th May 2009
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Scientists create liquid lens on a chip

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (UPI) — U.S. scientists say they’ve created tunable fluidic micro lenses that can focus light at will while remaining stationary and can be fabricated on a chip.

The Pennsylvania State University research engineers said such fluidic lenses can be used for many applications, such as counting cells, evaluating molecules or creating on-chip optical tweezers. The lenses might also provide imaging in medical devices, eliminating the necessity of moving the tip of a probe, they added.

The researchers, led by Assistant Professor Tony Jun Huang, said conventional, fixed focal length lenses can focus light at only one distance and the entire lens must move to focus on an object or to change the direction of the light. Fluidic lenses, however, can change focal length or direction in less than a second while remaining in the same place.

“We use water and a calcium chloride solution because they are readily available and safe and their optical properties have been well characterized,” said Huang.

The research that included graduate students Sz-Chin Lin, Michael Lapsley, Jinjie Shi, Bala Juluri and Xiaole Mao was reported in a recent issue of the journal Lab on a Chip.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 18th May 2009