In this issue: swimming, swarming, responsive robots; the new 3G iPhone; lighting's flat future; bionic hands; mobile bling; mini-copters; Inpec's 10 millionth record; a reprieve for Windows XP; Martian footprints and more.
A swarm of robotic jellyfish may help researchers solve future automation problems. German process automation company Festo worked with specialist display technology company Effekt-Technik to develop the devices.
Each AquaJelly is able to sense various aspects of its environment and to function completely autonomously, but can also communicate with other members of the group so that they can cooperate and behave as a system.
Festo created the robotic jellyfish as part of its ongoing research programme that looks at how swarming behaviour could be used to solve large-scale problems in advanced automation through strategic cooperation.
AquaJelly is an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive unit and an intelligent adaptive mechanism that emulates swarming behaviour. It consists of a translucent dome, a central watertight body and eight tentacles for propulsion.
The dome houses a control board with integrated pressure, light and radio sensors. The orientation of the propulsion system is constantly monitored by a processor. The control board also contains eight white and eight blue LEDs, which, together with the sensors, allow communication between several AquaJellies.
The pressure sensor enables the AquaJelly to determine its precise depth, and position itself within a specific pressure zone. It also relies on the pressure sensor for recharging, since this is the only way it can strategically swim to the surface, where the charging stations are located. The low-energy ZigBee radio system is used for short-range data exchange with the charging station and to signal to other AquaJellies at the surface that the station is occupied.
Under water, the principal communication medium is infrared light. Each jellyfish can communicate within a spherical surrounding space to a distance of about 80cm, which gives them enough time to avoid collision.
Weight displacement is used to control AquaJelly’s motion in three dimensions. Two actuators integrated into the body control a swash plate, which in turn operates a four-armed pendulum. when the pendulum moves in a particular direction, the centre of mass is displaced and the jellyfish moves in that direction.
Watch the jellyfish www.festo.com/cms/de_de/5889_6297.htm
Apple has unveiled its next generation iPhone, which promises GPS and faster Internet running on third generation (3G) networks – and will sell for as little as £100 in the UK. Chief executive Steve Jobs indicated that the company was in pursuit of the mass market.
The phone also marks a significant departure for how Apple will make money in its third major business alongside Macintosh computers and iPod media players.
Wireless network companies will no longer pay Apple part of the subscription fees they get from iPhone users, but instead will subsidise the devices up front to make them cheaper.
“The vast majority of agreements do not have those follow-on payments, so you can conclude that the vast majority of carriers do provide subsidies for the phone,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer.
Cook declined to comment on how the new arrangement would affect Apple’s profit margins, but AT&T, the exclusive US carrier for the iPhone, said the subsidy would hurt its earnings and margins through next year.
The new model, which looks similar to the earlier version but with glossy black or white plastic in place of a metal back cover, loads Internet pages almost three times faster than the original, Cook said.
In the US, an entry-level version of the new iPhone, with 8GB of memory, will cost $199, versus $399 for the older version. A 16GB model will cost $299. The new phones will go on sale on 11 July in 22 countries and regions, expanding to 70 by the end of the year.
As for China, the biggest mobile phone market in the world – and one where Apple does not have a deal to sell iPhones – Cook said they would get there “over time”, and CNBC quoted Jobs as saying Apple hoped to be there later this year.
The new iPhone will run on 3G wireless networks and includes satellite navigation capability, Jobs told developers at a conference in San Francisco.
A new service, ‘mobileme’, will automatically send email and other information to iPhones, similar to Microsoft’s Exchange email server product. The pay service will replace Apple’s .Mac service and offer Web applications intended to make the phone work more like a desktop computer.
Jobs said Apple has sold six million iPhones so far and Cook said he was “still very comfortable” that the company would hit its goal of selling ten million units by the end of 2008.
Lighting firms are beginning to think about the prospect of lighting moving from dedicated fittings to illuminating entire sections of a wall or ceiling.
A group headed by Mitsubishi heavy industries, Rohm, Toppan Printing and Mitsui have set up a joint venture to work out whether organic electroluminescence (OEL) panels will prove viable for lighting.
Lumiotec plans to sell sample panels from the spring of 2009, saying that they will emit uniform light with good colour rendering and are expected to outperform fluorescent tubes in power efficiency.
In Europe, Thorn Lighting is among the partners working on the British government-funded Topless (thin organic polymeric light-emitting semiconductor surfaces) project to establish the feasibility of a market based on flat printed-electronics panels.
Geoff Williams, programme manager at Thorn, said at the recent Printed Electronics conference: “The UK has tremendous knowledge in light-emitting polymers but not so much their application to lighting. Project Topless is a very strong industrially driven white-light applications project. It is worth about £3.3m.”
One aim of the project is to develop a bright, white-emitting polymer using technology developed at the University of Durham. “We want to target 20 lumens per watt,” said Williams. Another part of the project is to work out what architects and interior designers will use: “What does the customer want? What is the benefit to them? We have got to think less like technologists.”
Thorn is looking at the middle of the next decade for two-dimensional lighting panels to be of any size. “But it is today that we have to talk with the architects and get their buy-in.”
The work has yielded some early clues on what is required, which may simplify development.
“Nothing fed back from the market so far says that lighting panels need to be flexible or conformal. so we can optimise the printing for solid substrates,” Williams claimed.
The Japanese suppliers behind Lumiotec say that a full-scale system for the commercial production and marketing of the panels will be set up once business viability of the panels is confirmed, potentially making it the first company in the world dedicated to the OLED panels business.
The team that developed the world’s first commercially available bionic hand has won the respected MacRobert award for innovation in engineering.
Touch Bionics’ i-LIMB Hand was announced as the overall winner of the 2008 award at the Royal academy of Engineering’s annual awards dinner in London, beating three other finalists.
“This is a huge honour for any engineering-oriented company,” said Touch Bionics CEO Stuart Mead. “To be selected ahead of three other excellent innovations is a real testament to the tremendous level of hard work and incredible engineering skill that has gone into the development of the i-LIMB Hand.”
Launched in 2007, but with over 20 years of research and development behind it, the i-LIMB Hand looks and acts like a real human hand, with five individually powered digits. Since the launch, more than 250 patients worldwide have been fitted and Touch Bionics is rapidly expanding across the globe.
The key innovation is the multi-articulating finger technology, which has underpinned the product’s resounding commercial success.
“As a project, it scored very highly on all three of our criteria,” said Dr Geoff Robinson, chairman of the judging panel. “In addition to many specific innovations in the design and fabrication of the artificial hand, Touch Bionics have fundamentally changed the benchmark for what constitutes an acceptable prosthesis. The social benefit for those involved must be obvious to everyone.”
At A cost of $100m, Roadrunner – the first computer to break the petaflop barrier, the capacity to calculate 1015 operations per second – was built for the US Department of Energy’s national nuclear security administration and will be housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Its Cell Broadband Engine was originally designed for video game platforms, such as the Sony Playstation 3. In total, roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips (on iBm Ls21 blade servers) and 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Qs22 blade servers).
The Roadrunner system has 80TB of memory and is housed in 288 IBM BladeCenter racks occupying nearly 600m2. Its 10,000 connections – both infiniband (a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing) and gigabit Ethernet – require 92km of fibre-optic cable.
The hybrid supercomputer will be primarily deployed on national security applications.
This mobile phone can be yours for a cool $179,000. The handset, dubbed ‘Angel of the Stars’, is encrusted with 1,700 natural diamonds and white gold. It was exhibited at the first day of the Luxurious Millionaire Fair in Munich in May.
However, the ‘Angel of the Stars’ is by no means the world’s most expensive mobile phone: that honour goes to the GoldVish ‘Le million’ (price: $1m).
For fashionable phones more within the reach of the sub-billionaire pocket, see our Fashion Phones feature in this issue.
Researchers investigating possible links between low-level electromagnetic fields and health are facing increasing pressure to publish results that have not been verified by other groups, threatening the credibility of work on the subject, an IET-backed group of experts has warned.
The claim of evidence for an ‘underlying weakness’ in peer-reviewed literature comes in the latest position statement by the IET Biological Effects Policy Advisory Group. comprising six of the UK’s top scientists and engineers with expertise in this area, BEPAG issues an update on its findings every two years.
Since its last report, the group has reviewed more than 800 papers looking at the possible harmful biological effects of low-level electromagnetic fields with frequencies up to 300Ghz.
The number of papers published has remained largely unchanged since 2000, but there has been a continuing trend for research to focus on frequencies associated with mobile phones rather than power lines.
Of the 829 papers reviewed, 47 per cent covered static and low frequencies, primarily relating to power-frequency fields, down from 51 per cent in 2000. The proportion dealing with radio-frequency fields rose from 37 per cent to 42 per cent, with around two-thirds of those specifically related to mobile phone frequencies.
Although the group found that on balance there continues to be no robust scientific evidence of harm, it acknowledged that many studies do report effects. The problem is that when the same studies are repeated, no effect is found.
“This conundrum is suspected by BEPAG to indicate an underlying weakness in much of the published literature,” said BEPAG chairman Professor Tony Barker. “To improve the robustness of the literature, it would be desirable for studies which report apparent low level effects in the absence of plausible mechanisms to be confirmed by other groups prior to publication. Pressures to publish studies as soon as possible, however understandable, may not necessarily be in the best public interest.”
Last month, the Medical University of Vienna asked researchers in its clinical Division of Occupational Medicine to retract papers describing how mobile phone radiation had been shown to damage DNA in some types of cell when checks showed experimental results had been fabricated.
An independent review, prompted when other groups challenged the published work, showed that data had been fabricated, the University admitted.
“Within the framework of a review of the methodical procedure taken by one of the authors who is listed in both publications it was possible to prove that this author had based her entire working procedure on producing preconceived results,” an announcement said.
“She immediately confessed and terminated her employment relationship with the MUV with immediate effect.”
The IET position statement, ‘The possible harmful biological effects of low-level electromagnetic fields of frequencies up to 300 GHz’, can be downloaded at: www.theiet.org/factfiles/bioeffects/
The phoney war finally ended when Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic party’s 2008 presidential nomination to Barack Obama. However, her exit still demands a few words.
Many in Silicon Valley and the USA’s other high technology regions were disappointed. Public records for political donations show that senator Clinton had legions of supporters in the world of engineering. Indeed, beyond acknowledging her personal qualities, also remember that Bill’s term marked a period of almost uninterrupted growth for hi-tech – perhaps there was a little too much of it, but that didn’t stem the fond memories. Moreover, the contrast with the perceived (and sadly, often justifiable) anti-science bias of the Bush administration was stark.
However, politics is cruel, so Hillary is on her way (for four years, at least) and Dubya’s going to be following her soon enough. All of which brings us to the Obama-McCain Science Policy Face-off.
So this is the main event. You’ll notice I’ve used capital letters to jazz up the big policy conflict. And that’s because I’m a journalist and I’m trying to trick you. You see, actually, Obama and John McCain, his Republican rival, are both technology-friendly candidates.
Both believe government should stimulate massive research into alternatives to oil and ways of combating global warming. Both believe that immigration reform is needed so that US companies can seek to recruit the brightest and the best. Both understand and can articulate the long-standing link between innovation and US economic growth.
There are differences, but they are mostly philosophical – Obama would likely seek to boost US innovation with publicly funded initiatives; McCain favours measures that stimulate private sector-led R&D. But overall, this battle is shaping up to be a win-win for science. You can even expect technology to retain a high profile as the campaign hots up.
Obama is only ‘known’ as a candidate by the state of Illinois and his own parties’ primary voters. He has been in Washington DC for only a few years and must present himself and his ‘Change’ message to the wider electorate. Expect the same image of a savvy BlackBerry addict and the same stories about how his campaign has already harnessed technology to change the face of American politics to continue. Similarly, ideas about stimulating a moribund economy through innovation and the quest for energy independence dovetail well with that ‘Change’ mantra.
McCain, too, has good reason to develop a strong science platform. Already, Obama’s campaign is scoring points by characterising its rival as McBush – “another four years of failed policies”. Yet McCain’s consistent, progressive and long-standing positions on general technology issues and on global warming in particular give him his best opportunities to distance himself politically from the current president.
The 2008 campaign could thus actually be fun to watch rather than frustrating – with the caveat, of course, that these are politicians. But cautious optimism – yes, I think we can have a little of that. But only a little, mind.
http://election2008.aaas.org
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have created a computer model that can tell what someone is thinking by reading their brain images. The team, led by Tom Mitchell and Marcel Just, showed that their model could predict what word a person was thinking of three times in four, even though it had never seen that word before.
Is this mind-reading? “When people talk about ‘mind-reading’ they usually think of a machine that can determine what you’re thinking, no matter what that is. We cannot do that today,” said Tom Mitchell, who heads the School of Computer Science’s Machine Learning Department, in an interview with E&T. “But our computer can answer multiple-choice questions about what you’re thinking of and fairly accurately.”
The program achieved 77 per cent accuracy when given two nouns it had never seen before, plus two brain images, and asked which of those two brain images corresponded to which of the two nouns. Earlier research had already shown that functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) can be used to detect which areas of the brain are activated when a person thinks about a specific noun. But the Carnegie Mellon team took the next step by predicting these activation patterns for nouns FMRI data does not yet cover.
“The ability of our model to predict activity for nouns it has never seen is the key contribution,” Mitchell said. “Earlier work had not suggested that a computer might be able to predict neural activity for new words for which FMRI data is not yet available.”
In the study, nine subjects underwent FMRI scans while concentrating on 60 concrete nouns – five words in each of 12 semantic categories including animals, body parts, buildings, clothing, insects, vehicles and vegetables. The scientists also statistically analysed a set of texts totalling over a trillion words, called a text corpus. For each noun, scientists calculated how frequently it co-occurs in the text with each of 25 verbs associated with sensory-motor functions, including see, hear, listen, taste, push, drive and lift. These 25 verbs appear to be basic building blocks the brain uses for representing meaning.
“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” said Marcel Just, a professor of psychology who directs the Center for Cognitive Brain imaging. “So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”
By using the statistical information to analyse the FMRI activation patterns gathered for each of the 60 stimulus nouns, the Carnegie Mellon scientists were able to determine how each co-occurrence with one of the 25 verbs affected the activation of each voxel, or 3-D volume element, within the FMRI brain scans. To predict the FMRI activation pattern for any concrete noun within the text corpus, the computational model determines the noun’s co-occurrences within the text with the 25 verbs and builds an activation map based on how those co-occurrences affect each voxel.
“For example, the noun ‘refrigerator’ occurs frequently with verbs such as ‘open’, ‘clean’ and ‘fill’, whereas the noun ‘airplane’ occurs with verbs such as ‘ride’, ‘lift’ and ‘open’,” Mitchell explained. “Our model predicts the neural activity for an arbitrary noun by adding together the neural activity it has learned to associate with the corresponding verbs, weighted by how frequently the verb co-occurs with the noun. So what we have learned is that the neural activity we see for concrete nouns can be explained and also predicted in terms of such components.”
In tests, a separate computational model was trained for each of the nine research subjects using 58 of the 60 stimulus nouns and their associated activation patterns. The model was then used to predict the activation patterns for the remaining two nouns. The model had a mean accuracy of 77 per cent in matching the predicted activation patterns to the ones observed in the participants’ brains.
Geman researchers have achieved a breakthrough in fuel-cell power density, producing an exceptionally lightweight system to power a robotic mini-helicopter.
The work is part of an EU project that aims to create a 20cm helicopter for missions such as locating people trapped in fallen buildings.
A team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin developed the fuel cell, which weighs 30g and delivers 12W, giving a power density of 400W/kg that has only previously been achieved in much larger systems.
To achieve the desired power output, manufacturers normally stack a number of fuel cells in a structure consisting of several metal plates, each containing one channel for air and one for hydrogen. The Berlin team reduced the weight by using very thin planar fuel cells and replacing the metal plates with lightweight plastic spacers.
The wind generated by the helicopter’s rotor blades goes directly into the air vents, with no need for an additional pump.
The scientists had to devise a solution for the hydrogen supply, too, as a conventional pressure tank would be too heavy. “We have built a small reactor containing solid sodium borohydride. If we inject water, this produces hydrogen,” said IZM team leader Robert Hahn. Since the helicopter always needs about the same amount of energy to stay in the air, the reactor always has to produce a consistent quantity of hydrogen.
The researchers have already built a prototype. The helicopter is expected to take off, powered by this fuel cell, in just over a year’s time.
The next step is to adjust the hydrogen production to cater for fluctuating energy require-ments, which would open up applications such as charging laptop computers and phones.
A groundbreaking technique that uses tiny magnetic beads to speed up cancer screening is the subject of a landmark entry on the IET’s Inspec Database. An abstract of the paper in which the work is reported will be the subject of the ten millionth record to be added to the database since it was established in 1969.
Published this month in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, the research in cell nanomechanics carried out at the Teitell Lab in the US could lead to faster screening of tissue samples for cancer as well as helping to optimise chemotherapy drugs.
The method works by using a dispersion of magnetically actuated beads to press down a sample of cells. The motion of the beads is a direct measure of cell softness, which can in turn be related to metastasis – the point where cancer cells invade the body. Previously, researchers were only able to determine cell softness using a single-probe technique.
The Inspec database is currently growing at a rate of over 600,000 records per year.
A short film about the ten millionth Inspec record is online at www.theiet.org/10mrecord
Japanese automotive group Nissan is to build a new compact car in the UK for overseas export, with financial support from the British government.
The plant in Sunderland, north east England, will receive investment of about £55m, including a £6m contribution from the government.
The cash injection will safeguard jobs at the factory, which will lose production of the Micra model in two years’ time when it is transferred to a plant in Chennai, India, in a joint venture with Nissan’s global auto partner, Renault.
As the announcement of the investment was made, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met Renault-Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn at Nissan’s European design centre in London.
“Sunderland’s success shows what an innovative, talented and highly committed workforce can achieve, and reaffirms the UK’s position as a strong player in the global car industry,” Brown commented.
Ghosn added: “By delivering on tough commitments, our employees at Sunderland have demonstrated that our plant can be a globally competitive centre for the production of high-value products.”
Nissan would not divulge details of the new vehicle, to be made from 2010, but said it would be aimed at the European market.
Nissan’s Sunderland plant produced a record 374,000 vehicles in last financial year. The company is the largest vehicle exporter from the UK, with around 80 per cent of production sold abroad.
Together with the engine assembly plant and other facilities, the Sunderland site employs 4,700 workers. The workforce was expanded recently to meet demand for the new Qashqai model.
Nissan said in January it would add 800 staff and begin a third production shift in Sunderland in response to brisk demand for the Qashqai.
Microsoft is extending the life of Windows XP until at least the summer of 2010 for the emerging class of netbook and ultra low cost PC (ULCPC) market, reversing plans to cease supplying the operating system this summer.
XP will now continue to be available on low-cost devices aimed at schools and customers in the developing world. Experts believe that Microsoft is offering this package to prevent Open Source rival Linux gaining a foothold in the market.
“If Microsoft had decided to discontinue XP and prevent use, the market would have been left entirely to Linux,” said Jeremy Green, principal analyst at Ovum Research.
Clive Bottom, service director for analysts Quo Circa, added: “These types of PCs are aimed at the five billion users who cannot afford a typical laptop. Even if a small percentage were using these ultra-low-cost PCs, it would mean a significant market gain for Linux on the desktop.”
Currently, Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate customers have the flexibility to downgrade to Windows XP Professional.
IT workers are so upbeat about their employment prospects that they would not hesitate to recommend their career to their children.
Research by recruitment firms the IT Job Board and Barkers found that 75 per cent of respondents “would recommend a career in IT to a child”.
Staff were also shown to feel confident in weathering a market downturn should it occur, and feel the lessons learned during the dotcom bust will stand the profession in good stead when it comes to engineering economic recovery.
Some 69 per cent of IT sector respondents felt their company’s position in the market was “very secure” or “somewhat secure”, and 70 per cent expected a salary increase in the next 12 months.
“Belts are being tightened for sure, but the dot-com experience means that the IT profession is better prepared for a possible recession,” says Adam Stokes, IT Job Board operations manager. “IT practitioners know how to pull themselves up by their boot straps. Also, IT projects are deemed as a way of reducing unnecessary costs.”
Cloud computing: derives from the common use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or IP availability. The computing resources being accessed within the cloud are typically owned and operated by third-party providers.
Disruptive technologies: technological innovation, product, or service that brings about beneficial change by overturning the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market.
Multi-core multiprocessors: combine two or more independent processor cores into a single package.
Web 2.0: trend in the use of Web technology characterised by information sharing, collaboration and the use of the Web as a platform for services.
Web 2.0 technologies like social networking, Web mashups, plus multicore processors and cloud computing, are among the ten most disrup-tive technologies forecast to shape IT over the next five years.
Speaking at the Gartner Emerging Trends and Technologies Roadshow in Australia, Gartner Fellow David Cearley predicted that business IT applications will start to reflect the features found in popular consumer social software such as Facebook and MySpace, as organisations look to further employee collaboration and exploit community feedback.
Multicore processors are expanding what is possible with software, but single-threaded applications will be unable to take advantage of their power, Cearley counselled: “Enterprises should perform an audit to identify applications that will need remediation to continue to meet service-level requirements in the multicore era.”
By 2010, he predicts, Web mashups – which mix content from publicly available sources – will be the dominant model for the creation of new enterprise applications.
“Mashups create possibilities for a new class of short-term or disposable applications that would not normally attract development dollars,” Cearley added. “The ability to combine information into a common dashboard, or visualise it using geo-location or mapping software, is powerful.”
Chief information officers (CIOs) who see their jobs as “keeping the data centre running, business continuity planning, and finding new technology toys to show to people” will not survive, Clearley warns. They will have to think beyond the constraints of conventional, in order to identify the technologies that might be in widespread use a few years from now.
“CIOs need to act as a conduit from the business to the technology,” Cearley says, “to see how it might be possible to use these [emerging] technologies to solve a problem the business has identified.”
China is considering a request from Airbus to participate in the country’s development programme for large passenger aircraft.
Speaking to E&T on condition of anonymity, an official of Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (CACC) acknowledged that CACC has been approached by Airbus. He said the company will have to study how Airbus wants to participate, but declined to be drawn into further comment.
CACC was recently set up by the Chinese government with a registered capital of 19 billion yuan (US$2.7bn). It is responsible for research and development, design and production of the aircraft.
The shareholders are Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, China Aviation Industry Corp I (AVIC I) and China Aviation Industry Corp II (AVIC II ), all of which are state-owned.
AVIC I and AVIC II will jointly start work on the project early next year. This is part of China’s long-term plan to provide aircraft at a lower cost for its booming aviation industry, which is growing at the rate of 10.5 per cent a year.
China is embarking on a major shake-up of its telecoms industry to make it more competitive. In the first significant move, mobile service provider China Unicom is to acquire fixed-line operator and broadband service provider China Netcom Group in a share-swap deal.
Both companies are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Based on a 2 June closing price for China Netcom shares, the deal would cost China Unicom HK$439bn (US$56.3bn). According to Tong Jilu, executive director and chief financial officer of China Unicom, the merger should be sealed by September.
Unicom says the merger is in line with the industry trend of convergence between fixed-line and wireless businesses, and will enable it to achieve economies of scale. The company intends to focus on technology and product innovation and optimising its capital structure to improve competitiveness.
China Unicom is the second-largest mobile service provider in the country. Its larger rival, China Mobile Communications, will acquire China Tietong Telecommunications Corp (China Tietong) later this year.
The much-anticipated mergers are part of the Chinese government’s plans to open up competition in the telecommunications industry. In another development China Telecom has signed a deal with China Unicom to acquire the latter’s CDMA services for US$6.31bn.
China Telecom Corp, parent company of China Telecom will acquire the CDMA network from China Unicom Group, parent company of China Unicom for US$9.54bn. Both deals will be transacted in cash and are expected to be completed in October.
Under the restructuring of the Chinese telecommunications industry the five state-owned companies, China Mobile, China Netcom, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Tietong will be divided into three groups, with each providing both fixed-line and mobile services. Each group will be issued with a 3G licence upon completion of the mergers.
German firm Q-Cells is building a manufacturing facility in the state of Selangor, Malaysia, to produce solar cells for world markets.
The company held a ground-breaking ceremony earlier this month at the Selangor Science Park 2 (SSP2) to mark the start of construction. It is investing US$1.6bn in the plant, which includes cost of the construction, purchase of raw materials and equipment.
Q-Cells CEO Anton Milner said production of solar cells will start at the end of the second quarter of next year, with the entire output expected to be exported.
The company said in March that it would also incorporate wafer production capability into the new plant, with capacity matching that of cell production, which will amount to more than 300MWp.
In addition, Q-Cells plans to start production of the silicon ingots from which wafers are sawn. It is initially setting up a test plant in Germany, but intends eventually to set up ingot
production at the Malaysian complex too.
Q-Cells’ core business is in the development, manufacture and sale of monocrystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells. The company claims to be the world’s largest manufacturer of solar cells.
SSP2 is a 1,000-acre tech--nology park built by the Selangor gover-nment to attract high-tech manufacturing, including wafer fabs.
The footprint-like impression in this image was made not by a Martian, but by the Robotic Arm scoop of Nasa’s Phoenix Lander, currently on Mars. The Lander reached out and touched the Martian soil for the first time on Saturday 31 May.
“This first touch allows us to utilise the Robotic Arm accurately,” explained David Spencer, Phoenix’s surface mission manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Mars, a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface, has water ice just below ground level in its arctic region. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. Phoenix has been using its robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer and bring both soil and water ice to the Lander platform for analysis.
The results could assist scientists in answering the question of whether life ever arose on Mars.
Intel will release more technical detail on its progress in developing a ‘nearly all digital’ RF semiconductor platform before the end of the year, according to chief technology officer Justin Rattner.
Rattner, one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Design Automation Conference, told E&T: “We’re not looking at something that’s five or 10 years away. We’re building this stuff on today’s processes – so we’re talking 45nm – and, as for commercial production, you are probably looking at 2011. We’d expect to see this at 32nm.”
The last three years have seen several advances in realising functionality that previously required analogue and RF circuitry with more cost-effective digital alternatives. However, the timing in Intel’s roadmap is still ambitious.
This may largely be because the company has taken a significantly different route. Most ‘digitisation’ has tackled the problem from the point of view of replacing analogue circuitry with digital logic. Intel has instead focused on digitally addressing computational challenges.
“On both the transmit and the receive sides, it looks like you can build a radio that is mostly digital, save for one or two analogue elements,” Rattner explained.
“We’re not talking about just a soft radio here, but all the way from the antenna to the MAC [media access controller] and back. When you adopt this perspective, you realise that you’re now dealing with computational problems rather than simply circuit design problems.”
Intel wants the design to underpin a range of portable devices that operate multiple types of radio without needing to implement each standard (Wi-Fi, GSM, Bluetooth, etc.) separately.
“We’re looking at things from the platform level, particularly with regard to future mobile devices, whether they’re cellphones, smartphones, laptops and MacBooks, or something else,” said Rattner.
“The traditional approach goes, ‘okay, we’ll stack up these radios and then pray for some antenna space’. However, what we’re now looking at is this multi-radio approach where the entire send and receive chain is engineered so that it can be switched and reconfigured very quickly.”
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