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Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production

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Uni-Pixel, a company based in Woodlands, Texas, has announced it is about to start mass production of a thin-film to be used in time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, a next-generation display technology that exploits retinal persistence in the human eye and promises significantly better performance than CRT, LCD and OLED displays with, among other things, great durability and dramatically improved energy efficiency.


The vast majority of displays available today use spatial superimposition of a synchronized red, green and blue light, each shining with a specific intensity, to create millions of color combinations. For instance, in LCD displays each pixel is made up of three RGB-colored dots that can take up discrete values over a 6- or 8-bit range: when watching the pixels from a distance, the human eye blends these three components together and perceives a single color over a total 18- or 24-bit range respectively.


TMOS displays harness a different principle in human vision: rather than superimposing the three components spatially, they do it temporally, exploiting the retinal persistence by intermittently sending just one of the three components at a time at very short intervals, and letting our brains "do the math" by adding the colors.


This approach greatly simplifies the manufacturing process, basically subtracting components from existing LCD lines and reducing others — such as the thin-film transistors for the RGB dots — by a factor of three, resulting in monitors that are 60 percent cheaper to manufacture than LCDs.


Because each layer placed between the top and the bottom glass sheet reduces the monitor's overall light output (each layer acts as a filter), removing components and simplifying the rest makes TMOS displays highly energy-efficient, letting through more than ten times as much light as a conventional LCD screen. Intuitively, this means one could obtain the same picture brightness using less than one-tenth of the power.


The intermittent red, green and blue light come from side-mounted LEDs that illuminate the bottom glass layer. Applying a voltage to the specially-developed film causes it to deform downward and touch the bottom glass, routing light from LEDs up to a particular pixel. The routing is done with the help of tiny mirrors, each less than 10 microns in size, that can manipulate the signals very quickly and achieve refresh rates 1,000 times higher than in LCD displays.


This simple but seemingly very powerful architecture also has other advantages: for instance, because of its small pixel size, it will be possible to reach densities as high as 300dpi. But the figure that might well be the most impressive is the projected display's life. The first component expected to fail in a TMOS display is one of the three LEDs, each of which have a life of 100,000 hours under continuous operation. However, TMOS displays use the three LEDs intermittently, which puts display life to approximately 300,000 hours, much more than LCDs or OLEDs.


"It is our plan to have film production begin in low volume this coming quarter for these initial customer orders and then ramp to high volumes for additional opportunities in the beginning of 2010," UniPixel's president and CEO Reed Killion explained.

Memory chips could lead the way to gigapixel cameras

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Image sensors embedded in digital cameras are expensive, and issues with their circuitry limit the quality and resolution in the pictures they produce. Now a research group from the Netherlands believes a cheaper solution could be right before our eyes - the team's "gigavision" technique exploits the high light sensitivity of memory chips to produce inexpensive gigapixel sensors that perform very well, especially in extreme lighting conditions.

Today's image sensors in digital cameras are based on CCD or CMOS technology, which is effective but relatively complex and not very energy-efficient. With CMOS sensors, as light hits the objective its intensity is translated to an analog voltage for each pixel; the voltage is then transferred to the edge of the chip, where it's converted to a greyscale value between 0 and 255 by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a process that often compromises image quality.

Memory chips store digital information as an electrical charge, which needs to be very small to make read and write operations faster and store more data on the same surface area. However, this makes them very sensitive to external sources of noise such as light, which can easily alter the bits' values as photons hit the transistors in the chip.

A team led by Edoardo Charbon of the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, decided to exploit this phenomenon by conceptually "removing" the black plastic packages that protect memory chips from interfering photons. The team mapped the light hitting the camera's objective directly to the chip's memory cells, which act as a myriad of miniaturized digital sensors.

The main advantage with this approach is the better resolution with reduced complexity, because it can achieve imaging with 100 times as many pixels on a chip of the same area, reducing the cost in the meantime. Since most digital cameras can now take pictures at 10 megapixels, this means affordable gigapixel cameras could be easily manufactured.

This could pave the way for inexpensive digital cameras in cell phones or other devices that can take better pictures especially in conditions of very dim or very bright light, two areas in which digital cameras tend to struggle.

There is however one catch: each bit can only be set to either "0" or "1," as opposed to a the traditional greyscale sensor that is translated to one of 256 possible levels. This means that sensing the right level of gray accurately is trickier and requires an algorithm to consider not just one, but rather a few adjacent bits at a time.

The team is still working on developing an efficient algorithm for greyscale detection, and is hoping to have a first version of a gigavision memory chip manufactured late this year and a definitive version early next year.

Via New Scientist.

Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling

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The blue line shows estimates of Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years. The green line shows the long-term cooling trend. The red line shows the recent warming based on actual observations. (Courtesy Science, modified by UCAR.)

Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns. The international study, led by Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will be published in the September 4 edition of Science.
The scientists reconstructed summer temperatures across the Arctic over the last 2,000 years by decade, extending a view of climate far beyond the 400 years of Arctic-wide records previously available at that level of detail. They found that thousands of years of gradual Arctic cooling, related to natural changes in Earth's orbit, would continue today if not for emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
"This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change," says NCAR scientist David Schneider, one of the co-authors. "This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic's natural climate system."
Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University, the lead author and head of the synthesis project, says the results indicate that recent warming is more anomalous than previously documented.
"Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend," says Kaufman. "But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before."
The new study is the first to quantify a pervasive cooling across the Arctic on a decade-by-decade basis that is related to an approximately 21,000-year cyclical wobble in Earth's tilt relative to the Sun. Over the last 7,000 years, the timing of Earth's closest pass by the Sun has shifted from September to January. This has gradually reduced the intensity of sunlight reaching the Arctic in summertime, when Earth is farther from the Sun.
The research team's temperature analysis shows that summer temperatures in the Arctic, in step with the reduced energy from the Sun, cooled at an average rate of about 0.2 degrees Celsius (about .36 degrees Fahrenheit) per thousand years. The temperatures eventually bottomed out during the "Little Ice Age," a period of widespread cooling that lasted roughly from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.
Even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued, it was overwhelmed in the 20th century by human-induced warming. The result was summer temperatures in the Arctic by the year 2000 that were about 1.4 degrees C (2.5 degrees F) higher than would have been expected from the continued cyclical cooling alone.
"If it hadn't been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century," says Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.
To reconstruct Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years, the study team incorporated three types of field-based data, each of which captured the response of a different component of the Arctic's climate system to changes in temperature.
This data included temperature reconstructions published by the study team earlier this year. The reconstructions were based on evidence provided by sediments from Arctic lakes, which yielded two kinds of clues: changes in the abundance of silica remnants left behind by algae, which reflect the length of the growing season, and the thickness of annually deposited sediment layers, which increases during warmer summers as deposits from glacial meltwater increase.
The research also incorporated previously published data from glacial ice and tree rings that were calibrated against the instrumental temperature record.
The scientists compared the temperatures inferred from the field-based data with simulations run with the Community Climate System Model, a computer model of global climate based at NCAR. The model's estimate of the reduction of seasonal sunlight in the Arctic and the resulting cooling was consistent with the analysis of the lake sediments and other natural archives. These results give scientists more confidence in computer projections of future Arctic temperatures.
"This study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate, ending at least 2,000 years of Arctic cooling," says NCAR scientist Caspar Ammann, a co-author.
The new study follows previous work showing that temperatures over the last century warmed almost three times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. This phenomenon, called Arctic amplification, occurs as highly reflective Arctic ice and snow melt away, allowing dark land and exposed ocean to absorb more sunlight.
"Because we know that the processes responsible for past Arctic amplification are still operating, we can anticipate that it will continue into the next century," says Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a member of the study team. "Consequently, Arctic warming will continue to exceed temperature increases in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in accelerated loss of land ice and an increased rate of sea level rise, with global consequences."
The research was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation

'Time telescope' speeds up optical transmission by 27 times

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Most of today's telecommunication data is encoded at a speed of 10 Gbit/s, but researchers are constantly looking for new ways to push this limit even further. A group of researchers at Cornell University have recently come up with the "time telescope," a sophisticated system that can speed up optical communication by 27 times to an outstanding 270 Gbits/s by squeezing more information into a single flash of light and that, unlike previous solutions, does so in an energy-efficient manner.
Pushing the limit beyond 10 Gbps with today's electronics is proving challenging because engineers have to deal with a series of technological constraints that don't allow it to deliver much higher frequencies.
Faster transmission speeds can be achieved with optical fiber, but this usually requires a lot of energy because photons, which don't interact with each other easily, must be "forced" to do so. The team's work gets around the issue and makes achieving these higher speeds cheaper and much more energy-efficient.
The device developed by the Cornell team is called a "time telescope" and includes two silicon chips called "time lenses" — which work together like the lenses of a normal telescope — lengths of optical fiber and a laser. Because of its small size, it could be used in optical chips inside a computer, as well as for speeding up Internet connections over long distances.
The time telescope achieves these ultra-high speeds by squeezing more information — up to 24 bits — into each burst of light, and it does so by using silicon waveguides that can channel light.
As the information enters the waveguide, it is combined with a laser pulse from a series of infrared lasers that vibrates the atoms of the waveguide. The vibration lowers the frequencies of the front of the light pulse and increases those in its tail, effectively compressing the signal. As a result, the pulse is "squeezed" but no information is lost in the process.
The team then used a second time lens to convert the compressed pulse back into a 24-bit signal, and observed that the pulse duration shrank from 2.5 nanoseconds to 92 picoseconds, speeding up the data rate by over 27 times.
The physics involved are complex, but the net effect is that the system can speed up optical communication significantly, requiring no more energy than that needed to power the lasers, which is significantly less than that required by analogous systems previously developed by other researchers.
The device could be used to compress the data passing through packet-based optical networks, allowing to send 27 times as much information on the same wavelength channel, even though the information would have to be decompressed and then compressed again before and after every router, which would account for a small lag.
Via New Scientist

Speedy communication takes a quantum leap towards reality

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Quantum computing is expected to revolutionize electronics over the course of the next few decades, but a number of outstanding issues still remain. One such problem is that "qubits," the basic building blocks of quantum information, are very fragile and can be easily destroyed when sent on a fiber optics cable, due to the surrounding noise. Working on this issue, a team from Stockholm's KHT University, led by Magnus Rådmark, has developed a new method for combining six photons to obtain a robust qubit that is resistant to noise and is, therefore, able to travel long distances without interference.
Small imperfections in the cable, electromagnetic waves coming from nearby sources and small changes in temperature are just a few of many possible sources of noise that, when they add up, can corrupt the information traveling on a cable. Digital electronics deals with it by periodically regenerating the signal and adding redundant data (checksums, parity bits, etc) to identify and fix possible errors.
With quantum computing, however, the problem becomes much more complicated. When a single photon is sent through an optical fiber, the information is encoded in terms of the particle's polarization, which could be, for instance, horizontal or vertical. Adding a second photon makes it possible to generate many more useful combinations, but it then become impossible to know which photon has which polarization — it's only possible to observe the relationship between the two.
Quantum entanglement, a property of quantum mechanical systems according to which the state of one part (the polarization of one photon) can't be described without the mention of its remaining parts (the polarization of the remaining photons) is the cause of this further complication But it's also what makes quantum computing so attractive to scientists and engineers, because it allows for massive parallelism in data processing — when an operation is performed on one photon, the entire system is simultaneously affected.
With their work, the researchers managed to build a quantum state formed by six photons that can easily travel long distances in optical fibers, even when subject to mechanical stress or interference, allowing for reliable data transmission from one end to the other.
What's the catch? Unfortunately, while the team has successfully shown that its design would perform well, they still lack the technology to actually encode information on this six-photon configuration and then read it back. Once this issue is resolved, though, science will be very close to obtaining fast and highly reliable quantum communication.

Mouse 2.0: Microsoft's multi-touch mouse prototypes

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It's been over forty years since the first computer mouse saw the light of day, and the fact that its basic design hasn't changed all that much is a testament to the original. But that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. A group of researchers at Microsoft has come up with five new experimental designs that tie traditional mouse functionality to increasingly popular multi-touch technology on a single device.

Each prototype explores a unique combination of shape, sensing and interactive capabilities:

The FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) mouse is roughly the size and shape of a standard mouse and uses an Infrared camera to track the user's fingers as they move on its translucent surface. A sheet of acrylic is put on the device's surface and lit with infrared light: when a finger is pressed against the surface, it causes the light to be scattered away from it, which is immediately picked up by the camera and translated into an input signal.
The Orb Mouse uses again Infrared light, but this time tracking the user gestures on a hemispherical surface. The IR light radiates from the center and is reflected back by objects, such as the user's fingers, that come close to the surface of the mouse. The resulting image is picked up by a camera, normalized as if it came from a plain surface and then further processed to analyze the hand motions.
The Cap Mouse (short for Capacitive Mouse) uses a different technique for tracking the user's hand motions — a matrix of capacitive-sensing electrodes that track the location of the fingers as they move. Interestingly, this prototype can also be used as a single-button mouse when users press down towards the front of the device.
The Side Mouse doesn't need to be touched directly, and instead senses the user's fingers as they touch the surface around the mouse. This device is designed to rest under the user's palm, allowing fingers to touch the surface directly in front of the device, where a camera picks up the data and processes it as usual.
Finally, the Arty Mouse is equipped with three high-resolution optical mouse sensors, one in the base resting under the user's palm and two under the extensions that follow the movements of the index and thumb.
The team concluded in its paper that one of the challenges of placing a multi-touch sensor on the surface of a mouse is making it easy for users to switch between the two modes without drastically changing their hand position — a challenge that the team plans to address in the future.

For now, however, it seems like we'll be stuck with pointing and clicking for a little while longer.

Triumph’s Rocket III Roadster gets more power and torque

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Triumph’s three-cylinder 2,294cc Rocket III megamotorcycle has the strongest motor of any two wheeled roadgoing conveyance we’ve ever ridden – nothing else comes even close. As much as we fell in love with the monster, all the Rockets until now have been created with a laid-back riding position which doesn't necessarily suit everybody in general, or mountain roads and city traffic in particular. For 2010 though, the iconic British marque is to introduce a Roadster version with increased horsepower and a 15% torque boost to 224Nm. Anti-lock braking is fitted as standard and ergonomics have been reworked for a more natural around-town riding position.

Coming in two black color options, metallic Phantom Black and Matt Black, the Rocket III Roadster is powered by an uprated version of Triumph’s iconic powerplant. Maximum power has increased with torque up 15% to a mighty 224Nm.

The new ergonomics give the Rocket III Roadster a completely different riding experience from its predecessors. The new footrests are further back, lower down and more inboard than on the Rocket III, creating a comfortable riding position which non-cruiser riders will feel at home with. The plush new seat sits the rider higher and further forward than before, giving a comfortable and natural leg position while reducing the reach to the handlebars.

The result, says Triumph, is a motorcycle that is easier to steer through corners than any other Rocket III variant.

New rear suspension units have been designed to offer a comfortable ride, while the main components take on a blacked out appearance for that "bad boy" image. Many components have been taken back to black, including the forks, yokes, radiator shroud and rear springs. New silencers, one on each side, are the final touches. These have been designed to release more power and torque and optimize the aural experience.

The new Triumph Rocket III Roadster will be a lot cheaper at GBP 10,950 and will be available at official Triumph dealerships from early 2010. The long-haul Rocket III Touring is GBP 13,000.

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