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Nanotechnology often seems like a magical science, promising everything from tiny robots that can build cities on other planets to eternal life through cellular repair. But more prosaic applications of existing nanotechnology are being found every day. One such application, currently being pursued by researchers at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue's Discovery Park, is using tiny carbon nanotubes to greatly improve heat transfer between silicon chips and heatsinks.

Carbon nanotubes are specially-grown constructions of carbon atoms, arranged in a hexagonal lattice similar to chicken wire, then rolled up into long, thin tubes. The lattices are typically about 4 to 70 nanometers in diameter, are surprisingly strong and, as it turns out, also quite efficient at heat transfer.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071003-nanotubes-could-make-a-path-towards-a-cooler-chip-future.html

Amimon, a California-based startup company, introduced a technology that enables wireless transmission of high definition video streams. Their wireless high-definition interface (WDMI) could eliminate the need for wires while preserving the quality of the video stream. Amimon’s wireless modules, which use the company’s baseband chipsets, can deliver uncompressed HD audio and video files in real-time to a distance of up to 30 meters, through walls, maintaining wire-equivalent quality and robustness.

The WHDI chipset supports most video resolutions, at up to 720p and 1080i (including XGA), with no line of sight required between the transmitter and receiver and with latency of less than 1 millisecond. This means the video can be streamed over a standard wireless LAN 20 MHz connection, reaching a speed of 1.5 Gbps. The chip also enables the delivery of uncompressed 1080p HD content transmission at a 3Gbps rate through a 40MHz channel. Amimon is focusing on information coding and their strong, 256-bit AES encryption system significantly reduces the relatively high bit error rate present in other wireless links.

Source: http://www.tfot.info/news/1007/wireless-high-definition-video-takes-off.html

MIT spinoff Tilera announced that it's shipping a computer chip with 64 separate processors whose design differs drastically from that of the chips found in today's computers. The new chip, called Tile64, avoids some of the speed bottlenecks inherent in today's chip architecture, and it can operate at much lower power, says Anant Agarwal, founder and chief technology officer of Tilera, based in Santa Clara, CA. Initially, Tile64 will be used in video applications such as videoconferencing systems, and in network hardware that monitors traffic to reduce e-mail spam and viruses.

In existing multicore chips, each core communicates with the others via a set of wires called a bus. Performance doesn't necessarily suffer when two or four cores share a bus, but when 16 or more cores try to use it simultaneously, data can get backed up. Agarwal explains that Tilera's chip has no central bus. Instead, each core is connected to all the others. Also on each core is a full-featured processor, which can run an operating system, and memory caches, which hold data that needs to be quickly accessed.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19269/

Manipulating light in a novel way, researchers at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington, DC, and the University of Alberta, in Canada, have demonstrated that light can be controlled with magnets in very small, transistor-like devices. Such switches could lead to fast, small, and efficient optical chips for cell phones, and optical communications.

The advance combines insights from two nascent research fields. In plasmonics, researchers are studying ways of guiding light along very thin metal wires to allow faster communication between devices on a chip. The other field, spintronics, involves manipulating a property of electrons called spin; in the past several years, spintronics research has enabled ultradense memory in hard drives. Now the Naval Lab and University of Alberta researchers have shown that by manipulating electron spin using magnetic fields, they can turn off and on light that's being guided through metals.

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Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18874/

Scientists have created a form of nanoscale silicon that is stretchable. The new material may help pave the way for a class of stretchable electronic devices, such as “smart” surgical gloves and personal health monitors, that are not possible to create using current technology and materials.

“Electronics that are bendable have many potential applications, but reversible stretchability is a different and much more technically challenging characteristic,” said corresponding researcher John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), to PhysOrg.com.

Rogers and colleagues from UIUC and the University of Arizona created an ultra-thin silicon membrane from a silicon wafer and merged the membrane with a slab of a silicon-based polymer. The overall process involved several steps but, in short, the group first “pre-strained” the polymer slab, pulling it taut, before they topped it with the prepared silicon. When they released the strain the silicon buckled, resulting in a series of raised wavy ridges forming a herringbone-like pattern. The finished composite membrane is about 100 nanometers thick and can stretch biaxially – that is, in both the vertical and horizontal directions.

Source: http://physorg.com/news100966375.html