Intel again

The latest data from IHS iSuppli confirms the position of Intel as the world's leading semiconductor supplier with 15.6% (by revenue) of the market in 2011. Intel's position is due to demand for its PC-oriented microprocessors and for its NAND flash memory used in consumer and wireless products. The second largest supplier remains Samsung Electronics; Intel's revenue for 2011 being $48,721M and Samsung's $28,563M.

Elementary my dear Citigroup

Last year the Watson the IBM computer defeated two champions of the US game show Jeopardy. Now, the US bank Citigroup and IBM have announced that they will use Watson 'to explore the use of deep content analysis and evidence based learning capabilities to help advance customer interactions, and improve and simplify the banking experience'. Watson's strength apparently is being able to take and interpret un-structured data and produce output that mere humans can make use of. I trust it knows that 'Reichenbach Falls' is not the announcement of a declining share price.

Gnome's Law?

Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687 in which he postulated the inverse square law of universal gravitation. Rumour has it that Newton was inspired by a falling apple. The eminent scientist was clearly forced into thinking about Malus domestica because Baehr and Maresch of Dresden did not produce the first ceramic gnomes until 1841, with the first garden gnomes not introduced into the UK until 1847. Promoted by a German scales manufacturer, a garden gnome called Kern is currently travelling the world being weighed at numerous points on the earth as a route to illustrate the impact of the earth not being a perfect sphere of uniform density. You can track Kern's progress and see his weigh loss/gain here. So far he has weighed the most, a chunky 309.82 grammes, at the Amundsen-Scott Research Station in Antarctica.

RTA matches Lance Armstrong's Tour de France record in 2011

RTA Instruments has won the k-Space Associates' Representative of the Year award for the 7th year running. We are all delighted and thank our customers for their confidence in the k-Space products and our ability to provide support across Europe with our knowledge, skills and experience. Our sales performance is accompanied by our contribution to ongong product developments at k-Space, particularly in relation to the kSA BandiT product line. We look forward to another winning performance and building on the strong platform we have built in the last 8 years with k-Space and continuing to develop our European customer base.

Plastic sunflowers

The Swiss Centre for Electronics & Microtechnology (CSEM) is leading project Sunflower, an EU Seventh Framework Programme, created to generate solar energy with highly efficient and recyclable printed plastic solar cells. Led by the CSEM, the project consortium includes industrial partners Agfa, BASF, DuPont Teijin Films and Konarka. The Euro 14.2M project is to develop advanced flexible plastic solar panels designed to be integrated into new consumer mobile applications and buildings.

One tool to write them all?

Extreme ultraviolet lithography (also known as EUV or EUVL) is a next-generation lithography technology using an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelength, currently expected to be 13.5 nm. Anticipated uptake of EUVL may change, according to Burn Lin, Micropatterning Director at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. He says that as manufacturers seek to make ever smaller and denser chips, EUV could lose its edge in allowing the industry to follow Moore’s law. The answer may turn out to be switching to electron beam (e-beam) lithography. The move to using 450mm wafers would appear to require the costly development of a variety of patterning tools and resists if a conventional IC fabrication strategy were employed. Since multi-electron beam lithography can be used to write any layer, one 450mm e-beam direct-write tool could pattern them all, and for about 30% lower cost at production volumes. Only one machine would have to be engineered and only a few resists formulated.

Chips DNA

Counterfeit electronics and the cost of complying with new laws on detecting and replacing counterfeit items is causing concern in the USA. The law requires the US Government to buy parts either directly from the manufacturer, their authorized distributors, or from "trusted suppliers". Details are still being worked out, but to be categorized as trusted suppliers independent sources would likely be required to meet certain standards and be held liable in the event that they sell a counterfeit part to the government. In one approach to reducing counterfeiting botanical DNA is used to authenticate microcircuit chips. The use of a this type of DNA signature is already being used to prevent counterfeiting of such items as wine, textiles and bank notes.

Plessey growing

UK based Plessey Semiconductors Ltd have acquired Cam GaN Ltd a University of Cambridge spin-off formed in 2010 to commercialize proprietary technology for growing gallium nitride based high-brightness LEDs on large-area silicon substrates. Plessey will integrate its silicon processing knowledge with CamGaN’s proprietary GaN-on-Si technology to fabricate low cost, high quality HB-LEDs on standard, readily available 6-inch silicon substrates.

Bigger (slower), smaller (faster)

We may be seeing a human obesity epidemic in some parts of the world but according to a recent study on the evolutionary scale it is much quicker for animal species to decrease in size than grow in size. Apparently it takes about 24 million generations for a mouse sized animal to evolve into the size of an elephant. However a mere 100,000 generations are needed to reverse the process and achieve dwarfism. The differences may be explained by the evolutionary driving forces of smaller species requiring less food and being able to reproduce quicker.

Outnumbered

The latest Global Data Traffic Forecast from Cisco says that this year the number of mobile connected devices ('phones, tablets etc) will exceed the world's population. They also predict that there will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices in 2016, including machine-to-machine modules, greatly exceeding the world's population at that time (7.3 billion). Adding in the speed/quality benefits available from 4G technology the rise in data consumption is likely to cause more problems for mobile operators already struggling to cope with demand. Although 4G connections represent only 0.2 percent of mobile connections today, they already account for 6 percent of mobile data traffic. CISCO think that global mobile traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016.

Could be slower (or faster)

Many in the scientific press have decided that the potentially theory busting neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light are no more. The primary culprit being the timing system. However the recent press release from CERN and the OPERA group could be interpreted as a wonderful mix of honesty confusion and damage limitation. The groups have informed funding agencies that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection in the fibre-optic cable carrying the GPS signals between Switzerland and Italy, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, thus negating the faster than light claim. The other effect concerns an oscillator in OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings' time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.

The potential extent of these two effects is being studied with further experiments scheduled for May.