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TDK sets new hard drive density record, paves the way for 6TB HDDs
Solid state drives are continuing to build momentum as a speedy and rugged replacement for traditional spinning drive. TDKs ongoing research into mechanical hard drives, however, suggests that we shouldnt give up on the legacy technology just yet. The company recently announced a new milestone that will increase recording density in future drives by 50 percent.
The team at TDK have managed to achieve densities of 1.5TB per square inch by improving the magnetic head and hard disk medium with help from Showa Denko K.K. In laymans terms, this new advancement will allow a single platter in a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive to achieve 2TB of storage. Add more platters to the mix and youre now looking at hard drives reach 4TB and even 6TB in capacity.
Perhaps even more interesting is the impact it will have on 2.5-inch notebook drives. TDK says these smaller form factor HDDs will be able to achieve capacities of 1TB. This will allow users that arent yet sold on cloud storage to have a larger amount of data on hand at all times without having to lug around an external storage drive.
TDK will be showcasing the new technology at CEATEC this week although volume production isnt expected to begin until sometime in 2014. At that point, one has to wonder just how far solid state drive technology will have come in terms of price versus capacity. This ratio has been the Achilles heel for SSDs thus far even as drives continue to be more affordable.
People can let their fingers - and hands - do the talking with a new touch-activated system that projects onto walls and other surfaces and allows users to interact with their environment and each other.
The system identifies the fingers of a person's hand while touching any plain surface. It also recognizes hand posture and gestures, revealing individual users by their unique traits. "Imagine having giant iPads everywhere, on any wall in your house or office, every kitchen counter, without using expensive technology," said Niklas Elmqvist, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. "You can use any surface, even a dumb physical surface like wood. You don't need to install expensive LED displays and touch-sensitive screens."
The new "extended multitouch" system allows more than one person to use a surface at the same time and also enables people to use both hands, distinguishing between the right and left hand. Research indicates the system is 98 percent accurate in determining hand posture, which is critical to recognizing gestures and carrying out commands. The technology has many possible applications, said Karthik Ramani, Purdue's Donald W. Feddersen Professor of Mechanical Engineering.
"Basically, it might be used for any interior surface to interact virtually with a computer," he said. "You could use it for living environments, to turn appliances on, in a design studio to work on a concept or in a laboratory, where a student and instructor interact." Findings are detailed in a research paper being presented this week during the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (ACM UIST 2012) in Cambridge, Mass. The paper was written by doctoral students Sundar Murugappan and Vinayak, who uses only one name, Elmqvist and Ramani. The system uses the Microsoft Kinect camera, which senses three-dimensional space. "We project a computer screen on any surface, just a normal table covered with white paper," Ramani said. "The camera sees where your hands are, which fingers you are pressing on the surface, tracks hand gestures and recognizes whether there is more than one person working at the same time." The Kinect camera senses depth, making it possible to see how far each 3-D pixel is from the camera. The researchers married the camera with a new computer model for the hand.
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TDK sets new hard drive density record, paves the way for 6TB HDDs
TDK sets new hard drive density record, paves the way for 6TB HDDs - TechSpot News
Solid state drives are continuing to build momentum as a speedy and rugged replacement for traditional spinning drive. TDKs ongoing research into mechanical hard drives, however, suggests that we shouldnt give up on the legacy technology just yet. The company recently announced a new milestone that will increase recording density in future drives by 50 percent.
The team at TDK have managed to achieve densities of 1.5TB per square inch by improving the magnetic head and hard disk medium with help from Showa Denko K.K. In laymans terms, this new advancement will allow a single platter in a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive to achieve 2TB of storage. Add more platters to the mix and youre now looking at hard drives reach 4TB and even 6TB in capacity.
Perhaps even more interesting is the impact it will have on 2.5-inch notebook drives. TDK says these smaller form factor HDDs will be able to achieve capacities of 1TB. This will allow users that arent yet sold on cloud storage to have a larger amount of data on hand at all times without having to lug around an external storage drive.
TDK will be showcasing the new technology at CEATEC this week although volume production isnt expected to begin until sometime in 2014. At that point, one has to wonder just how far solid state drive technology will have come in terms of price versus capacity. This ratio has been the Achilles heel for SSDs thus far even as drives continue to be more affordable.
(Phys.org)Spintronic technology, in which data is processed on the basis of electron "spin" rather than charge, promises to revolutionize the computing industry with smaller, faster and more energy efficient data storage and processing. Materials drawing a lot of attention for spintronic applications are dilute magnetic semiconductors normal semiconductors to which a small amount of magnetic atoms is added to make them ferromagnetic. Understanding the source of ferromagnetism in dilute magnetic semiconductors has been a major road-block impeding their further development and use in spintronics. Now a significant step to removing this road-block has been taken.
A multi-institutional collaboration of researchers led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), using a new technique called HARPES, for Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, has investigated the bulk electronic structure of the prototypical dilute magnetic semiconductor gallium manganese arsenide. Their findings show that the material's ferromagnetism arises from both of the two different mechanisms that have been proposed to explain it.
"This study represents the first application of HARPES to a forefront problem in materials science, uncovering the origin of the ferromagnetism in the so-called dilute magnetic semiconductors," says Charles Fadley, the physicist who led the development of HARPES. "Our results also suggest that the HARPES technique should be broadly applicable to many new classes of materials in the future."
Fadley, who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the University of California (UC) Davis where he is a Distinguished Professor of Physics, is the senior author of a paper describing this work in the journal Nature Materials. The paper is titled "Bulk electronic structure of the dilute magnetic semiconductor GaMnAs through hard X-ray angle-resolved photoemission." The lead and corresponding author is Alexander Gray, formerly with Fadley's research group and now with the Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
In a key step toward creating a working quantum computer, Princeton researchers have developed a method that may allow the quick and reliable transfer of quantum information throughout a computing device.
The finding, by a team led by Princeton physicist Jason Petta, could eventually allow engineers to build quantum computers consisting of millions of quantum bits, or qubits. So far, quantum researchers have only been able to manipulate small numbers of qubits, not enough for a practical machine.
To make the transfer, Petta's team used a stream of microwave photons to analyze a pair of electrons trapped in a tiny cage called a quantum dot. The "spin state" of the electrons -- information about how they are spinning -- serves as the qubit, a basic unit of information. The microwave stream allows the scientists to read that information.
Petta said the next step is to increase the reliability of the setup for a single electron pair. After that, the team plans to add more quantum dots to create more qubits. Team members are cautiously optimistic. There appear to be no insurmountable problems at this point but, as with any system, increasing complexity could lead to unforeseen difficulties.
THE cassette tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way. From the updates posted by Facebook's 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organisations worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need for something to store huge tranches of data is greater than ever. And while hard drives have traditionally been the workhorse of large storage operations, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives that pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy, is set to replace them.
Researchers at Fuji Film in Japan and IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data - or about 35 million books' worth of information - on a cartridge that measures just 10 centimetres by 10 cm by 2 cm. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated in particles of barium ferrite.
But the real debut for this technology is likely to be the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope, whose thousands of antennas will be strewn across the southern hemisphere (New Scientist, 2 June, p 4). Once it's up and running in 2024, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day.
Current projections by the trade body Information Storage Industry Consortium show that although hard drives will be able to store 3 terabytes a piece in a decade's time, that still amounts to at least 120,000 drives a year.
INTERFACES change, processors come and go, but the keyboard and its trusty sidekick the mouse have been part of the PC for at least 30 years. They may now be about to get stern competition, thanks to two gesture-sensing technologies set to drastically reduce the amount of typing and clicking needed to control the average computer.
By tracking hand movements precisely, the wrist-mounted prototype of the Digits project, built by a team from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, allows gestures to be communicated in real time to any connected device.
An array of LEDs mounted on a plastic wrist brace facing the palm bounce infrared light off the user's fingers. A laser shines across the hand to highlight the orientation of the fingers. A camera then reads the reflections, and software builds a model of the moving hand that is accurate to within one hundredth of a centimetre.
IBM's technique can arrange single carbon nanotubes -- and sometimes pairs -- between two electrical contacts. It's an essential part of making a transistor in which a nanotube leads from a source on one side to a drain on the other. At left in this is an image of a chip designed to test the technology electrically; at right is a close-up of the nanotubes stretching from one electrical contact to another.
(Credit: IBM)
In the effort to find a replacement for today's silicon chips, IBM researchers have pushed carbon nanotube technology a significant step ahead.
Carbon nanotubes are very small structures made of a lattice of carbon atoms rolled into a cylindrical shape, and a team of eight researchers have figured out a way to precisely place them on a computer chip, IBM announced today. That development allows them to arrange the nanotubes 100 times more densely than earlier methods, a key step in economical chipmaking, and IBM has built a chip with more than 10,000 carbon nanotube-based elements.
The new technique helps improve the nanotubes' chances in the hunt for alternatives once today's silicon transistor technology runs out of steam. Today's chips are made of tiny electrical switches called transistors, and carbon nanotubes are a potential substitute for the silicon channels that carry electrical current in those transistors.
Moore's Law has successfully improved microchips for decades by shrinking chip elements to ever-smaller sizes, and it's got years of life yet in it. Today's Intel "Ivy Bridge" Core processors found in new PCs have transistor elements measuring 22 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, and Intel thinks it can shrink that over several generations of improvement down to 5 nanometers. Beyond that, though, processors will probably need to be built with very different technology.
The system is powered by Nvidia GPUs and thought to be one of the two fastest supercomputers in the world. It's capable of making 20,000 trillion calculations each second.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is home to Titan, the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science with a theoretical peak performance exceeding 20 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second). That kind of computational capability, helped by Nvidia GPUs, is on par with each of the world's 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.
(Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Forecasting for weather like this week's "Frankenstorm" may become a lot more accurate with the help of the Department of Energy's Titan supercomputer, a system that launched this month for open research development.
The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan -- believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world -- to research things such as climate change and alternative fuels
If Oak Ridge upgraded Jaguar by simply expanding the CPUs, the system would be more than four-times its current size and would consume more than 30 megawatts of power.
Researchers at Intel envision a future where smartphones are powerful enough to perform tasks typically delegated to full-size computers today. And it’s not just a pipe dream either - they’re already working on a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets designed to replace your desktop or laptop completely.
Intel’s focus on the project at this point is finding new ways to manage and use multiple cores in a mobile device. Smartphones and tablets already exist with multiple cores (up to four, typically) but a system with 48 cores would be a real game changer.
The advantage of having multiple cores, of course, is the ability to divide the workload up among each core. This has several benefits, just as it does today. For one, heavy computational tasks can be completed much more quickly. A system with dozens of cores would be able to multitask much more efficiently than today’s chips that often struggle to complete several tasks at once.
Multimedia would also benefit greatly as multiple cores could be used to decode different video frames simultaneously, resulting in a smoother and more seamless experience. Furthermore, by reducing the strain on a single core and spreading the workload among many parallel cores, less energy would be consumed overall.
Researchers anticipate having such a chip ready for prime time within five to 10 years although Intel CTO Justin Rattner said it could hit the market much sooner than forecasted. He believes that advanced features and functions like speech recognition and augmented reality will accelerate the drive for more processing power.
As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015.
China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed.
Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018.
The Tianhe-2 is not China's first attempt at building a world-beating supercomputer. It briefly took the top spot on the world's list of most powerful supercomputers in 2010 with the Tianhe-1A. That computer is now ranked fifth in the world with a theoretical peak speed of 4.7 petaflops, and uses processors from Intel and Nvidia.
Like the Tianhe-1A, the Tianhe-2 will also be designed by China's National University of Defense Technology.
The Chinese government is pushing the development of the country's supercomputing technology, according to Zhang Yunquan, a professor at the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, who also keeps track of China's top supercomputers.
The government is aiming for China's supercomputers to reach 100 petaflops in 2015, and then 1 exaflop (1,000 petaflops), in 2018, he said. This comes from China's "863 program", which was founded in 1986 and is meant to help accelerate the country's development in key technologies.
"Taking the top spot in the world's fastest supercomputers gave us a lot of drive, and gave us more confidence to develop better machines," he said. But while China has largely relied on U.S. chips and software to develop its supercomputers, Zhang said this could gradually change as the country invests more in developing its own homegrown technology.
A clear example of this was when last year China's Sunway Bluelight supercomputer grabbed headlines for using a domestically developed processor, the Shenwei 1600.
The next generation of electronic displays is a step closer thanks to research from the University of Cincinnati.
Advances that will eventually bring foldable/rollable e-devices, as well as no pixel borders have been experimentally verified and proven to work in concept at UC's Novel Devices Laboratory. The research was published this week in the journal Nature Communications.
The study, "Bright e-Paper by Transport of Ink through a White Electrofluidic Imaging Film" is authored by Matthew Hagedon, Shu Yang and Ann Russell, as well as Jason Heikenfeld, associate professor of electronic and computing systems. UC worked on this research with start-up company Gamma Dynamics.
Electrofluidic imaging film
One challenge in creating foldable e-Paper devices has been the device screen, which is currently made of rigid glass. But what if the screen were a paper-thin plastic that rolled like a window shade? You'd have a device like an iPad that could be folded or rolled up repeatedly – even tens of thousands of times.
The research this week experimentally verifies that such a screen of paper-thin plastic, referred to as "electrofluidic imaging film," actually works. The breakthrough is a white, porous film coated with a thin layer of reflective electrodes and spacers. These are subjected to unique and sophisticated fluid mechanics in order to electrically transport the coloured ink and clear-oil fluids (text, images, video) of electronic devices.
According to UC's Hagedon, "This is the first of any type of electro-wetting display that can be made as a simple film that you laminate onto a sheet of controlling electronics. Manufacturers prefer this approach compared to having to build up the pixels themselves within their devices, layer by layer, material by material. Our proof-of-concept breakthrough takes us a step closer to brighter, colour-video e-Paper and the Holy Grail of rollable/foldable displays."
No pixel borders
Importantly, this paper-thin plastic screen developed at UC is the first among all types of fluidic displays that has no pixel borders.
In current technology, colours maintain their image-forming distinctiveness by means of what are known as "pixel borders." Each individual pixel that helps to comprise the image necessary for text, photographs, video and other content maintains its distinct colour and does not "bleed" over into the next pixel or colour due to a pixel border. In other words, each individual pixel of colour has a border around it (invisible to the eye of the consumer) to maintain its colour distinctiveness.
This matters, because pixel borders are "dead areas" that dull any display of information, whether a display of text or image. Leading electronics companies have been seeking ways to reduce or eliminate pixel borders in order to increase display brightness.
UC's Heikenfeld: "For example, the pixel border in current electrowetting displays, which prevents ink merging, takes up a sizable portion of the pixel. This is now resolved with our electrofluidic film breakthrough. Furthermore, our breakthrough provides extraordinary capability to hide the ink when you don't want to see it, which further cranks up the available brightness and colour of the display when you do want to see it. With a single, new technology, we have simplified manufacturability and improved screen brightness."
Foldable e-devices as environmental electronics
The first generation of foldable e-devices will be monochrome. Colour will come later. Eventually, in the late 2020s, they will feature magazine-quality colour, be viewable in bright sunlight and run on low power. "Think of this as the green iPad or e-Reader, combining high function and high colour without the weight of a heavy battery, readable out in the sunlight, and foldable into your pocket," says Heikenfeld.
The device will require low power to operate since it will charge via sunlight and ambient room light. It will only use wireless connection ports, and be so durable that you could leave it out overnight in the rain. In fact, you'll be able to wash it or drop it without damaging the thin, highly flexible casing and screen.
This latest proof of concept research verifying the functionality of electrofluidic imaging film builds on previous research out of UC's Novel Devices Laboratory. That previous research broke down a significant barrier to bright electronic displays that don't require a heavy battery to power them.
Most of today's colour-saturated devices – such as LCDs, tablets and smartphones – require high power (and consequently, a larger battery). This is largely because they need a strong internal light source within the device to "backlight" the screen, as well as colour filters in order to display the pixels as colour/moving images. The need for an internal light source within the device also means visibility is poor in bright sunlight.
The new electrofluidic imaging film will require only low-power to produce high speed content and function, because it makes use of ambient light, as opposed to a strong, internal light source within the device.
The modern smartphone is the Hungry Hungry Hippo of the electronics world. Tablets, e-readers, and even notebooks are more efficient than the power-sucking smartphone in your pocket. While battery technology is slowly moving forward, an MIT spinout company is working to reduce the power consumed by not only smartphones but the base stations that keep them connected to the world.
MIT Technology review reports that startup Eta Devices is bench testing a new power amplifier chip that consumes less power than those currently found in smartphones and base stations. Power amplifier chips transform electricity into radio signals and keep your smartphone connected to your carrier’s network.
In current power amplifier chips the standby mode pulls a hefty amount of power in order to be ready to communicate with cell towers. Smartphones like the iPhone 5 have up to five power amplifier chips in them. These chips lose more than 65 percent of their energy to heat. It’s the reason your smartphone gets warm when you download large files.
Earlier this year, well known cardiologist Eric Topol published his highly successful book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine.” In it he describes several examples where smartphones, particularly the iPhone, have been morphed into first-rate medical devices with the potential to put clinical-level diagnostics in the hands of everyday users. Coincidentally, Topol was on a flight not long ago, returning from a lecture where he had spoken about a new device made by AliveCor. The pilot intoned an urgent, “is there a doctor on board?” In response, Topol took out the AliveCor prototype, recorded a highly accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) of an ailing passenger, and made a quick diagnosis from 35,000 feet.
As the leader in the smartphone revolution, the iPhone has been the platform of choice for early adopters in the health and quantified self arenas. Even so, there are a few shortcomings to development on the iPhone which, at least among DIYers, has led to Android becoming the path forward. Apple’s single-vendor solution and sequestering of many low-level input/output details behind the premise of ease of use have made interfacing the device to external sensors both a difficult and expensive proposition.
While it can be nearly impossible to write an Android app that will work on every device out there, writing an app to work on one’s own smartphone or tablet is fairly straightforward. Another challenge to the smartphone as a medical device is that many important sensor variables are analog in nature. It is possible to use the analog-to-digital converter on the audio input for data acquisition, however in the absence of sophisticated multiplexing one is limited to a single channel (unless some kind of expansion device is used).
Run tracking and calorie counting apps can certainly be regarded among the successes of the smartphone, but without dedicated sensor hardware, the philosophy of “there’s an app for that” only goes so far. A host of products now available for Android let users with a little bit of technical know-how create powerful devices previously found only in the domain of hospitals and law enforcement. One of the most successful expansion boards that allows Android devices to control external instruments and to orchestrate the collection of a variety of sensor data is the IOIO board. The system works well in wireless mode with most Bluetooth dongles, and its on-board FPGA gives 25 I/O channels, including plenty for analog input. It also handles analog output via pulse width modulation (PWM).
Vendors like Sparkfun, a popular supplier for the Arduino developer market, have realized the power inherent in readily programmable smartphones. They provide inexpensive heart monitors, as well as CO2 gas, dissolved oxygen, and blood alcohol content (BAC) sensors. These sellers provide documentation and, most importantly, access to the source code. With this information, interfacing with a BAC sensor, for example, is relatively straightforward and, if appropriately calibrated by the user, very accurate.
Japan Display showed off a low-power display panel last week at the FPD International 2012 show in Japan. Unlike every other LCD in our current devices, this one does not use a backlight to illuminate the panel.
Instead, it uses reflected light—sort of like a mirror—to render a monochromatic image. At the same time, the device deploys color filters to produce the final color image and video that you see.
An obvious advantage of this display is that it could dramatically reduce power consumption without the need for a backlight. The power savings don’t stop there.
According to Diginfo.tv, this display only draws three milliwatts of electricity when showing a still image because each pixel can actually retain a signal and remember what color it was last set to without drawing power. That sort of pixel memory functionality could make it a low-power, color LCD alternative to E-Ink devices or digital picture frames.
