CES 2011 been and gone...

Well, I've had a break and left you all in peace over the Christmas & new year period for a few weeks. Now it's time to review the main stuff at Vegas's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year. Even though Apple doesn't attend CES, yet again this year most of the talk seemed to be dominated by one of their products and this time it wasn't phones but tablets. It's not as if they haven't appeared at CES before; in fact there have been concepts and vapourware from lots of companies over many years. However this year everyone it seems was trying to come up with the "iPad killer". So how did they do?

The most likely competitors expected to achieve any moderate success in the market are the RIM PlayBook and the Motorola Xoom. However one of the biggest problems for competing devices to iPad may actually be the sheer confusing number of devices, with around 40 different ones likely to appear in 2011.

Most analysts and commentators still seem to overwhelmingly believe that Apple are likely to continue dominating as market leader with iPad with around 70% share as these competitors come to pass. The PlayBook will try especially to appeal to those corporates that already run Blackberry devices, however the iPad has already become a consumer-led trojan horse in many large global corporations. The PlayBook seems to suffer some power management and browser/scrolling performance issues, the latter apparently common amongst many of the Intel competitors at CES. Many competitors also have too small screen sizes, and the promise of later larger models will worry potential buyers in case the apps each device is trying to build up will not look so great or function well on a different sized screen later.

Apple still leads the way in aesthetics and design, although a new even sleeker upgraded iPad 2 is expected in the next month or two. They also have advantages in hardware-software integration and hence a better user experience, and their massive app store ecosystem. On the profits side, Apple also have cost/volume advantages in component supplies not only due to the number of iPads being made but also some of the components that it shares with other Apple products. This will make it difficult for competing companies to match quality and price of device.

Polymer Chip Fabrication

As Moores Law continues to prevail, processor manufacturers are continuing to produce faster and faster chips, while basically using the same underlying fabrication science. I have covered before how new nano-science such as replacing copper connecting wires with carbon nanotubes on chips could bring further advantages. Researchers are also experimenting with other approaches not based on current lithography techniques. This would mean that instead of requiring a template like pattern to be used to etch silicon, so-called hitching posts can be established using sparse silicon, to which complex chains of molecules can attach themselves to. The chains are made of very precise copolymers which can form motifs acting as transistors for example. The process of manufacturing would then involve soaking plates in a liquid and letting polymerisation happen, rather than a lithographic process. The technique is still at an embryonic stage but I would expect simpler chips with very regular patterns such as memory chips would be possible first. The properties of the copolymers and the size of the plates would determine the capacity of such memory chips.

Wearable batteries

One of the ways we will integrate with our computing technology in the future is to wear it, as I have blogged about before. One important component of this is how to power the devices we wear. Scientists have now presented how a coating of carbon nanotube 'ink' on ordinary polyester or cotton fabrics can store electrical energy. The interwoven fibres of such materials are ideal absorbers for for the billionth of a metre across carbon tubes. Once coated, stretching or washing the fabric leaves the electrical characteristics of the material intact. Previously this type of approach has been identified as working on paper, but fabrics open up a whole new world of wearable computing possibilities. Combined with other wearable components such as solar cells means that the wearable batteries could be charged while being worn.

Chips a decade from now...

As we leave one decade behind and enter 2010, I'm looking ahead another decade as to how some of the manufacturing challenges of the silicon chips, which power so many things, are likely to be overcome. Current chip geometry is already at an incredible small scale compared to even a few years ago, at around 45nm with plans to move towards 22nm. But then there are challenges in actually mounting the electronic components onto the chip while preserving necessary structure. One technique, based on research which shows that DNA strands may be used as a kind of scaffolding, could reduce this down to around 6nm. The research shows that the DNA can self-organise itself on the silicon base.

Other research has shown that DNA can also be used to store and manipulate data and perform simple computations. Computing on this biological scale would enable considerable advances in computer performance. The closer together the components on a chip can be placed, the faster and smaller computers can be. Such DNA based chips are 10-15 years away, but many people celebrating new year's eve this year will remark how quickly the last decade seems to have passed!

3D in your pocket ?

Conoscopy is the technique which might just bring 3D displays on pocket devices. It's a trick that steers the illumination from the backlight to light up left and right eye parts of the screen. It has been demonstrated on 9 and 2.8 inch LCD panels with LED backlighting, by tape manufacturer 3M. Why? Well because the screen employs a special thin film which does the steering of the light. Because the whole screen is used for each eye's image, there is no loss of resolution. The resulting screens also need no glasses to be worn by the viewer. By applying a single image to the 3D display, it will also show normal 2D images without distortion.

The issue with all 3D displays in terms of mass adoption is not the technology which makes it possible but rather the availability of content in the form required to drive them. Eventually we will see 3D displays, and the most common implementations will differ for different categories of device (e.g. TVs or handheld devices). A thin film approach to steering backlights may well be one of them.

The next smartphone sensor...

Mobile phones have come a long way in the last few years. The high end so-called smart phones are now equipped with a range of sensors that once upon a time no-one associated with phones at all. There are the obvious location sensors such as GPS receivers so that the phone knows precisely where you are (not just roughly from cell towers). Video CCD sensors have adorned phones for some time but have mainly been confined to the obvious camera picture taking application. These can also sense light levels, read barcodes, and provide the means to recognise gestures and expressions. Many high-end phones also know what orientation they are in and how they are being moved through the use of accelerometers. And some know which direction they are facing through magnetometer sensors. This is important in augmented reality applications as well as useful in mapping. In the former it allows the phone to deduce which buildings the camera is seeing for example, while in the latter it means displayed maps can be automatically oriented the right way for where the user is facing.

So what will be the next sensor that we see incorporated in the high-end phones? It could well be the near field communications technology which can form the basis for radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers. This would allow a whole host of new application types. In addition it will enable e-commerce on the phone; ticketing and small value purchasing by simply waving you phone over readers, much like the Oyster card is used by Transport for London as an e-ticketing alternative around the UK Capital. The future for smarter phones is bright.

Wearable displays

While all the talk these days is about touch screen displays, the form factors of future devices will exploit rollable and foldable displays, before the display is separated from the device altogether. The first instantiation of this separation is likely to use special glasses which the user wears and which projects an image onto the lens. I have already seen some excellent prototypes of this sort of display by Konica Minolta in Japan.

Another Japanese innovative company NEC have now given details of what I expect to be the natural successor to the glasses based displays, a prototype retinal display. The 'tele-scouter' has been described as a tiny retinal projection display and microphone mounted on a frame in front of the wearer's eyes. The application they have described it being used for is to translate and display languages. This seems a bit ambitious even for a prototype at this stage but it is good to see these types of innovation beginning to see the light of day. One quote even states that NEC hope to bring something based on this technology into the market during 2010 so watch this space!

Intel presses on with smaller geometry

Intel is due to start shipping commercial processor chips using a 32nm geometry size by the end of this year but is always continuing to push ahead with reductions in die size in order to push the gap further between it and its competitors. They have already demonstrated a 22nm wafer that is populated with RAM chips at a conference. It contains 2.9 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail. The 32nm Xeon chips which will find their way into systems during the first months of 2010 are the sort that Apple typically uses in its Pro tower models. The 22nm process should become part of standard manufacturing by the last quarter of 2011 and a move to an amazing 15nm process by 2013.

Graphene on-chip?

There is potential to replace the use of copper interconnections on future super fast chips and processors with single layers of graphite molecules. These ribbons of molecules are known as Graphene. The crucial current carrying capability of Graphene is at least two orders of magnitude that of copper at the same sizes. This should allow higher reliability of chips.

Graphene also has a high thermal conductivity, which may allow interconnections to also serve as heat sinks in next generation chipsets. Fabrication is the ultimate challenge although lithography has so far resulted in ribbon widths between 16 and 52nm and lengths of up to 1 micrometre. This is yet another application of nanotechnology that could impact the future generations of electronics which will be inside devices that we all use.

Polymer based disk storage

Imagine the contents of 250 DVDs being squeezed onto a disk the size of an American 25 cent coin. Researchers from two American universities have been able to create error-free arrays of storage cells just 3 nanometres in size. This is possible by exploiting self assembly properties of chemically dissimilar polymer chains and creating extremely dense but perfectly regular formations. Using this cell size, it is potentially possible to reach storage densities of 10Tb (Terabytes) per square inch!

The same technology may also be exploited in the design of circuits, which currently tends to use photolithography techniques. The problem with this is that the limited resolution of light will eventually be reached. The polymer approach also reduces the amounts of acids and other harsh chemicals required.

Storage as a commodity is a journey which seems to be speeding up.

Pushing the scalability of memory

An american semiconductor company is promising a one terabit memory chip by 2015. The scale of the process used will decrease as far as 20nm. Traditional flash memory which we are used to having in digital camera cards or wearable memory sticks is expected to reach no smaller than a 32nm process since the oxides used are too thin at those geometries. Unity, the company who has announced the prospect of a 1Tb chip in six years time, is using a different passive cross-point array technology. Their product roadmap shows a 64Gb chip by the early half of 2011, and 128Gb and 256 Gb chips by 2012-13, all on a 35nm process. Significantly, they then expect to move to a 20nm process to produce the 1Tb chip by 2015.

It remains to be seen whether the technology also has similar parameters as far as longevity is concerned. While memory sticks and cards used today are reliable for at least a decade, their reliability beyond that into the longer term are not guaranteed. This is worth bearing in mind if you plan to use such devices as an archive for personal data in the long term.

Commodity storage

When I was a teen, having one kilobyte of storage in a personal computer was normal! And that same machine lost everything in its now tiny memory when the power was removed, unless you connected an audio cassette recorder and saved the contents on to a magnetic audio tape cassette, (for younger readers, this was one of the pre-cursors to CDs and music downloads!). Now my laptop computer has 320Gb hard disk and 4 Mb RAM, and we take this for granted. That excludes the cache memory the processor chip has on-board or the video RAM included. Optical storage has been through a similar trend ... first the CD, then the DVD and more recently Blu-Ray disks. Scientists are now experimenting with holographic disk technology amongst others. The BBC reported recently on techniques that swell data capacities to 300 times the current DVD standard.

This all points to the fact that storage is no longer a limiting factor in most applications. Storage is becoming a commodity item. In some applications it will be more cost-effective to store huge amounts of data on media and send the media than to send the data over communications links, where immediacy is not so important. Some people are already in the habit of wearing or otherwise carrying a memory stick containing all of their important and needed data with them. The amount of storage in personal devices is ever increasing. Eventually such devices will offer whole-life recording. Storage will play a key part in this as will technologies that enable content to be searched and tagged automatically. I often wish I didn't forget things; in the future I may not be able to!

Printing electronics potential

Innovation in future devices and electronics will be enabled by many advances.  The advent of surface mount components enabled huge advances in miniaturisation of devices for example, which we now take for granted.   Another advance is the ability to 'print' electronic components on to surfaces.   The surfaces may be plastic or textiles for example.  This brings mass market wearable computing closer and is applicable in lots of other contexts such as flexible displays.  

I was pleased to read recently that a new research centre (PTEC) has opened in the UK in County Durham, specialising in printable electronics.  They are hoping to accelerate the commercialisation of printable electronics research and an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) lighting firm is already building their first production line facility within the PTEC clean room environment.  In the display area alone, the printable electronics industry could see massive growth over the next decade as more and more devices demand these new innovative displays.

The battle of the video sockets!

One of the annoying things when a consumer tries to connect different bits of kit around the home together is that the video in and out connectors vary so much across devices.  High end TVs now typically carry an array of SCART, HDMI, Component, Composite, and VGA connectors amongst others.  PCs may have VGA, DVI or the newer DisplayPort standard connectors.  In this post I am going to compare the latest and greatest from each of these device types as we look to the future, HDMI and DisplayPort.  

VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) actually introduced DisplayPort in 2006, ratifying v1.1a of the standard a year later.  Silicon support for it in graphics cards and north bridge processor chipsets is growing and device manufacturers will start to exploit this in the coming year(s) with products which use it.  Unlike HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) which is charged at $5-10K p.a. and a levy of around 4 cents per device, DisplayPort is royalty-free and so attractive to product manufacturers.  Whereas HDMI is only used externally to connect different devices together, DisplayPort is also targeted at internal use between board and display inside devices.  Hence it also replaces the need for LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signalling) circuitry which is currently used inside both PCs and CE (Consumer Electronics) products for this internal video connection.  

From a technical perspective, DisplayPort is lower power and requires fewer, thinner wires in the cabling, which will be important in the race to produce even slimmer displays.  The low power advantage will also be important to silicon vendors as process geometry goes below 45nm.  DisplayPort uses a packet based architecture, allowing audio, video and control signals to be handled in a consistent single packet stream. HDMI uses separate streams (or channels) for each of audio, video and control.  

HDMI's current advantage is that there are millions of CE products already out in the marketplace with HDMI sockets on them, especially HD TVs.  I believe that over time, this advantage will be eroded.  DisplayPort will first make its mark internally in PCs and then externally on laptops and other PCs and related products.  Apple has already reduced the footprint of its video out sockets on its latest notebook computers by designing and freely licensing a 'mini-displayport' connector, which conforms to the VESA DisplayPort standard.  In the future, probably beyond 5 years, will we see DisplayPort begin to make a significant presence in CE products including televisions.  Hopefully future attempts to cable video between CE products in the home will be simpler! 

Danger UWB!

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) wireless technology offers new capabilities over other wireless standards.  It could potentially offer high speed short distance communications (for example over a metre or so between devices) while able to still achieve lower throughput over longer distances.  It is also capable of providing radar type positioning information at short distances.  But there is a danger that this technology will no longer get off the ground.  It took a long while for spectrum to be made available in parts of the world outside the USA, although this now has been partially resolved, but maybe too late.  The Bluetooth standards group had seemingly been interested in combining with UWB but this interest seems to have waned and instead there is now talk of an alliance with WiFi standards instead.  Since 2007, four chip manufacturers have halted activity on UWB chips.  It would be a pity if the drawbridge is pulled up on UWB in the current difficult economic climate.  More innovative products need this sort of wireless capability.  Let us hope that some companies take the plunge so that demand rises and UWB can live again.

Touchy-feely screens?

Cambridge-based tech firm NXP is looking at using their SoundVu technology to enhance touch screens like those which have been used in many mobile phones since Apple released the iPhone.  The technique uses a piezo actuator to introduce bending waves into the touch screen.  This effectively makes the screen into a loudspeaker.  Feeding the right signals to this actuator allows the vibrations to be felt on the screen which gives the user haptic feedback as they touch.  The company hopes to be able to simulate the feeling of writing or drawing on a textured surface.  So in the future we may be not only touching our screens to control devices but listening to them and feeling the reaction too.

Keeping in touch with Home

Recently I have had the opportunity to review and test the premium kit for home security produced by AlertMe.com which is a fresh, modern approach to adding peace of mind to homeowners when they are away from home.  I will spare the details of the large set of features offered by the system here since you can read that on their excellent website.  I will though make some comments about its performance and the impressions I have formed from trying it out.  

First from a technological point of view, it is one of the best, sensible, and innovative designs and implementations of technology I have seen for the home.  The use of the ZigBee mesh networking standard provides a simple way to build reliable systems suitable for the huge variation of domestic situations using small (and crucially) low power components.  Its use of broadband and GPRS fits with modern (and as ubiquitous as currently possible) networking trends.  And its use of a browser interface means that it is platform-agnostic as far as access via a personal computer or other devices.  And it is possible for the technically minded to add other facilities using the API (Application Programming Interface) available.

Next about the design.  Anyone who has opened an Apple product will know what I mean about the thought that can go into the simplest things like packaging, and not just the product.  The AlertMe kit was 'Apple-esque' in both respects.  It was a joy to open and explore, and the design of each component of the system is very good.  One of the marketing points made is the simplicity of installation and use of the system.  This is totally borne out, and I'm convinced that the most technologically inept person could easily be up and running in minutes.  The website, including the support forums and online store are also well designed, and in my short experience so far the people in the company are a joy to deal with. 

There are many systems available for home security.  And increasingly there more and more gadgets advertised aimed at energy efficiency.  Home automation systems are still in their infancy, and largely still only suitable for the hobbyist and enthusiast.  But in the future, ideally all of these things should be integrated.  The biggest plus for me about the AlertMe system is that it has the potential to make this convergence and integration possible.  And what is more, the company seems to have the vision to want to enable this.   They are soon to launch their energy monitoring service which will use many of the same components as the security service.  For example the existing sensors all report temperature, which provides an interesting way to monitor your home's heating patterns.  A look at the user forum website shows the range of imaginative ideas for additional types of components that could be added to the system.  With many of the security systems available, it is a case of designing it, having it installed, and then living with it.  And if you want to, for example, use the same motion sensor for security and automation (perhaps to turn a light on as you enter a room), it can be quite difficult.  With the AlertMe approach, the flexibility to add to and modify the behaviour of components and the system as a whole is very good.

People will want to be in touch with home seamlessly and easily in the future.  Innovative systems like AlertMe are an excellent step along the road to achieving this.

Happy New Year 2009

Predicting the year ahead is rather too short term for a futurologist ... but in the gadget's area I specialise in there are a few continuing trends.   Smart phones will continue to be used by more and more people for internet access and communications when out and about, as the user experience improves and eco-systems for adding new applications become more important, both distinctive features inspired by the iPhone.  As the year ends, and we finish this festive season in 12 months time, we will begin seeing more Near Field Comms functionality in the high end smart phones allowing people to use them in place of travel cards and for small payments etc.  There are also indications that the home media server may become more palatable to consumers as they realise the amount of personally valuable media that has accumulated on their various devices.  Gaming is gradually becoming more mass-market through devices like the Wii - we should see the success of this learnt from by one or more console producers.  Finally we will see yet more advances in processor development, lower power devices despite more processor cores included in one package, and more software support for exploiting multiple cores as well as for utilising graphics processors for more general number crunching.  

Happy New Year!

Christmas lights ...

Ok it's getting near that frustrating time of year again.  You dig out the Christmas decorations and find that the coloured lights for the tree or elsewhere don't work again.  They worked when you put them away last year.   But now ... nothing.  You hunt around the house for a while for the spares but any you find are the size and voltage that suited the set of lights you had before these.  In the end, you decide to go and buy yet another full set.   

In the past, you would have bought normal filament lamps.  Last year, this year or next year you will probably have bought, buy or will buy LED (light emitting diode) type decorative lights.  The low power consumption probably makes you feel good about the effect of so many bulbs on the environment.  In a few years it may be organic LED or OLED lighting that we are buying.  General Electric have talked about the possibility of OLED thin pliable wallpaper which can light up the walls or any other surface we desire.  Apparently we should look for it in home improvement stores by 2010.  

Folding displays...

The latest example of a folding display I have seen is from Samsung.  It is of the active matrix type, and when unfolded reaches five inches diagonally.  A very thin film encapsulation technique has been used which the maker promises will give twenty thousand hours of use.  Other OLED displays struggle to meet this.  The display is only half a millimetre thick too and offers WQVGA resolution and 8 bit colour.  We could see such displays in commercial use sometime in 2010.