News & Analysis
Photo gallery: Eye on innovations at ISSCC
Rick Merritt
2/25/2011 2:33 PM EST
Taisuke Boku of the University of Tsukuba (left) and Hiroyuki Kondo, a Renesas department manager, were among the collaborators on a research project that drives PCI Express into a new role. Their prototype SoC integrates four PCIe Gen 2 links and eight Renesas processor cores in a single switching chip.
Their innovation: The chip can address two CPUs as peers, breaking the traditional PCIe limit of only linking to a single master processor. The fresh approach opens up new possibilities for a wide range of communications and automotive systems with an approach more powerful than an Ethernet or CAN switch and less costly than one based on Infiniband.
4. Samsung packs power amp in CMOS
6. Wireless HDTV done two ways
7. TI chip helps harvest energy
8. Medtech necklace a real jewel
9. Net chip handles copper, optics
11. Duo drives PCIe innovation
12. Cellular SoC saws off filters
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goafrit
2/26/2011 7:47 AM EST
Very cool stuffs. The #1 is awesome. How possible? That is the singularity arrival in our time. ISSCC is not a must go for innovative minds in this industry
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GREAT-Terry
2/26/2011 12:34 PM EST
I like to see more news from TI's energy harvesting stuff. It is interesting to know how IC makers think about converting energy from other forms.
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daleste
2/27/2011 3:24 PM EST
I would like to see more about energy havesting too. There seems to be an almost endless supply of motion engergy that should be able to keep all of our mobile devices charged.
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Sanjib.Acharya
2/26/2011 12:47 PM EST
I too found the first one as the most interesting idea among all of these great stuffs. Not sure if the first one is based on what is called "Eye Tracking"? Atleast the heading for this topic suggests so. The "Eye Tracking" is carried out by measuring the scattered light emitted by an infrared LED and reflected by the iris. Since this eye tracker only uses one reflection, head movements are compensated by using a bite bar. But not sure if they are using similar technique.
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elctrnx_lyf
2/27/2011 7:50 AM EST
Good two innovations from MediaTek to provide low cost mobile communication and driving the wimax for home video applications.
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elctrnx_lyf
2/27/2011 7:52 AM EST
Zacate getting a place in HP mini note book is a great news for AMD. Their new fusion platform will give them an edge to compete with Intel CPU's.
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Sheetal.Pandey
2/27/2011 5:17 PM EST
Eye tracking device sounds fantastic. I was thinking if there was a interface, like we dont have to press any switch, just merely by thought it happens. i guess this eye tracking is very close to that.
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Duane Benson
2/28/2011 11:27 AM EST
I wonder what kind of trouble energy harvesting is going to get us into once it's ubiquitous. There was a time was timber was thought to be an inexhaustible resource. Same with petroleum. Hydro power and wind power were once though to be environmentally friendly, but hydro messes up river ecosystems and wind messes with birds.
So many things that seem great in small volumes have proven to simply not scale well. If energy harvesting doesn't come with some albatross, then it, combine with increasingly lower powered chips, will help lead to a dramatic increase in the number of application for small scale monitoring and control.
But, that energy has to come from somewhere. Maybe it truly is wasted energy, but maybe when scaled up sufficiently, we'll just find it to be another technology with great promise but a high environmental cost.
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David Ashton
2/28/2011 8:56 PM EST
Solar's great - does not seem to hassle anything or any one as far as I can see - but time-limited. So to make solar really work - 24 hours - there has got to be a better way of storage. Be that better batteries, supercapacitors, pumping water up into a storage dam during the day and using it to generate hydro power at night, whatever. Anyone fancy running an underwater power cable to/from Australia???
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David Ashton
2/28/2011 9:02 PM EST
As it happens, there's an article on exactly this subject from about a week ago at
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4213412/Rethinking-Energy-Storage-for-a-Green-Future
Only just seen this....it mentions all the things I suggested above, glad I'm not tooo stupid.... but all of them are a long way off practical use.
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daleste
2/28/2011 11:30 PM EST
When I think of energy harvesting, I think of the self winding wrist watch. I don't think it caused any issues for the wearer. Of course, it only contiued to work if you wore it every day. They have battery powered devices that will move the watch back and forth to keep it wound while you aren't wearing it. Kinda defeats the purpose.
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jimcondon
2/28/2011 7:45 PM EST
It may be just me, but since I was a little kid I dreamt my glasses could be better than eyes, a heads display, night vision, etc. Something like Geordi had on Star Trek. That OLED from Fraunhofer Institute seems to be a step closer. Maybe by the time my future grandchildren need glasses, we'll be there.
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docdivakar
3/1/2011 12:23 AM EST
So far, the most effective way to harvest energy for sensors is by photovoltaic; no other source comes close to that (including mechanical vibrations, piezoelectric, etc.).
TI, ST are among a host of other companies working on energy harvesting and power management solutions for low-power ubuquitous sensing applications. TI had some good presentations on this at last year's Embedded conference in the Silicon Valley.
MP Divakar
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