EE Times - August 6, 2007 - (Page 50) Monday, August 6, 2007 Plugged in News and views from around the Web www.eetimes.com Sound off “W Editors’ picks from the EE Times network For the full story, type the article ID after each item below into the search box at www.eetimes.com e would have liked to manage traffic as flows from the beginning but we didn’t have enough memory or processing power. Now memory is cheap as mud.” —Larry Roberts, founder of Anagran, on his new flow router design Qualcomm enters 45-nm era Qualcomm Inc. has announced that its first 45-nm chip has taped out, with a 40-nm device possibly on the horizon. The undisclosed chip is made on a foundry basis by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC). Article ID: 201202477 Codec cranks for wireless stereo headsets The promise of affordable, highquality Bluetooth stereo headsets appears closer, thanks to better hardware and software on the way. Today, most MP3 players and even an increasing number of cell phones that build in music capabilities typically use wired headsets. Even the much-hyped Apple iPhone today only supports monophonic Bluetooth headsets. Article ID: 201202250 Sony to show high-speed cell-computing board at Siggraph Sony said next week it plans to showcase a newly developed prototype of its high-speed Cell Computing Board, which incorporates a Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor and RSX graphics processor. The board is designed for computers that handle multimedia applications. IBM, Sony and Toshiba jointly developed the Cell processor (see “Siggraph taps virtual video, multitouch,” page 15.) Article ID: 201202579 On the FCC’s 700MHz ruling: ’m pretty skeptical of any government moves to mandate network openness.” Organic solar cells gain ground A new composite material for plastic solar cells, formulated at Ohio State University, offers what researchers there claim is the best bet yet for beating the relatively high cost of grid-supplied electricity. The researchers promise to best today’s inorganic silicon-based solar cells and beat the cost of traditional electricity-generation sources in just a few years. Article ID: 201202360 “I —Larry Lang, general manager of the mobile group at Cisco Systems Outside Sources Electric fields have potential as a cancer treatment Yoram Palti, of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, and his colleagues have demonstrated another way to disrupt cell division: alternating electric fields with intensities of just 1 to 2 V/cm. The fields they use, with frequencies in the hundreds of kilohertz, were previously thought to do nothing significant to living cells other than heating them. But Palti and colleagues have conducted a small clinical trial showing that the fields have an effect in slowing the growth of tumors. http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/ vol_60/iss_8/19_1.shtml Intel trashes AMD consultants’ antitrust claims A study on behalf of AMD in its long-running antitrust dispute against Intel suggests that the latter extracted monopoly profits from microprocessor sales of more than $60 billion. Intel dismissed the allegation as “wild speculation” based on unsubstantiated assumptions. Article ID: 201202552 On the boy genius pictured on this week’s coverwrap: decided that Carson would be a good guinea pig.” “I —Jake Chuang, senior director of applications solutions/marketing at Actel, on 8-year-old whiz-kid fiddling with Actel parts Meet Zonbu, the amazing $99 green PC This tiny machine is stylish, silent, cheap and innovative. It’s not really a computer at all and is best described as a desktop outpost to a cloud of data stored on server farms across the Internet. If the kinks are removed, it could be revolutionary. http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2007/08/02/zonbu/ Our blogs (eetimes.com/blog/news) Communications Google, MVNOs and the FCC The degree of consensus regarding the Federal Communications Commission’s July 31 ruling on 700-MHz spectrum is pleasantly surprising, suggests Loring Wirbel. Even though AT&T and Verizon did a lot of whining Loring Wirbel about Google’s initial request for open networks, few were surprised about chairman Kevin Martin’s joining with Democratic commission members to support three of four open interfaces Google had requested (see “Guarded optimism greets auction plan,” page 6). On the bridge collapse last week in Minneapolis: “S o far, we have inspected and repaired cracks on only three bridges in Pennsylvania and one in Massachusetts, where we found several repaired cracks that were still growing.” —Bill Berks, director and vice president of government projects at Material Technologies Inc., which claims to have the only technology that can diagnose whether repaired bridge cracks have stopped growing Purdue ‘milestone’ a step toward advanced sensors, communications Engineers at Purdue University have shown how to finely control the spectral properties of ultrafast light pulses, in a step toward creating advanced sensors, morepowerful communications technologies and more-precise laboratory instruments. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007b/070801WeinerArbitrary.html Consumer Lectures online that inspire It sounds like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lectures are popular with the portable electronics crowd, notes Nic Mokhoff. Lectures on physics, psychology, math and architecture have been among the top items this summer on Apple’s iTunes U, which allows colleges and universities to post audio and video educational content online. NASA to test-fly Orion spacecraft next fall NASA said last week it is on track to launch its first flight test in September 2008 of the Orion spacecraft. http://news.com.com/2100-11397_3-6200278.html Simtek founder’s vision deferred When Richard Petritz launched Simtek Corp. in 1987, he predicted the computer-chip company would employ up to 1,000 and produce chips to operate an entire computer. Twenty years later, Simtek’s still around. But the predictions of Petritz, who died four years ago, have yet to materialize. http://www.gazette.com/articles/simtek_25536 article.html/ Computing The curse of Google Today, Google is a media and Wall Street darling, the company everyone wants to work for, partner with and name-drop, observes Rick Merritt. But those things go in cycles—you party hearty for awhile, then the hangover comes. These days, though, he’s seeing early glimpses of the dark side of Google. 50 Electronic Engineering Times | August 6, 2007 http://www.eetimes.com http://www.eetimes.com http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/19_1.shtml http://eetimes.com/blog/news http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2007/08/02/zonbu/ http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007b/070801WeinerArbitrary.html http://news.com.com/2100-11397_3-6200278.html http://www.gazette.com/articles/simtek_25536___article.html/
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