A Tiny Engine That Could
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Ziff Davis - Cell phones and other portable devices are ideal for on-the-go and emergency situations&#151;unless the battery's dead.
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Carnegie-Mellon professor is working to create swarms of tiny robots that can assume any shape.
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Using electric fields to alter the electrical properties of a carbon nanotube on the fly makes for a key nanoscale electronic component.
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Aluminum, the stuff of cans, explodes in its nano form. A small start-up has decided to harness that property.
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Experts say they have paved the way for tiny supercomputers which could fit in the palm of the hand.
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A gas flow such as a puff of compressed air produces a tiny amount of electricity as it passes across a semiconductor surface -- enough to make a sensitive gas-flow sensor.
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Scientists create a tiny image of the Sun using a technique which could be used to make future silicon chips.
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A 7200rpm unit that's as fast as a 10,000rpm job, apparently
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Researchers are developing tiny atomic clocks that could be made using standard semiconductor processes and slipped into cellphones, hand-held computers and global positioning system receivers.
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The computing technologies to go beyond Moore's Law
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It's a tiny vacuum cleaner for the brain: A new treatment for stroke victims promises to suction out clogged arteries in hopes of stopping the brain attack before it does permanent harm
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One nanotechnology researcher said supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away."If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years," said Michael Zaiser, a professor and researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. "The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close -- 10 years, maybe 15."Zaiser's research into nanowires should help move that timeline along.For the last five years, he has been studying how tiny wires -- 1,000 times thinner than a human hair -- behave when manipulated. He explained that each such miniscule wire tends to behave differently when put under the same amount of pressure. Therefore, it has been impossible to line them up close to each other in tiny microprocessors in a production atmosphere.Zaiser said he's now figured out how to make the wires behave uniformly. He separates the interior material of the wire into distinct groups so the wire can't react as a whole. That makes it much easier to control. "It's like crowd control," he added. "If they can all go one way, you have a big mess."These nanowires will go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, cell phones, or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.Shrinking down the microprocessors is a big step toward shrinking down computers.Zaiser was quick to point out that his nanowire discovery won't immediately lead to the development of supercomputers that can fit in the palm of a hand or even shrink down to the size of a book of matches. In addition to smaller microprocessors, engineers will need to deal with thermal fluctuations that erupt at that size.But he does humbly admit that taming nanowires is a big step toward the goal of small supercomputers."This will enable chips to become much smaller," he said. "Think 10 years back. You could hold [a cell phone] the size of a telephone receiver and it didn't work so well. Today, you can fit what is a powerful computer onto a small device."Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said that with advances like nanowire technology continuing to come along, Zaiser's predictions for tiny supercomputers may not be so far off. And that will be a huge step for the industry, considering that not so long ago supercomputers filled up enormous rooms or even entire buildings."Actually, what he's saying is not crazy," said King. "The wire problem was an important one. Solving that particular issue, one so fundamental, needed to be done. If he can solve that, a lot of people, a lot of companies, will appreciate that. The industry is aligning in a direction where we're going to be seeing continuing improvements and developments."Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he definitely can see palm-size supercomputers coming out within 10 to 15 years, but he thinks they'll be based on the basic silicon technology used today. He added that the next generation of tiny supercomputers -- made with carbon nanotubes and nanowires -- may be as far off as another 30 to 40 years, though."You know, everybody says we'll get to a physical limit but every time we think we're going to hit it, we overcome it," said McGregor. "They end up being speed bumps instead of road blocks."King added that over the last 10 or 20 years, technology advancements have put smaller and more powerful computers into the hands of children and researchers alike. That leads him to believe that the shrinking of supercomputers is just ahead of us."We're at the beginning of some very exciting times in supercomputing," he said.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Heating droplets with a laser makes for a simple and potentially cheap type of lab-on-a-chip.
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MIT's Martin Culpepper shows how to build simple machines that move with nanometer precision.
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Massachusetts-based start-up has come up with a way to print photographs or documents without ink or an ink cartridge. And that means smaller devices.Photos: Teeny tiny printers
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Blog: Get your motor running. Head out on Mass. Ave. A group of MIT students aim to show that electric cars could be viable in the near future.
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The genetic building blocks that form the basis for life may also be used to build the tiny machines of nanotechnology, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.