Beyond Binary headed (slowly) to CES
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Lousy weather in San Francisco is slowing things down, but News.com's Ina Fried has plenty of gadgets to keep her company at the airport.
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The Viiv and vPro brands haven't exactly hit their mark. Now they'll take a back seat to Core--and long live Centrino.
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(InfoWorld) - Future models of consumer goods, from digital cameras to MP3 players, could take a leap forward with a new type of analog circuit demonstrated at a trade show Thursday by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The MIT team showed a comparator-based switched capacitor (CBSC) circuit, which could be manufactured with smaller size and better power efficiency than traditional analog circuits using operational amplifiers. The team had presented a rougher version in 2006, and improved on the design this week by unveiling an 8-bit, 200 MHz analog-to-digital converter at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. The advance could help analog technology catch up to the tremendous pace of improvement in digital circuits, which have shrunk in recent years thanks to software-aided design tools and to manufacturing processes such as complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, said Hae-Seung Lee, one of the MIT professors involved in the work. Despite those enormous improvement in digital circuits, electronic devices will always need analog circuits too, because the sights and sounds in the world around us exist as variable analog data, not discrete digital bits. Analog circuits translate between those two languages by amplifying, processing, and filtering natural data and then converting it to digital signals, Lee said. From playing songs on iPods to sending and receiving voices on cell phones, analog circuits are part of most consumer devices. "Analog circuits sit on PC boards; when you put a disc in a CD-ROM drive to play music, the music is encoded in digital format, but what you're hearing is analog. That's a digital-to-analog converter doing that," Lee said. Engineers could use the new CBSC circuit as a more efficient tool to filter and modulate analog data, leading to less expensive, longer-lasting devices. "Current analog circuits consume a disproportionate amount of power, which really drains the batteries. We think we can reduce the power consumption of analog circuits by at least an order of magnitude," he said. In addition to saving space and power, the CBSC circuits could also work with emerging technologies like carbon nanotube or nanowire and molecular devices, a looming challenge for conventional analog circuits. And since they work with CMOS fabrication techniques, the new circuits are immediately applicable to those challenges. Still, products using the new circuits will probably not reach store shelves for several years. "We have demonstrated a proof of concept, so we know the technology is good. But there are still some practical questions to answer, like 'Is it robust enough to work in consumer electronics?' So it will be a couple of years before we see it in stores," Lee said.
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We try to pinpoin the discernible directions in which the consumer electronics industry seems to be heading.
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Is the traditional puzzle cube any better with lights and games built in? Plus: Romantic geeks can now exchange binary wedding bands. In Gadget Lab.
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Chipmaker looks beyond upcoming quad-core tech to a "teraflop" processor with 80 cores. Also: Steeley chip to cut UMPC prices.
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With over-the-air television broadcasts switching from analog to digital in just over a year, converter boxes are expected to be among the hot devices on display at next week's CES.
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A competing chip from rival Advanced Micro Devices will likely arrive several months earlier.
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Check out Wired's picks for standouts at CES 2008. Some are more pleasant on the eyes than others.
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Moore's Law isn't alone. Many technologies now improve so quickly it boggles the mind.
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The chip maker reorganizes around platforms. Will it make a difference?
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CES 2005 Quality content coming to new format. Van Helsing too
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SUN ANNOUNCED THE UltraSPARC IV+ this morning, most probably the last of its line. Sun will be taking a new direction from this point on, with the new Fujitsu co-developed chips being a definite step sideways
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Every year at CES time, we revisit the topic of when or whether the US will finally catch up with the rest of the world in mobile wireless broadband. Why do we keep butting up against the same roadblocks year after year?
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At CES 2008, home entertainment will be dominated by a move towards various forms of wireless connectivity -- and, of course, enormous TVs. This year, LCD technology appears to have definitively won out over plasma and rear-projection, even for very large displays.
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Chipmaker to focus on technology and features instead of megahertz.
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News.com's Ina Fried leaps into the blogosphere with Beyond Binary, a look beyond the ones and zeros of technology.