Laser-etching coming to a laptop near you
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New company in New York will emboss gadgets with custom artwork, and they're going to give away the business plan. Photos: Laser-etched laptops
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Consumers hoping to enjoy their favorite  comics or Harry Potter book in digital form could soon have a  flexible alternative to clunky laptop computers.
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Chip-making technique to fuel AMD64, PowerPC, 'Cell' production
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Digital photo frames expand beyond standalone frames into home appliances.
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Massachusetts-based start-up has created a way to print photographs or documents without ink or an ink cartridge. From Crave, CNET's gadgets blog.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers from Intel and the University of California at Santa Barbara have found a way to build low-cost "laser chips" that could eventually shuttle data around PCs at much higher speeds than today's copper wire interconnects. The researchers combined the properties of a compound semiconductor material called indium phosphide, which emits light constantly, and silicon, which can be used to amplify and direct that light. They sandwiched the materials together to create a single device that can be manufactured using standard chip-making techniques. The breakthrough, announced Monday, is significant because it could help the interconnect technologies that carry data between components in PCs and servers to keep pace with the rapid advances in processing power of the chips themselves, the researchers said. "This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical 'data pipes' inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's Photonics Technology Lab, in a statement. The work may be several years away from commercialization, but the researchers expect eventually to be able to put dozens or even hundreds of lasers on a single chip, they said. Indium phosphide is already widely used to make lasers for fiber optic networks, but the cost of assembling and aligning the lasers makes them too expensive for the high-volume PC business. Silicon, on the other hand, can amplify and control light and could be used more affordably, but it is not an efficient generator of light itself. The researchers figured out a way to combine the two materials to build a "hybrid silicon laser" that can be manufactured using Intel's standard manufacturing techniques, keeping costs relatively low. To make the silicon laser they created a thin oxide layer roughly 25 atoms thick on the surface of each material. They then heated the oxide and pressed the two layers together, forming a single chip with a "glass glue" between them. Applying a voltage to the device generates light from the indium phosphide, which passes through the joining layer to be guided and controlled by the silicon. The laser light can send data between computer components at extremely high speed. This can be done using a "silicon optical modulator," which effectively turns the laser beam on and off at very high speeds to represent the 1s and 0s of computer code. Intel has already demonstrated a silicon modulator that can transmit data at up to 10Gb per second. Figuring out how to make the hybrid silicon laser was the last big barrier to using silicon-based optical devices in computers and data centers, the researchers said.
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Also: High security built right into $100 laptop's OS. Read these stories and more from around the Web at News.com Extra.
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The same laser that writes your latest music mix will etch a label onto the other side of special discs.
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It seems like a great idea: making a computer that's somewhere between the size of a cell phone and a laptop, for people to carry around and surf the Web.
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Visually distinctive graphical symbols make it easier to find your way through a computer's contents.
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Upcoming chip set will include built-in security features for your PC.
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Scratch that underwear off your wish list. The Laserpod ambient lighting system is one gift you won't regret getting this holiday season. By Amit Asaravala.
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By exploiting the physics of how light reflects off of pits in a plastic surface, researchers have come up with a method for storing 1,000 gigabytes of data on a DVD-size disk.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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Today, notebook computers are being used in an increasing number of applications in both consumer and commercial environments.  This paper  discusses the technologies necessary to meet the demands of these applications and what Fujitsu is doing to meet the varied display requirements of its customers.
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Imagine sitting down to your computer and seeing thin, plastic color displays on either side of your monitor, showing high-resolution text pages you can refer to and print from. On the wall next to you is another large display on which you can show colleagues a power point presentation, or display family photos and notes.
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A novel nanolaser could cram more data onto a hard disk.