John Karlin, Developer of All-Digit Dialing Dies at 94

As the home phone is posed to slowly fade into oblivion, many of us are unaware of the process that took the home phone from the realm of operator controlled call centers to completely automated digital call handling.  

Before John Karlin call handling had transformed from operators to mechanical switches.  But in the decades following WWII the number of home based private numbers outpaced the mechanical switch centers ability to absorb them.  

Enter the DTMF system or Dual Tone Multi Frequency dialing which mixes two tones to represent a single number and as little as five frequencies mixed to produce 0 thru 9 plus room for two special keys.  This technology allowed the call centers to transit to filters and digital switches and the ability to handle substantially more calls. 

But the shift to the new system required a paradigm shift in the design of the phone. 

From the article:

• The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin. 

2013 is the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone.  In those 50 years, Karlin's designs have affected many more technologies than the phone.  The keyboard design alone has become innocuous  finding itself incorporated in dissimilar items as the microwave oven to cellular phones.   And to consider that John Karlin made such stunning contributions to the very nature of how we use technology was virtually unknown outside his field.  

Original article in the New York Times 2/8/13 by By Margalit Fox

submitted by xnewsman

Flexable Film Speakers

This is probably old news, but this is the most flexible film medium speaker I have ever seen demonstrated!  With this type of speaker and the flexible displays that are right around the corner, you can well imagine that rolled up flexible communicator that has been getting air time on almost all new sf movies and shows.  This device is so much more flexible than anything that I have seen up to this point!  Check the vid out!

Fun With LEDs

I know...not science or ...well wait it IS kinda sciency...you find so much fun stuff on the Hack A Day blog...lol anyway, if you are facinated with LEDs like I am than you're going to love this piece from ToddFun.com as he disassembles an LED home bulb. Todd it seems ran into the exact same thing that I think any of us that jumped on the LED bandwagon only to find that many of the early producers shoved whatever they could into whatever they could and called it good enough. Far from the 5000 hours, you were lucky if you got a couple of week! But these bulbs were treasure troves of LEDs and various hardware.

So, this is like the everyman's teardown. If you are a tech, you will find some of the video tedious, but the attention to detail that Todd gives us makes up for it.

So, here is another of my fascinations, electronics...and I think LEDs rule! I hope you find this as much fun as I did 

The ToddFun site can be found here

LED Bulb That is 230% Efficient

You read that right. An MIT research team has shown an LED bulb can actually give off more energy (in light) than it consumes in electricity. Every law about the conservation of energy or thermodynamics that you learned in school just flew out the window. How is this possible?

Well for clarity, lets look at the Gizmodo article:

• (scientists) from MIT posited that while the bulb's energy requirements decrease at an exponential rate (halving the voltage reduces the input power by a factor of four), the lumen output would decrease linearly (halve the voltage and the lumens drop by half as well). This means that at some point, the amount of lumens the bulb is emitting would be more than the amount of energy spent—essentially "free" light.

Still it's enough to make you head spin!  The factors we do have to watch though are that the bulbs are extremely small and the amount of voltage applied is minuscule.   To get an idea, let's look at the article again:

• the team was able to generate 69 picowatts of light from just 30 picowatts of energy. (to get an idea of how small a picowatt is,  a picowatt is 1 trillionth of a watt)

But some of the methods used to boost efficiency is equally amazing.  In this instance, the MIT team boosted the bulb's inherent electrical inefficiency by capturing waste heat from the bulb's atomic lattice!  This cools the device and raises the efficiency.   The really good news is that the methods employed can be applied to the LEDs in use today, making them "cold" bulbs.  Though they would not reach the efficiency of  the MIT's bulb, the bulbs would still be giving off light without any waste heat to rob the bulb's overall efficiency. 

Physics online article here

The I.C. Celebrates it's 50th Birthday

The Hack A Day blog reminded me of something that was history making that happened 50 years ago on April 26th. This marks the 50th anniversary of the first silicon integrated circuit patent. According to the article:

• Robert Noyce received the patent on April 25^th 1961, and went on, along with Gordon Moore, to found a little known company you might of heard of, Intel Corporation.

Now before someone wigs out, this is the silicon IC. Earlier researcher Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, designed one using a germanium wafer.

But if you don't have a clue why the IC is important, which I can't imagine, look at all the electronic devices you use in a day or devices that use some form or electronics in them, (from cars to microwaves) none would be possible or at the very least affordable, without intergrated circuit.

Read the article here and the movie is great pr too!

Skinput interface - very cool -

Odds on when we will see this in everyday consumer electronics?


article in Core77 via Make

Paper Batteries a very real possibility

Consider this: Paper cell-phones or paper lap-top computers. Electronic paper that doesn't require any batteries or solar cells. Or batteries a mere fraction the weight and size of current technology, but still able to produce enough power to meet the needs of an electric vehicle but have far greater range.

Scientists at Stanford University in California report that regular paper could easily be turned into a super battery.

From the Yahoo news article sent in by Tim Sayill (click link for complete story)

• ...they have successfully turned paper coated with ink made of silver and carbon nanomaterials into a "paper battery" that holds promise for new types of lightweight, high-performance energy storage.

Moore's Law to run out in 5 years?!

Here is an interesting article that Xnewsman sent me that he found in the New York Times. The basic premise by the author Saul Hansell was that Moore's Law will quite literally run out of space in as little as 5 years.

First, lets explain Moore's Law:

• Moore’s Law — the observation by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the capacity of semiconductors doubles roughly every two years.

What does that mean in real world examples? Well the article gives an excellent example.

• In 1990, SanDisk, shipped its first flash memory chip. Each chip stored four million bits of information. Today, the biggest chip SanDisk makes holds 64 billion bits.

In reality then, SanDisk doubled the capacity of it's chips slightly ahead of Mr. Moore's prediction, doubling 14 times in 19 years. But Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk, is worried about how much further the boundary can be pushed. “We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,”

Every memory chip is made up of cells. The job of these cells is to hold electrons (memory remember is a recording and a recording is electrical and therefore containing electrons) Mr. Harari warns, “We are running out of electrons.”

No we are not eating up all the world's electrons, but there is an actual physical limit to how many electrons you can cram into each chip and therefor only a limited amount to spread between all the cells. When chips first came out, they had about a thousand electrons for each cell. With the increase in memory density each cell now is down to just a few hundred. At some point you can see where the cell density would be high enough to drop the electron count to 1 or below....and obviously you can't have a working circuit on zero electrons. The work around for this problem is quite ingenious. Older chips worked very much like computer memory, 1s and 0s or ons and offs but this method limited the size of the chip and at the time made them wildly expensive. Now the chip can actually count how many electrons are in a cell, and depending on the number it can write and read up to 16 states or for the computer geeks out there 4bits.

But at the end of the day, Mr. Harari said, it probably can double the capacity of its chips only two more times. Once the industry goes from its current 64-billion-bit chip to a 256-billion-bit chip (that’s 32 gigabytes), it will hit that brick wall.

There might be a bright spot on the horizon however. Many companies are now experimenting with stacked layers. This technology has great potential but at the present time has major drawback, like only being able to write one time.

Read complete NY Times article here

First superconducting transistor - now a reality

The holy grail for electronics in general and for computers in part has been a way to boost speed and efficiency while at the same time dealing with the heat that comes from ultra fast switching.

It has been well known for many years that certain materials brought near to the temperature of absolute zero drastically change their electrical properties. Many materials that do not even conduct electric current are able to do so and at no resistance, when chilled to near absolute zero.

Transformers and wires become ultra efficient when electrical connections and electronic forces no longer hold back current. However one component has eluded researchers for many years. The transistor.

Many devices use switches to control voltage and current. One of the most common switches and also one of the most efficient is the transistor. Much like a relay it can handle high current and is able to be controlled easily and fast. But the price of this speed is heat. The faster it is switched the hotter it will become. Cooling is only a stop-gap as transistors work much less efficiently when chilled below their operating range.

Now researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have had success at building a crystalline structure that they can turn on and off at will at 3 tenths of a degree above absolute zero. The result is a superconducting version of the field effect transistor. Computer CPUs running these transistors would run significantly faster than the present gighertz speeds.

<- NewScientist tech ->

Immune System For Electronics?

The most undesirable facet of our complex technological society is not "if" something will fail but "when". As devices become more and more complex and we depend on the services that technology brings us, it's no wonder the amount of havoc that is created when parts of the system fail. Having the highly computerized watch on your wrist fail is an inconvenience, but have the same highly computerized system on a plane fail....

As a recent article in Science Daily stated: Electronic hardware designers have achieved fantastic levels of reliability so far but, as such devices become more and more complex, such instances can only become more common. Under fault conditions it would, therefore, be highly desirable for the system to be able to cope with faults, and continue to operate effectively even if one or more components have failed; but this is not the way electronic systems are currently designed.

Researchers at the University of the West of England are to carry out ground breaking research with collaborators from the University of York into creating electronic systems that can diagnose and heal their own faults in ways similar to the human immune system.

Drawing on inspiration from nature, the researchers at York and Bristol will look for ways to create electronic systems based on a structure of ‘cells’ which have the ability to work together to defend system integrity, diagnose faults, and heal themselves. The researchers will be looking at the way complex biological systems, such as the defense mechanism of the human body, are able to deal with faults and still keep functioning.

(The science fiction tie in? This is how I envision a true android. A cyborg is a mixture of man and machine, a robot is pure machine. But a self healing machine ? That starting to sound like a biological analogue....an android.)

<- more -> from Science Daily online

Printing electronic components a step closer

You want to know what future fashion statements will look like or what form popular consumer electronics will take, read this newest article in ScienceDaily. Here they describe advancements researcher have make in developing printable electronics that can be used for creating radio frequency identification tags and flexible watch displays. This research comes from the vision of being able to print complex electronic components on organic materials such as paper, fabrics, or plastic. The need being to produce large amounts of these components cheaply. Proof of concept has shone with suitable inks and printers, organic liquid crystal displays and other optical electronic devices can be printed and done very accurately. This is extremely important because each component has to be persisely aligned with it's neighbors to function. This type of technology has unlimited potential, say food packaging that can test the contents and tell you if they have expired or are contaminated. Shopping bags that could tell what products are inside and do all the totalling and billing, eliminating the need for a check-out person, electronic paper, eyeglasses with embedded displays, or even smart clothing. The possibilities are endless. Ah if this doesn't smack of Cory's story Printcrime!

photo Credit: SOFTswitch Ltd.

Electronic tattoo display runs on blood

No question about it, Shaun Saunders loves to inform and shock all at the same time. Case in point, this juicy tidbit from Physorg.com:

Jim Mielke's wireless display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.

If that isn't unusual enough, the unit has a most unusual power-supply.....blood.
The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

If you're like me your both fascinated and repelled at the same time.!
The tattoo display communicates wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices - both in the outside world and within the same body. Although the device is always on (as long as your blood´s flowing), the display can be turned off and on by pushing a small dot on the skin.

More

We are the BORG you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Thanks Shaun, I know I am going to have nightmares over this one!