Sony Ericsson K850 (5 megapixel) Review
November 25, 2007
Gsmarena.com reviewed the latest Sony Ericsson K850 which rivals the Nokia N95 with a 5 megapixel camera and according to gsmarena the Sony Ericsson K850 lives up to the responsibility of being a landmark product in the company portfolio. With rich camera settings, the K850 comes incredibly close to stand-alone digital cameras. The novelties in navigation suggest the K850 will not resort to simply being an upgrade to older Cyber-shot handsets and will be aiming beyond the brand-loyal consumers. However, the first 5 megapixel Cyber-shot will be forced to handle a lot of pressure. It’s been a year since Nokia N95 was introduced, which indisputably outruns K850 in non-cam features. Other tempting 5 megapixel mobiles as LG KU990, Samsung G600, Samsung F700, and Nokia N95 8GB will soon be crowding the cameraphone market.
Five Days of Deals!
November 21, 2007
Starting Thursday, November 22nd, through Monday November 26th, Tiger GPS is offering five EXCLUSIVE deals throughout these five days:
Garmin nuvi 260 - now $249.99!
Garmin nuvi 360 - now $349.99!
Garmin nuvi 660 - now $449.99!
Lowrance iWAY 600C - now $349.95!
DeLorme PN-20 with Topo 7.0 Bundle - now $299.99!
These offers are for a limited time only, so get shopping!
First Deals of the Holiday Season
November 21, 2007
Hey kids,
Sorry for the lack of updates.  We’ve been busy all month getting our holiday deals and guides together.  We’re glad to announce the first official special this season: the TomTom GiveGive rebate!  ALL TomTom automotive models - including the ONE 3rd Edition, ONE XL, ONE XL-S, GO 720 and GO 920 now have a $100 Mail-in Rebate! That means that you can get a new ONE 3rd Ed. for $149.95 after rebate - talk about a steal!
A journey into ‘fab world’
November 15, 2007
By Peter Wilson
The process of making silicon chips is as complex as the chips themselves.
Each manufacturing plant, or “fab”, may cost billions of dollars and is a triumph of engineering.
But working inside these hi-tech plants can be a surreal experience, says Dr Peter Wilson of the University of Southampton.
"“Fab world” is like no other place on earth.
Its pristine white walls, secure air locks, sterile air and ethereal yellow lighting makes it seem like you have arrived in the belly of an orbiting space station.
I can still remember the first time I went there.
It was set in classic “tumbleweed” territory - a small town in Arizona with just one road and the factory.
The temperature was over 100 degrees outside, with dust everywhere, but when you crossed the threshold into the plant, the air-conditioning kicked in and you felt like you were in a different world.
This is a common experience to anyone who works in the silicon manufacturing sector. The world outside and the fab world inside are on two different planes.
The boundary can transcend geographic and political boundaries - it can become impossible to tell which country you are in, when everyone is wearing a mask, and is dressed head to foot in shapeless, white hooded-suits.
‘Bunny men’
Outside, we worry about dirt on our shoes and wipe our feet, or perhaps wipe some dust off our laptop screen. In fab world, we worry about a few atoms contaminating the environment.
If dust falls on the delicate silicon wafers on which chips are printed it can render them useless.
Modern transistors - the tiny switches at the heart of these devices - are described in terms of the smallest feature sizes that can be made, such as a 45 nanometres, or 45 billionths of a meter.
To put this in perspective, the average human hair will be between 20 and 100 micrometers across - over a thousand times larger - and a typical dust particle will be anything from 1 to 100 micrometres.
Dust and contaminants must be kept out.
The fab is a place for chips, not for people. As a result, only the pure and the clean are given permission to penetrate its’ inner chambers.
Anyone that enters must go through a strict set of procedures.
All of the trappings of the outside world must be left behind, whether clothes, jewellery or even make-up.
A series of ante-chambers serve as prep rooms where workers change into a series of gowns and gloves, collectively known as a “bunny suit”.
Sticky floors make sure that no one treads in any contaminants and an air shower before entry makes certain that any loose particles are stripped away.
Skin flakes, lint, hair and anything else gets sucked into the grate in the floor.
Pure products
And then it’s onwards into the hum of the clean rooms. Stark white walls reflect the yellow sodium lights from above and a constant breeze blows down from the ceiling taking any particles through the gridded floor.
Peter Wilson
In modern fabs, ultra high tech chips are manufactured in what are known as class 1 rooms that contain just one tiny particle per metre cubed. In contrast, a room where open heart surgery takes place may have as many as 20,000.
Everything taken in either needs to be cleaned with alcohol or specially designed. Even the paper we use to take notes is designed from a special lint-free material.
Inside, humans very rarely come into contact with the rainbow-streaked discs of reflective silicon on which the chips are cut.
Instead, they are there to trouble shoot and monitor that everything goes correctly.
The silicon wafers are handled on monorails that move above the fab floor and the processing is done by complex vacuum sealed robots.
The wafers enter one end of the line costing a couple of hundred dollars and appear at the other - weeks later -patterned with billions of transistors and worth tens of thousands of pounds.
The silicon itself is not made at the fab - the ultra pure ingots (up to 99.99999999% pure) are produced and cut by specialist companies and sold to the chip makers.
The fab world’s magic is creating the incredibly complex patterns of wires and circuitry on chips the size of a postage stamp time and time again
That alchemy can cost billions of dollars.
Non-Stop
Each layer of a processor is constructed using a mask which is like a stencil, to highlight the areas to be deposited, etched or doped.
Each plant can cost billions of dollars
Doping involves adding impurities to the silicon to change its electrical characteristics - something which has to be done with astonishing precision.
Each mask used to cost several thousand pounds but as the complexity of chips has increased, and the smallest possible feature size has reduced, the number and intricacy of these masks has increased.
In addition, the size of individual features is now smaller than the wavelength of light that used to be used to pattern them, which means the use of some clever optics is required.
The yellowish lights used inside the fab are to make sure that they do not interfere with this process.
The result of all of this is that an individual silicon integrated circuit may require masks that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, or perhaps even millions of pounds, to produce and machines that cost a similar amount.
Fab world is an expensive place and, hence, it never stops.
The plants churn out chips every single day of every year. So called giga-fabs may process more than 100,000 wafers every month, each containing hundreds of chips.
Each one of the 10mm by 10mm silicon squares is a triumph of design.
As a chip designer, the impact of the incredible complexity of fab world has led to an amazing transformation in what we can do on a single chip.
The products of this strange and surreal place have burst out of its confines and have pervaded every facet of the outside world from computers and mobile phones to aircraft and microwave ovens.
Yet, incredible as it is to visit, fab world is also a place that is blissful to leave.
At the end of the day there’s no better feeling than being able to rip off the itchy bunny suit, step outside into the searing heat and once again get dirty."
Dr Peter Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Electronics at the University of Southampton, School of Electronics and Computer Science.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Future computing technologies
November 14, 2007
Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.
A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales.
In a quantum computer data is not processed by electrons passing through transistors, as is the case in today’s computers, but by caged atoms known as quantum bits or Qubits.
“It is a new paradigm for computation,” said Professor Artur Ekert of the University of Oxford. “It’s doing computation differently.”
A bit is a simple unit of information that is represented by a “1″ or a “0″ in a conventional electronic computer.
A qubit can also represent a “1″ or a “0″ but crucially can be both at the same time - known as a superposition.
This allows a quantum computer to work through many problems and arrive at their solutions simultaneously.
“It is like massively parallel processing but in one piece of hardware,” said Professor Ekert.
‘Complex systems’
This has significant advantages, particularly for solving problems with a large amount of data or variables.
“With quantum computing you are able to attack some problems on the time scales of seconds, which might take an almost infinite amount of time with classical computers,” Professor David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the BBC News website recently.
In February 2007, the Canadian company D-Wave systems claimed to have demonstrated a working quantum computer.
At the time, Herb Martin, chief executive officer of the company said that the display represented a “substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable.”
But many in the quantum computing world have remained sceptical, primarily because the company released very little information about the machine.
The display also failed to impress.
“It was not quite what we understand as quantum computing,” said Professor Ekert.”The demonstrations they showed could have been solved by conventional computers.”
However, Professor Ekert believes that quantum computing will eventually come of age.
Then, he said, they will not be used in run-of-the-mill desktop applications but specialist uses such as searching vast databases, creating uncrackable ciphers or simulating the atomic structures ofsubstances.
“The really killer application will probably be in designing new materials or complex systems,” he said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Getting more from Moore’s Law
November 13, 2007
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
For more than 40 years the silicon industry has delivered ever faster, cheaper chips.
The advances have underpinned everything from the rise of mobile phones to digital photography and portable music players.
Chip-makers have been able to deliver many of these advances by shrinking the components on a chip.
By making these building blocks, such as transistors, smaller they have become faster and firms have been able to pack more of them into the same area.
But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever.
MOORE’S LAW- The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years
- First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel
- Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965
“The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips,” said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.
Even Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel and the man that gave his name to the law that dictates the industry’s progression, admits that it can only go on for a few more years.
“Moore’s Law should continue for at least another decade,” he recently told the BBC News website. “That’s about as far as I can see.”
Tiny tubes
As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in efforts to allow the industry to continue delivering the advances that computer users have come to expect.
Key areas include advanced fabrication techniques, building new components and finding new materials to augment silicon.
Already new materials are creeping into modern chips.
As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip.
To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium.
The material’s development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as “the biggest change in transistor technology” since the late 1960s.
But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger advances.
“Carbon nanotubes are a step beyond [hafnium],” explained Dr Phaedon Avouris of the company.
‘Superior’ design
CARBON NANOTUBES- Sheets of carbon atoms folded into a cylinder
- Unusual strength and electrical properties
- Promise to revolutionise electronics, computers, chemistry and materials science
Carbon nanotubes are tiny straw-like molecules less than 2 nanometres (billionths of a metre) in diameter, 50,000 times thinner than a strand of a human hair.
“They are a more drastic change but still preserve the basic architecture of field effect transistors.”
These transistors are the basic building blocks of most silicon chips.
Dr Avouris believes they can be used to replace a critical element of the chip, known as the channel.
Today this is commonly made of silicon and is the area of the transistor through which electrons flow.
Chip makers are constantly battling to make the channel length in transistors smaller and smaller, to increase the performance of the devices.
Carbon nanotube’s small size and “superior” electrical properties should be able to deliver this, said Dr Avouris.
Crucially, he also believes the molecules can be integrated with traditional silicon manufacturing processes, meaning the technology would more likely be accepted by an industry that has spent billions perfecting manufacturing techniques.
The team have already shown off working transistors and are currently working on optimising their production and integration into working devices.
Tiny improvement
Professor Williams, at Hewlett Packard is also working on technology that could be incorporated into the future generations of chips.
As well as exploring optical computing - using particles of light instead of electrons to significantly increase the speed of today’s computers -he is building new electronic components for chips called memristors.
He says it would be the “fourth” basic element to build circuits with, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.
“Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits,” said Professor Williams.
Professor Williams and his team have shown that by putting two of these devices together - a configuration called a crossbar latch - it could do the job of a transistor.
“A cross bar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it’s working with very different physics,” he explained.
Crucially, these devices can also be made much smaller than a transistor.
“And as they get smaller they get better,” he said.
Professor Williams and his team are currently making prototype hybrid circuits - built of memristors and transistors - in a fabrication plant in North America.
“We want to keep the functional equivalent of Moore’s Law going for many decades into the future,” said Professor Williams.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Recharge your iPods with AVD-ACADUNWH
November 13, 2007
AVD-ACADUNWH..errrm…whoever comes out with such a name for such a beautiful device? Anywayz the name aside this cool little gadget is pretty nifty as it’s able to recharge your iPods.
Excerpt:
If you have an old generation of iPod and were tired of seeing new rechargers implementing only the plugs for the latest versions, then this AVD-Thingy can make a lot of sense for you; it features an iPod connector and a USB, capable of saving your life when you run out of batteries. Thank you Elecom!
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