A collaboration between Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo achieved a record 25Gbps data communication link using quantum dot laser, a low-cost technology that can reliably handle high-speed data transmissions while consuming minimal power. With good performance and wide margins for further improvement, this development paves the way to the next generation of high-speed Ethernet data communications, which will see a tenfold increase in transfer speed.

As the video sharing and cloud computing phenomena keep inflating our need for speed, engineers urgently need solutions to keep pace with these growing demands. When it comes to long distances the astronomical speeds and good technical characteristics of fiber optics seem up to the task of meeting our demands for some time to come. But of course, since our personal computers aren’t (yet) capable of directly elaborating the light signals from fiber optics, the speed of the end connection becomes just as important.

This explains why this research is newsworthy: quantum dot laser is a semiconductor-based technology that can interface with our home computers, and do so 2.5 times faster than the latest Ethernet standard. This development also comes with excellent timing, since the IEEE has announced it is hoping to create a 100Gbps Ethernet standard by this year’s end, which makes quantum dot laser the strongest candidate to date.

One of the main issues with current semiconductor-based data transmission is their very poor stability as the temperature rises, which in turn causes dramatic increases in power consumption. Quantum dot lasers are less sensitive to temperature fluctuations and also offer much lower power consumption, weaker distortion, and faster speeds. The decreased sensitivity to temperature fluctuations also makes temperature controllers superfluous, which helps in lowering costs.

Up to now quantum dot laser technology could only achieve data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps, but the researchers managed to reach higher speeds by forming high-density indium-arsenide quantum dots on the surface of a gallium-arsenide substrate, which doubles the number of quantum dots per unit area. Additionally, they developed a technology for stacking multiple layers of high-density dots, increasing the number of layers from five to eight.

Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo have announced they plan to further develop this technology, working on improving reliability and transmission distance while QD Laser is currently considering commercializing this technology.

What goes around, comes around – so goes the saying. Many moons ago a certain computer-in-a-keyboard affectionately coined the C64 took over the world and gave a whole generation a taste of things to come. Now Commodore USA has given the keyboard computer a modern facelift, resulting in an all-in-one solution powered by an Intel Atom processor and sporting a 5 inch touchscreen display.

At the risk of giving my age away, I remember my first introduction to the wonderful Commodore 64 back in… well, let’s just say the mists of time, shall we? As the name suggests, the computer-in-a-keyboard featured a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory and outperformed just about everything else at the time. It became a world dominator in the days when chunky and clunky IBM machines graced far too many a desk. Fond memories indeed.

In the years since the demise of Commodore International, desktop computing has grown up and taken over just about every aspect of our modern existence. Paint me intrigued to learn that the brand name which helped start a revolution resurfaced in March, albeit as Commodore USA and in the hands of CEO Barry S Altman. Its first all-in-one computer solution, appropriately named the Phoenix, included Intel Core 2 Duo or Quad Core processors, storage space of up to 2TB and an optical drive.

When ASUS officially announced its Eee Keyboard recently, it looked like the age of the keyboard-based computer was set to return. Now the Commodore USA Invictusis getting ready for launch.

The product page has lots of intriguing snaps of the new all-in-one, but is dramatically lacking in technical detail. Gizmag contacted Commodore USA’s CEO to find out more. Altman told us that the Invictus will be powered by Intel’s 64-bit Atom 330 dual core processor running at 1.6GHz on NVIDIA’s MCP79 ION platform, with storage on a 250GB HDD and up to 4GB of memory. There will be a card reader, a USB threesome and 802.11b/g/n wireless networking as well as HDMI and VGA display connectivity.

Altman told Gizmag that the Invictus is “perfect for home theater… sit on the couch, keyboard entry with no need for an additional mouse, also great for just checking Instant Messaging, email etc…. I would not want to write a novel using a 5 inch screen though.”

To the right of the keyboard sits the aforementioned 5 inch color TFT resistive touchscreen, which will work with either a preconfigured operating system or as the user dictates in a barebones configuration. The device will be open to various OS varieties such as Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and will contain a Li-ion battery which should give around five hours of full-on use between charges.

No word on when the Invictus will be available as yet but Altman told Gizmag, “Once we get our landed cost and currency exchange set, we will release prices for the first 5,000 units.”

Posters of the periodic table on the walls of science labs in schools around the world will need to be updated after the discovery of the newest superheavy element, element 117. With the temporary name of ununseptium, the temporary symbol Uus and the atomic number 117, it was the only missing element in row seven of the periodic table until its discovery by an international team of scientists from Russia and the U.S.

Scientists at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia announced internally that they had succeeded in detecting the decay of a new element in January 2010, and the results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The discovery of element 117 wasn’t easy. The two-year experimental campaign began at the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge with a 250-day irradiation to produce 22 mg of berkelium. This was followed by 90 days of processing at Oak Ridge to separate and purify the berkelium, target preparation at the Research Institute for Advanced Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, 150 days of bombardment at one of the world’s most powerful heavy ion accelerators at Dubna, data analysis at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Dubna, and assessment and review of the results by the team. The entire process was driven by the 320-day half-life of the berkelium target material.

The experiment produced six atoms of element 117. For each atom, the team observed the alpha decay from element 117 to 115 to 113 and so on until the nucleus fissioned, splitting into two lighter elements. In total, 11 new “neutron-rich” isotopes were produced, bringing researchers closer to the presumed “island of stability” of superheavy elements.

“Island of stability” is a term in nuclear physics that refers to the possible existence of a region beyond the current periodic table where new superheavy elements with special numbers of neutrons and protons would exhibit increased stability. Such an island would extend the periodic table to even heavier elements and support longer isotopic lifetimes to enable chemistry experiments.

On course to the island of stability, researchers initially skipped element 117 due to the difficulty in obtaining the berkelium target material. The observed decay patterns in the new isotopes from this experiment, as close as researchers have ever approached the island of stability, continue a general trend of increasing stability for superheavy elements with increasing numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. This provides strong evidence for the existence of the island of stability.

“It fills in the gap and gets us incrementally closer than element 116–on the edge,” said Ken Moody, one of the LLNL collaborators and a long term veteran of superheavy element research. “The experiments are getting harder, but then I thought we were done 20 years ago.”

This discovery brings the total to six new elements discovered by the Dubna-Livermore team (113, 114, 115, 116, 117, and 118, the heaviest element to date). This is the second new element discovery for Oak Ridge (61 and 117). In addition, Oak Ridge isotopes have contributed to the discovery of a total of seven new elements.

Since 1940, 26 new elements beyond uranium have been added to the periodic table – no doubt proving a boon to the publishers of school textbooks.

“These new elements expand our understanding of the universe and provide important tests of nuclear theories,” said Vanderbilt University Professor of physics Joe Hamilton. “The existence of the island of stability, a pure theoretical notion in the 1960s, offers the possibility of further expansion of the periodic table with accompanying scientific breakthroughs in the physics and chemistry of the heaviest elements.”

The team included scientists from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia), the Research Institute for Advanced Reactors (Dimitrovgrad), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

According to the Neil Young album title, rust never sleeps. In construction, rust damage can be insidious – especially in infrastructure like concrete bridges where rust can have fatal consequences if the steel in bridges fails. But detecting rust before it’s too late has been an ongoing challenge for engineers and scientists. Experts at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisburg, Germany, have developed an early-warning system for rust. By installing sensor-transponders into in the concrete to measure the extent of corrosion, engineers are being given a vital heads-up.

Concrete bridges, in particular, are subjected to a tough life. They have to be strong enough to withstand frosts, extreme heat, heavy traffic and emissions, which all take their toll on these structures. Then there’s various types of road salt used in winter to combat icy roads which are not steel-friendly.

On Germany’s roads, when the salty ice thaws it breaks down into ionic components that penetrate the concrete’s 5cm thick protective alkaline layer. Then, any salt that leaches through to the steel rods used to reinforce the concrete will cause them to rust, causing structural damage and weakening the bridge. Cracks can appear, which can lead to a bridge collapse.

It may seem a little primitive, but until now the most effective tests to determine how deep the ions have penetrated the concrete and what damage they have caused is conducted by construction workers hammering on the reinforced concrete in search of cavities, which are conclusive signs of corrosion damage.

But Fraunhofer Institute experts say the new sensor-transponder can continuously measure and monitor how deep the ions have penetrated the concrete.

The detection equipment is really a two-part operation, comprising a sensor and wireless transponder. The sensor is a criss-cross of very fine iron wires, laid down at even distances inside the concrete.

“If the dissolved salts reach the iron wires, these begin to corrode and break. The number of defective iron wires is an indicator of the extent of corrosion and the depth to which the concrete’s protective layer has been penetrated. This allows us to determine when the next repair work needs to be carried out,” says Frederic Meyer, a researcher at the IMS.

The transponder wirelessly transmits the data to a reading device carried by the construction workers – instead of their hammers.

“Our transponder does not get the energy it needs to measure the corrosion from a battery, but from a magnetic field. This means it does not need to be replaced and can remain within the concrete structure permanently,” says Meyer.

A test bridge has been constructed for the purpose of measuring the success of the sensor-transponder and field tests are currently being conducted.

The Melbourne Herald Sun has reported that an Australian PhD student has developed technology that will delver Internet speeds up to 250Mbps over existing copper phone lines, negating the need to install costly fiber optic cables. Dr John Papandriopoulos, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, spent a year developing the technology, which uses mathematic coding to reduce the interference that slows down Internet speeds.

Papandriopoulos also told Image and Data Manager Online, “People have been trying to push up the speeds of broadband to as fast as possible by pushing the actual bandwidth limits. The underlying problem is really one of interference, in effect your neighbor is interfering with your speed”.

Reportedly, the anti-interference technology could be installed directly into existing modems as a software upgrade or be shipped in new modems and would also require installation at the telephone exchange end.

Dr John Papandriopoulos won the Melbourne University Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in PhD, for the technology which is being patented in Australia and the U.S.

The technology has huge potential, particularly in countries where the cost/benefit equation of rolling out expensive fiber optic networks to replace existing copper phone lines is prohibitive. Dr Papandriopoulos hopes it will be available within 3-4 years.

In an ideal world we would all access the Internet over fiber optic cables that reach right up to the front door to deliver blisteringly fast transmission speeds. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world and many of us are forced to rely on aging copper network infrastructure. Now, Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs has demonstrated technology that boosts the transmission speeds available over two copper pairs that could see this infrastructure given a new lease of life, satisfying consumer’s need for speed for some time to come.

In a lab test of “DSL Phantom Mode,” Bell Labs achieved downstream transmission speeds of 300 Megabits per second (Mbps) over distances up to 400 meters (1,312 feet) – or 100Mbps at 1km (0.62 miles) – using just two digital subscriber lines (DSL). At its core, DSL Phantom Mode involves the creation of a virtual or “phantom” channel that supplements the two physical wires that are the standard configuration for copper transmission lines.

Bell Labs’ innovation and the source of DSL Phantom Mode’s dramatic increase in transmission capacity lies in its application of analogue phantom mode technology in combination with industry-standard techniques: vectoring that eliminates interference or “crosstalk” between copper wires, and bonding that makes it possible to take individual lines and aggregate them.

“What makes DSL Phantom Mode such an important breakthrough is that it combines cutting edge technology with an attractive business model that will open up entirely new commercial opportunities for service providers, enabling them in particular, to offer the latest broadband IP-based services using existing network infrastructure,” said Gee Rittenhouse, head of Research for Bell Labs.

According to Ovum analyst, Kamalini Ganguly, “Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs’ DSL Phantom Mode lab test adds a whole new dimension to the ongoing ‘100Mbps for all’ debate. The fact that existing copper loops can facilitate 300Mbps at 400 meters reshapes the whole next-generation broadband competitive environment – and will open up a wide range of new business opportunities for ‘traditional’ DSL players. This announcement shows that Alcatel-Lucent is seriously looking at all possible innovations to help its customers speed up the deployment of next-generation access networks, through a smart mix of advanced copper and fiber technologies.”

The company says it is conducting further research to “refine deployment models and determine a specific set of customer premises equipment (CPE) – models compatible with the DSL Phantom Mode technology.”

With many countries around the world struggling to find the cash to update aging infrastructure the ability to boost their performance using Alcatel-Lucent‘s technology without a wholesale replacement is sure to appeal.

Making use of novel lensless imaging technology, a UCLA engineer has invented the world’s smallest, lightest telemedicine microscope. The self-contained device could radically transform global health care – particularly in Third World countries – with its ability to image blood samples or other fluids. It can even be used to test water quality in the field following a disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.

Created by Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and a researcher at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, the microscope builds on imaging technology known as LUCAS – Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell Monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging – which was also developed by Ozcan.

Instead of using a lens to magnify objects, LUCAS generates holographic images of microparticles or cells by employing a light-emitting diode to illuminate the objects and a digital sensor array to capture their images.

In addition to being more compact and lightweight than conventional microscopes, it also does away with the need for trained technicians to analyze the images produced. Rather, the images are analyzed by computer so that results are available instantaneously.

The icroscope itself also requires minimal training. Because of its large imaging field of view, the sample does not need to be scanned or perfectly aligned in the microscope. And operating the microscope is as simple as filling a chip with a sample and sliding the chip into a slot on the side of the microscope.

Weighing 46 grams ― approximately as much as a large egg ― the microscope is a self-contained imaging device. The only external attachments necessary are a USB connection to a smart-phone, PDA or computer, which supplies the microscope with power and allows images to be uploaded for conversion into results and then sent to a hospital.

Also, because of its large aperture, the lensless microscope is also resistant to problems caused by debris clogging the light source. In addition, there are few moving parts, making the microscope fairly robust.

Samples are loaded using a small chip that can be filled with saliva or a blood smear for health monitoring. With blood smears, the lensless microscope is capable of accurately identifying cells and particles, including red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. The technology has the potential to help monitor diseases like malaria, HIV and tuberculosis in areas where there are great distances between people in need of health care and the facilities capable of providing it, Ozcan said.

Ozcan believes his microscope is ideal for use in telemedicine. In resource-limited settings, tools that are portable enough to do medical tests in the field are vital. Tools like the lensless microscope could be digitally integrated as part of a telemedicine network that connects various mobile health-care providers to a central lab or hospital, filling gaps in physical infrastructure with mobile tools. The transmission connections for such networks already exist in cellular networks, which have penetrated even the most remote corners of the globe.

Using a couple of inexpensive add-on parts, the lensless microscope can also be converted into a differential interference contrast (DIC) microscope, also known as a Nomarski microscope. DIC microscopes are used to gain information on the density of a sample, giving the appearance of a 3-D image by putting lines and edges in stark contrast. The additional parts for conversion to a DIC microscope cost approximately US$1 to $2.

The microscope was unveiled in a paper entitled, “Compact, light-weight and cost-effective microscope based on lensless incoherent holography for telemedicine applications,” which was published online in the journal, Lab on a Chip.

Wireless data transfer speeds in excess of 1Gbps now seem positively slow compared to Sony’s recent achievement of 11Gbps transfer speed, even if the distance is quite, erm, short, at just 14mm. So before you go getting excited about a home network with blistering speeds you should know the technology is actually intended for high speed wireless data transfer inside electronic products to replace complicated wires and internal circuitry.

The advancing functionality of today’s electronics means ever-increasing quantities of internal data being transferred around inside devices. Once wired connections approach the limit of their data capacity, additional circuitry is required to accommodate the extra data. However, this leads to increasingly complicated integrated circuit (IC) packages, more intricately printed circuit boards, and larger IC sizes.

By replacing physical circuitry in electronics products with high-speed wireless connections, this new data transfer technology reduces the number of wired connections and minimizes IC use, to simplify the IC package and printed circuit board.

Sony’s new wireless intra-connection system is based on millimeter-wave wireless data transfer technology – which refers to electromagnetic waves with a frequency of 30GHz to 300GHz, and wavelength between 1mm to 10mm. With their high frequency, millimeter-waves are suited to ultra high-speed data transfer, while a further advantage is their ability to transfer data using only very small antennas – meaning they can be built into a single chip at very low cost.

To realize high-speed wireless data transfer Sony integrated highly energy efficient millimeter-wave circuits on 40nm-CMOS-LSIs with an active footprint of just 0.13mm2 including both the transmitter and receiver. Over a distance of 14mm using antennas approximately 1mm in size and with power consumption of 70mW Sony was able to achieve data transfer speeds of 11Gbps. Sony says that it is possible to extend the distance to around 50mm using high directivity antennas.

Sony will present the technology at the International Soild State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2010, which is currently running in San Francisco. It will proceed with efforts to adopt the technology in a range of electronics products, such as television sets.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the world’s first self-powered sensors at the nanometric scale. Tiny generators embedding thousands of nanowires produce electricity whenever the wires are subjected to mechanical strain, and can be used to power microscopic sensors without the need for batteries.

The team has been working on nanoscale generators that harness the piezoelectric effect — which allows the transformation of mechanical waves into an electrical signal, and is used among other things in certain types of microphones — for the last five years, finding once more that reducing the size of components means a much improved efficiency in a surprisingly small package.

The generators are large arrays of hundreds and even thousands of zinc oxide nanowires. The output voltage is proportionate to the mechanical strains being applied to the wires, and the team confirmed they can produce a peak voltage of 1.26 volts and peak power density of 2.7 milliwatts per cubic centimeter when the material on which they are deposited is subject a straining of a mere 0.19 percent.

A Paper published on the journal Nature explains how the wires can then generate current as they are compressed in a flexible enclosure, eliminating the contact with a metallic electrode that was required in earlier devices.

Because the generators are completely enclosed, they can now be used in a variety of environments, harvesting the mechanical forces in seawaves, sonic waves, or even running shoes to power devices without the need for a battery.

The team has already produced two nanosensors working in conjunction with the generators, one to measure the pH of liquids and a second one that can detect the presence of ultraviolet light, both of which work by measuring the amplitude of voltage changes across the device.

The generators were manufactured via a chemical process designed to facilitate low-cost manufacture on flexible substrates. Moreover, extensive tests carried out on nearly one thousand of these nanogenerators showed that, thanks to the absence of moving parts, they can be operated over time without loss of generating capacity.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Future research efforts will go into scaling these nanogenerators up for more and more practical applications.

Newly developed radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology could usher in the era of checkout line-free shopping. The inexpensive, printable transmitter can be invisibly embedded in packaging offering the possibility of customers walking a cartload of groceries or other goods past a scanner that would read all the items at once, total them up and charge the customer’s account while adjusting the store’s inventory. More advanced versions could even collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time.

Researchers from Rice University working in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, developed the new technology which is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.

“We are going to a society where RFID is a key player,” said Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon, who expects the technology to mature in five years. Cho and his team are developing the electronics as well as the roll-to-roll printing process that, he said, will bring the cost of printing the tags down to a penny apiece and make them ubiquitous.

RFID tags are almost everywhere already. They are being used to identify and track everything from farm animals to shipping containers and passports to library books. But to date RFID tags have been largely silicon-based. Paper or plastic tags printed as part of a package would cut costs dramatically and the roll-to-roll technique, which uses a gravure process rather than inkjet printers, could replace the barcodes that currently appear on just about everything we buy.

The researchers have already developed a three-step process to print one-bit tags, including the antenna, electrodes and dielectric layers on plastic foil. Work is underway on 16-bit tags that would hold a more practical amount of information and be printable on paper as well.

The researchers say the RFIDs are practical because they are passive. The tags power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain. “If there’s no power source, there’s no lifetime limit. When they receive the RF signal, they emit,” Tour said.

There are several hurdles to commercialization. First, the device must be reduced to the size of a bar code, about a third the size of the current device. Second, its range must increase.

“Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it’s getting farther all the time,” he said. “The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a meter. But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store – what’s on the shelves, their dates, everything.

“At 300 meters, you’re set – you have real-time information on every item in a warehouse. If something falls behind a shelf, you know about it. If a product is about to expire, you know to move it to the front – or to the bargain bin.”

Tour allayed concerns about the fate of nanotubes in packaging. “The amount of nanotubes in an RFID tag is probably less than a picogram. That means you can produce one trillion of them from a gram of nanotubes – a miniscule amount. Our HiPco reactor produces a gram of nanotubes an hour, and that would be enough to handle every item in every Walmart.

“In fact, more nanotubes occur naturally in the environment, so it’s not even fair to say the risk is minimal. It’s infinitesimal.”