Progress in electronics are promising to make the bionic eye a reality by the end of this decade. Actually, it would be better to think in terms of symbiotic eye, since the electronics can become embedded in the biological eye itself and both help one another.

We have already seen electronic implants on the brain cortex to stimulate the visual area of the brain and convey images detected by a camera placed on glasses and converted into signals by a computer, able to re-create a certain degree of visual perception.
However, this approach, although getting better and better as signal processing mimics more faithfully the signals stimulating the visual cortex and contacts to the visual cortex cells gets more and more tiny nd focussed, is not going to recreate a normal vision. That is because the normal vision involves several areas in the brain and through this approach we can only get to one.

The only hope to recreate visual capability is to use the optical nerve stemming out of the retina.

However, the attempts made so far (to a certain extent successful) are limited by the need to power the retinal implant for the detection and conversion of lights into signal for the optical nerve. A variety of approaches have been tried, none completely satisfactory and that has slow progress.

Structure of the retinal implant. Every squaree" contains the sensor and three diodes to convert infrared light into power

Now a team of researchers at the Stanford University in California have succeeded in creating an implantable chip that doubles up as a power generator.  A camera on the glasses picks up the image and a computer embedded in the glasses converts it into signals modulated by an infrared signal that is beamed to the chip on the retina through the eye. The chip is made by an array of photodetectors, like the ones on a digital camera sensor and converts the infrared signal into stimulation of the optical nerve. Here is the great invention. For every pixel (photodetector) there are three diodes that convert the infrared beam into sufficient electrical power to make the processing and stimulation of the optical nerve possible. The team has managed to create a structure that can package 178 pixel per square millimeter (with each pixel containing three diodes and the processing part. For comparison, the first retinal implant was able to provide a total equivalent of 60 pixels. Here there are potentially thousands of them (a one square centimeter would accommodate over 17,000 pixels) and researchers are already at work to produce a bendable implantable chip that can follow the curvature of the retina.

Just few days ago I posted the news of the new Intel chip that keeps the Moore’s Law in good shape, and the expectations for the following three years. However, by the end of this decade (somewhere earlier actually), the present silicon will fail and if we want to keep Moore’s law going we need to look for something different. Many are betting on graphene, a carbon based substrate that can provide speedier chips.

The silicine film

Now at the MIT a team of researchers have announced the creation of a thin film made of bismuth and antimony letting electrons flow at a speed hundred times faster than in today’s silicon.

In the researchers own statement “electrons fly like a beam of light”! Obviously this is not exactly true but still it shows the progress made.

Now, you know that the signal is not brought around in a chip by electrons (that are actually moving pretty slow, a few cm per second having to jump from one atom to the next) but by the electromagnetic signal (and this really flies at the speed of light). The fact is that the movement of electrons leads to energy dissipation (the chip gets hot) and there is only as much heat that can be dissipated before the chips stops working. So this invention is good because it radically decreases the heat generation and can therefore support ever denser transistors, hence the survival of the Moore’s Law for a few more years.

The first application of this smart material, however, are likely to be in the area of solar cells, where what is important is the flow of electrons and therefore speedier electrons make for better panels.

It is also expected to find application in several devices creating layers upon layers of this material, each one with specific property.

Other scientist, in France at the Aix Marseille University with colleagues at the Technical University in Germany, have found a way to create a layer of silicon made by a single atom. It is done by blowing silicon vapor on a silver plate. This can also lead to cheaper and faster electronics. The material is shown in the figure above (the photo has been taken with an electron microscope) and has been called “silicine”.

There are many research teams exploring new materials and among these we will probably find the successor to the silicon that has reigned in these last 60 years.

The new Chip, 22 nm

The production of Ivy Bridge by Intel adds new life span to the Moore’s Law.

It is based on 22nm technology, today’s chip are based on 32 nm, and that has allowed to pack 1,4 billion transistors on a 160 square mm chip. The Ivy Bridge is 37% faster than the present chips and if run at the same speed of today’s chip uses only half the energy they use.

So Moore’s law continues to apply and it will do so in the next few years, given the announcement of Intel to release in 2014 the first 3D chip at 14 nm. Achieving the present result has not been a piece of cake, said Mark Bohr, the Intel scientist in charge of making industrial production (read cheap) of new chips a reality. It has required a different approach to the design of the channel, the part of the transistor separating the source and the drain. Similarly it will not be easy to move forward to a 3D structure and a 14 nm technology but, again Mark words, there shouldn’t be any insurmountable problems.

I am here at the yearly Media Lab meeting looking at what is new, ideas and prototypes. The intellectual challenge is not to remain hooked on dreaming about the future but to place all these (crazy) ideas in perspective asking yourself what of these can fly and become common experience.

Take as an example WristQue.

WristQue, your key to control your Smart House

WristQue is an electronic wristband that can connect you to your smart space (a smart office, a smart home). it comes equipped with sensors and communications capabilities. It is a curved plastic box printed by a 3D printer containing a microprocessor and sensors to detect temperature, humidity and light plus a sideband communications system that double up as a localization device. It is being tested in the Media Lab, a smart building brimming with sensors everywhere that can tell how many people are in the room and quite often who they are (if like myself have loge in the building and carry a RFId tag).

It has been designed to be cheap and easy to use (it only has 3 buttons) and its easiness is possible because of the software that manages the smart ambient and integrates all information. The research team who designed it, the Responsive Environments group, explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, while developing new sensing modalities and enabling technologies that create new forms of interactive experience and expression.

Now, I feel that at least one piece of the puzzle, in making this a reality, is ok: the focus is on the user experience. However, there are other pieces that need to fall in place to make it a success, such as the availability of a smart space (an ambient equipped with sensors and with a software able to transform sensors’ data into useful information and act upon it) and the availability of interesting application. True, we never though 20 years ago that a television set has to have a remote control and now we could not live without it, but still wearing a bracelet all day to trim the home temperature makes very little sense to me…

The relentless progress of electronics (Moore’s law) has increased the number of transistor per chip. Every single one of them needs power and this has resulted in a tremendous increase in power requirement.

Jonathan Koomey observation (law...)

This energy has to be dissipated somehow and that cost money. As an example Telecom Italia use about 2 TWh per year of energy and over 40% of it is used to cool equipment.

Scientists have managed to decrease the need for energy per transistor, as it is shown in the graph above. You can see that the overall efficiency per chip has progressed exponentially, similarly to the Moore’s law, but still the huge number of transistors per chip has lead to tremendous use of energy and therefore of dissipation.

This is why the news of a new technology for heat dissipation in chips is so interesting. One of the hurdles hampering the continuous validity of the Moore’s law is heat dissipation

Researchers at the North Carolina State University have discovered  a more efficient and less costly way to cool chips. They use a copper-graphite composite glued to chip surface with an indium-graphene film. This becomes a heat spreader that efficiently increases the dissipation surface thus providing for a better cooling of the chip.

The “better” can be quantified in a 25% gain in dissipation efficiency. A significant help to those scientists working on cramming more and more transistors in a chip!

Most of us remember the movie “Fantastic Voyage”, a science fiction story of a miniaturized submarine (and crew) injected in the blood stream of a patient to perform an otherwise impossible surgery.

The "submarine" to navigate our blood vessels

Now research has made possible to miniaturize probes and surgical instruments so that endoscopic procedures are now commonplace.

Creating a submarine like device that can roam in our blood vessels, as it was the case in the science fiction movie, presented the challenge of miniaturization as well as the one of powering it. The first one has been solved but the second has remained open. Till now.

At the International Solid State Circuit Conference a researcher of Stanford School of engineering, Ada Poon, has shown a way yo solve the problem by using a magnetic field in the range of 1 GHz.

The whole system is based on a radio transmitting device located outside of the body sending the electromagnetic field to the miniature device placed in the blood vessels, providing power and steerage.

The transmission of energy through radio waves is already common but this has not been applied to micro devices inside our body because high frequencies are soon absorbed by flesh and bones and low frequencies would require a big antenna. What Poon discovered is that the body can be treated as a dielectric, actually a low loss dielectric where a polarized signal can actually travel pretty far and be captured by an antenna 100 times smaller than usual.

This has opened the way to the creation of the first “submarine” able to travel the body blood vessels. Take a look at the simulation:

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This result opens up the way for micro surgery performed in places that are today “off limits” as well as to the delivery of targeted drugs.

More than that. It opens the way to placing (and moving around) tiny sensors that will be able to communicate, through a telecommunication network, of course, the insurgence of any problem. And, although it may seem a bit far fetched, it also opens the way to some sort of periodical check up performed by inserting some of these robots “to take a look around” and report back…

Sony has announced a new sensor specifically designed for cell phone cameras that promises a significant advance in quality.

Cell phone cameras suffer from the tiny size of the sensor (a bigger sensor size would require a bigger lens and hence a bigger form factor). The limited space available to pixels lead to very small pixel and the rush towards more and more resolution shrunk the pixels even more.

The solution proposed by Sony is to move the electronics for manipulating each pixel to the back of the sensor, as shown in the figure, whilst today the electronics uses part of the sensor surface.

This is made possible by the new 3D chips and results in bigger pixels, hence in reduced noise, one of the problem affecting the cell phone photos.

It does not solve the problem of the lens quality (and the fact that given the small distance basically we lose depth in the image, but it is a good improvement in quality.

Today there are more cell phone cameras than digital cameras (Nokia has claimed to be the largest digital camera manufacturer) and this is going to remain so..for a while.

By the end of the decade I see the possibility for the embedding of cameras in dresses and at that point we might see Abercrombie becoming one of the largest camera manufacturer!

Raspberry promised a 25$ computer back in 2011 and now it delivers!

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As you can see it is a tiny board, the size of a credit card and you need to connect it to a screen (it has a DMI socket to connect to your HD TV) and to a keyboard.

What is amazing is the price. You get a device that can be used to process video and to do whatever your PC can do. Of course there are limitation, like its 256MB storage (there is a 512 MB version selling at 35$) and you are not going to use it for gaming. Still, it is a fu fledged PC with Linux and along with it thousands of free applications you can find on the web.

You also get access to tutorials for leveraging on its capabilities. One possible application will be in class room, to teach programming to pupils at an affordable price also in many developing countries.  Just remember that 5 years ago the 100$ LapTop computer seemed an utopia. Generation Z is probably the first truly digital native generation and there is no turning back.

The world in this decade will see a progressive fading of the boundaries between inert objects and interactive ones. This is happening through the embedding of electronics in many materials and in turns the embedding of chips into objects.

Look at the threads (not "wires") connecting the LED. They are made of cotton

An example comes from a paper I just read (you can download it for 99 cents and if you are interested in details it is worth it). It reports the results obtained buy a team of Italia, French and USA researchers on using nanotechnology to transform normal cotton into a conductive material.

More research is being done at Cornell in the Nanotextile laboratory.

The trick is to use nano particle of gold embedded in the cotton threads (being “nano” makes the process cheap, you actually don’t see that the cotton has been altered in any way). These ensure the conductivity of the material.

In the reported experiment, researchers have been able to create cotton based transistors in the shirt. This is the first stepping stone to create processing capability in a textile.

They are suggesting as possible applications carpets able to detect movements of people, shirts that can act like sensors to pick up pollutants…Actually, the applications are just imagination bounded. If you are wearing a computer, or if your towel becomes a computer, then it can do a variety of things, as many as the ones your laptop does.

And this … will be the future.

A transistor shown by an electron microscope with the gate separating the source and the drain

The series above refers to the continuous shrinking of the gate dimension in transistors on a chip. We are now moving from 45 to 22 nm (billionth of meter) and this requires a change in the architecture of chips. With 22 nm it is no longer possible to have transistors laid one by the other on a flat surface, rather they have to be created in a try-dimensional space where the gate is all around them. This creates new problem in the insulation, that is now measured in number of atoms rather than in nm.

We can expect these 3D structures in the chips we will be getting once we buy a new computer in the second part of 2012, so they are already under fabrication. By 2015 we can expect the dimension of the gate to squeeze further down to 14 nm with the expected progress in insulation techniques.

Going smaller and smaller decrease the amount of energy required and increases the speed. It also makes possible to squeeze more transistor per chip or, alternatively, to produce more chips per wafer and this means decreasing the cost per chip (the cost is basically related to the wafer, not to the chip, so the more chips you cram into a wafer the less the single chip cost).

Going further down the 14 nm is not possible with silicon since slow this dimension electrons tend to jump from one place to another and you lose control.

New materials have to be found if we want, and we do…, squeeze further the gate dimension.

This is where the research from Purdue and Harvard come handy. Researchers have found a way to use indium-gallium-arsenide nanowire as gate and more importantly they have found a way to make them using the current manufacturing processes used for silicon. This latter is crucial since those manufacturing processes have been finely tuned over time and are most efficient. Moreover, creating new processes would require designing new plants with astronomical cost.

Smaller and smaller chips (along with their “nano cost”) allows their diffusion in any object changing our ambient.