Funding

Funding
by Michael Orshan

One of the really frustrating things about the Iraq War is the sad effect of funding Science and Technology. There are so many articles on this phenomenon I’ll spare the tears of “where’s my money?” Sure the war drained what money there was, but maybe the system of science and technology failed to.

Now I’ve seen many universities start programs on entrepreneurship. There are great tech transfers now, even though many of these lose money, they create community togetherness and organization focus. These are all steps in the right direction.

One of the best examples on how to move forward is the city of Phoenix and the University of Arizona. For whatever reason they put a stake in the ground and claimed the biotech was their future. They created T/Gen a facility for biotech research, tech transfer and company building. Then the University created a great biotech facility and began to coordinate their efforts with T/Gen. Now they are building, actually past building, a remarkable cluster in biotech. Now city services, growth, employment, resources are all focused in the same direction. I predict that funding to this will always be there, because the media, politics, planning and everything are focused.

Here is what I want to point out. I believe that economic success occurs when scientists, entrepreneurs, politics and capital work together. This is perfect example. This Phoenix project spanned multiple governor administrations, mayor administrations and so forth. Yet, the political process was smart enough to share in the success and let that success drive their own campaigns from election year to election year.

Personally, I’d like to see public funding, at the University level, be focused on the economic goals of the region. This forces the entire region to decide on that focus, get behind this and drive success forward.

Suits you sir!

In a competitive minefield of electronic components offerings, tailor made solutions can be just what wins the customers vote, Bernd Hantsche discusses

There is little sense in considering the trend of single components within the field of wireless. Particularly in the case of technically demanding chips, the target applications, in other words, the entire circuit system should be analysed in order to obtain information on the future of individual components. Tailor-made solutions therefore are an essential sales advantage for a distributor such as Rutronik. With its Wireless Development Centre and a dedicated wireless line card, RUTRONIK strives to be the consultation and skills interface between the manufacturers and the customers. Wireless experts provide assistance and support in the planning and implementation of wireless applications. Lars Mistander, Manager Wireless Development Centre, describes the task performed by the Team: "We explain our manufacturers' components to our customers so precisely that the customer understands its function and can use them in their applications without wasting time on trial and error." Our Wireless Development Centre supports our customers for instance with troubleshooting in their program codes, in circuit technology, with layout especially for high frequency signals and also with product selection. Continuous new codes and standards challenge distributors just as much as customers and manufacturers. Customised solutions range from the highly integrated GSM module with GPS support and integrated SIM card holder with preinstalled antenna including freely programmable microcontrollers as well as memory and interfaces, through to a chip with minimum wireless functions.

"Particularly small, flexible development companies show us on a daily basis what can be done to improve conservative circuits. Expensive pin-and-socket connectors therefore are simply replaced by cheaper wireless connections and sensitive mechanisms such as a sliding contact and exchanged for long-lasting transceivers," explains Lars Mistander, Manager Wireless Development Centre, based on his own experience. "Innovative ideas get around and we currently see the trend in companies to install wireless systems and to fully re-design old products."

Ultra Low Power is still too high
Many wireless applications are battery-powered. For this reason, power consumption is a decisive criterion for the product manager. Here the distributor is required to have the ability to give advice on the diverse offers made by manufacturers. "In addition to the well-known LowPower and UltraLowPower Infineon chips with 433 and 868MHz range, Nordic Semiconductor products also meet the growing 2.4GHz band requirements," explains Mistander. "Rutronik places as much value on protocol-based wireless technologies: With the IEEE802.15.4 Microchip has developed a high-performance transceiver and already offers ZigBee and the even clearer MiWi; two protocols to choose from."

Infineon, for example, presently has an 868MHz transmitter with an integrated booster especially developed for long battery life. A corresponding PLL synthesizer, a Power Down Mode as well as many other features and only a few external components make this product particularly interesting for remote operation and control.
Nordic Semiconductors covers all ISM bands, however they are increasingly specialising in 2.4GHz technology. Together with Nokia, Nordic has developed a new radio standard with "Wibree" which can be implemented parallel to Bluetooth and is particularly suitable for wireless computer periphery. Among others, an FSK transceiver is already available, with incorporated sensor network protocol, which has considerably raised the bar for low power networking. Dynastream has developed the ANT protocol and Nordic has implemented it using its new chips, resulting in a very interestingly combined product, which can also operate for several years by means of a small battery.
Microchip, on the contrary, has developed the PAN Standard IEEE802.15.4 and is working towards DSSS transmission on only one channel. The transceiver which also operates in the 2.4 GHz band is suitable for ZigBee as well as for a Microchip’s own open source protocol.

Discrete structure does not mean costly acceptance tests

Naturally a wireless application can be implemented without the installation of a spectrum analyser. Rutronik offers for instance a 2.4GHz Vishay module which can be effectively installed in multi-media applications with data rates of up to 8Mbit/s. Rutronik has supplemented its portfolio with Free2Move Bluetooth modules which include all authorisations and releases. A customer can choose from various performance levels: Either choosing a module with integrated antenna or fitting one with an external antenna. The Broadline distributor portfolio also includes special wireless modules for sound streaming. Thus Rutronik offers solutions for discrete structuring of high volume systems as well as development-friendly modules such as those used in small to medium volume systems. A distributor should also be available for advice on which hardware is suitable for which application and is the least expensive in the long run. "Often a company lacks the development know-how for high-frequency wireless chips and, as a result, some electronics developers miscalculate in their planning," says Mistander. "We provide our customers with reference designs and refer them, if necessary, to design and testing companies who have already gained experience in the products implemented. In this way, each design ends up being successful."
RFID – tested anti-pirating system
"Increasingly, companies who previously managed without electronics, are approaching us," says Mistander. "There is a strong trend towards contact-free identification of products." The background for this is mostly the optimisation of logistics or anti-plagiarism methods, which has drastically increased in relevance with product copies originating in the Far East. "This "electronically unfamiliar" clientele constitutes a completely new target group" explains Mistander. "Thanks to our substantial partner network in the areas of HF design, driver programming and RFID production, Rutronik can also assist inexperienced customers in finding solutions with, for example, RFID transponders which offer several memory storage areas." One of these has already been allocated to a specific silicone manufacturer with a particular identification number that cannot be cancelled or manipulated. In this way specific number fields can be allocated to customers and replacement with a pirate copy is made impossible. RFID can also be programmed with individual data, for instance, information such as date of manufacture, version, product status or repair frequency – watertight, heat-resistant, dirt-resistant, long-life and invisible.

Individual and specific
Rutronik's application experts also investigate customer products and make suggestions regarding innovative improvements. In this way they contribute to avoiding misguided development investments. According to Mistander: "Currently we have observed that the greatest uncertainty on behalf of customers lies in wireless networks at sensor and actor level. Queries regarding licences, compatibility as well as product-specific software stacks are common. Many customers intending to implement a ZigBee network suddenly come across more cost-effective alternatives, such as MiWi. Only a detailed network plan will indicate which solution can be recommended. In general, it can be said that the maze of possibilities especially in the wireless sector at the moment is almost unmanageable, particularly since new solutions appear daily and there are no uniform standards. "You really need a good sense of orientation to negotiate the right way. As an initial orientation, we offer our customers our current seminar series "Think Wireless"."

”In one case, a customer wanted to extend his machine with a simple 220V switching logic circuit and use it to send SMS. He asked us for advice on GSM modules. We carefully studied the customer's development project and offered a complete telemetry systems solution directly from our stores," recounts Mistander. "The customer's total expenditure on development was slashed. Instead he only had to configure the telemetry module by SMS and install the circuit board with two screws and four wires into the machine. Each separate development with relay, power supply and a GSM module at such low unit numbers would have been an inappropriate investment.

Wireless bandwidth is endlessly diverse and far from being exhausted: "In a few years digital cameras, for instance, will be fitted with Bluetooth, Wireless-USB, WLAN and GPS and will be automatically fully interchangeable with the other technical equipment," asserts Mistander. A digital camera is already compatible with GSM or GPRS – in the form of the current mobile phones or as special cameras, which are used, for instance, to photograph the weld points on long pipelines to record working procedures, where the co-ordinates of the photographs of individual weld points can be located thanks to the built-in GPS. "Due to the rapidly decreasing GPS prices, this function will in future also be installed in consumer cameras so that you can see which photographs were taken in which places in the world by using Google-Earth", explains Mistander. Rutronik has a paneuropean agreement with Tyco to distribute their GPS-Receiver portfolio. Tyco offers a complete range from low-cost solutions up to newest generation high-end receivers. Both products are very small and compatible to each other. They also offer modules with integrated antennas, modules which support additional gyro-sensors for navigation (AGPS), up to modules with a CAN-bus interface.

Nano-generator could power tiny devices

19:00 13 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite

A simple "nano-generator" that converts movement into electricity could let nanoscale devices draw power from their surroundings, researchers say.

Currently, nano-devices must use conventional power sources built on a much larger scale. But a nano-generator could, for example, let a tiny medical implant draw power from the movement of a patient's arteries.

The nano-generator, developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US, consists of an array of flexible zinc oxide nanowires. Each is 50 nanometres in diameter and 300 nanometres in length (a nanometre is a billionth of metre). As each wire bends, its crystalline structure builds up electrical charge in response to mechanical stress - an phenomenon known as the piezoelectric effect.

To charge up the nanowires, the researchers gently bent them using the tip of an atomic force microscope. "One side of the nanowire is compressed and the other is stretched," explains Jinhui Song, a member of the research team. "The deformation of the crystal structure on the surface of the wire causes charge to build up. The stretched side becomes positive, and the compressed side negative."

When the tip was in contact with the positive, stretched, part of the wire the charge could not escape. This is because of the electrical properties of the junction between the platinum tip of the microscope, and the semiconducting nanowire. But when the tip moved over to the negative, compressed side of the wire, the charge could escape, making it act like a nanoscopic power source.

Billionths of a wattA single nanowire can only produce around half a picowatt, or one hundred billionths of a watt. But 200 nanowires can be squeezed into a 10 square micron area, to produce 10 picowatts. That is enough to power a nanoscopic device like a nanotube-based gas sensor, the researchers say.

Milo Shaffer, a nanotechnologist at Imperial College London, UK, says the generator could make a useful addition to the growing array of nano-components already created by scientists. But he adds that researchers have yet to work out how to link many of these components together.

"We're assembling lots of small pieces, but a big challenge for the future will be how to build these components into working systems," Shaffer told New Scientist. "In this case, it will be necessary work out how to connect up these wires to the electronic components."

However, Shaffer notes that a recently announced method for embedding electronic transistors within nanowires could be a solution. The technique, revealed in March 2006 by researchers from IBM, the University of Florida and Columbia University in the US, could be used to connect the generator to an electronic circuit, Shaffer says.

Before tacking this issue, however, the Georgia Institute of Technology team are keen to get as much power as possible from their generator. This could involve using lots of nanowires at once or finding a way of keeping contact with the wires for longer while they vibrate. "The current system captures only around 20% of the available mechanical energy," Song says.
Journal reference: Science (vol 312, p 242)

Get ready for single-pixel cameras

A single-pixel camera? Yes, there is such a thing and it promises to be more useful than it at first might appear. The basic idea behind the new camera is to drastically reduce the amount of information needed to represent an image. This takes place by compressing information in the image as it is digitized, rather than compressing image data after digitization. It involves a single-photon detector whose output is digitized and then transmitted to a digital signal processor. The DSP uses sophisticated algorithms to reassemble the data into a version of the original image.

Researchers at Rice University recently constructed a bench-top setup that demonstrates these principles. Their demo uses a single- photon detector, some lenses, and a digital micromirror chip. The DM chip is a key component. Often used in video projection systems, it has several hundred thousand microscopic mirrors arranged in a rectangular array on its surface. The mirrors can be individually rotated about 10° to an on or off state. A mirror in the on state reflects light in one direction, and elsewhere when off.

In the Rice demo, light from the object of interest is reflected through a lens onto the DM chip. Meanwhile, the DM chip is fed a long series of random numbers which control the orientation of the mirrors on its surface. The result is a series of random orientations for the surface mirrors. Another set of lenses picks up the light reflected from the DM chip and focuses it onto a single-photon photodetector. The analog output of this detector is proportional to the light level.

An a/d converter digitizes each level from the photodetector corresponding to a new random pattern of the DM chip mirrors. The resulting stream of digital numbers gets beamed to a receiver and then to a digital signal processor. The DSP uses knowledge about the random patterns imparted on the DM chip, plus advanced algorithms such as 3D wavelet transformations, to assemble the stream of digital numbers into an image of the original object.

All in all, the single-pixel camera converts a scene that would be captured as one image in a conventional camera into a series of intensity values registered on the single-photon detector. The recording process takes place without any of the components in the setup physically moving (other than the microscopic mirrors on the DM chip). The DSP knows enough about the recording process to reassemble the series into an image of the original scene.

Rice’s single-pixel camera uses principles from an emerging branch of study called compressive sensing. The advantage of the technique is that it needs far less data to digitize an image or a video stream than predicted by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Nyquist-Shannon dictates that a signal be sampled at a rate of at least twice that of its lowest-frequency content. Otherwise, the sampled version loses information present in the original signal. This idea works fine for situations where there is enough bandwidth to transmit the sampled signal. But it can cause problems for video signals because of the amount of data needed to represent each video frame. So video signals often get compressed before they are transmitted back to processing electronics, where they are in turn decompressed.

Compressive sensing techniques avoid the compress/decompress overhead because the signal is compressed as it is digitized and decompressed when reassembled. The key factor that lets compressive sensing work on images and video is that these kinds of signals are generally what is called sparse data. In scenes being videoed, for example, not much changes from one instant to the next. Mathematically, this lets a small amount of data relative to the overall number of pixels represent successive images.

Rice researchers say compressive sensing tehcniques are in the their infancy, but they hold promise in a number of areas. For example, single-pixel cameras can be super small, so they could conceivably be deployed in large arrays to image expansive areas. Surveillance applications, where scenes typically change little, are another area where single-pixel cameras could provide significant cost savings.

Monitoring jetengine bearings, wirelessly

Monitoring jetengine bearings, wirelessly

Researchers at Purdue University working with the U.S. Air Force have developed wireless sensors strong enough to survive inside operating jet engines where temperatures can climb to 572°F. The sensors detect when critical bearings are close to failing, as well as how long before they fail, letting maintenance personnel prevent costly breakdowns. The MEMS sensors are also small enough that they don’t interfere with the bearings. The sensors actually measure temperature, a good indicator of how well bearings are performing and when they can be expected to fail. Conventional bearing monitors track engine-oil temperature, an indirect method which yields less specific data. The sensors do not need batteries, which is a plus because batteries don’t perform well in hot environments. Instead power is supplied remotely through inductive coupling which uses coils of wire to generate current. The sensors send data out using telemetry.

Too Many Science Projects

By Michael Orshan Team Technologies

Eventually manufacturing standards and processes will be figured out. Hopefully, sooner than later. One of the issues, with all science, is how to get the science out of the R&D centers and into the commercial world. We all know that novel sciences are often funded by state or federal government and often part of the universities or public labs. It is amazing the success I’ve seen in labs. Truly amazing. However, how do we get this out of the labs?

Well, surprise, I have no plans of bashing scientists who have no worldly experience. I think that is unfair and often a “the easy way out”. I believe that four groups need to learn how to work together and be forced to work together. These are:

1. Those scientists
2. Entrepreneurs
3. Public Officials
4. Capitalists

I will rub a few scientists the wrong way by saying that you need all four and nobody, nobody, fits more than one category. A scientist can turn into a entrepreneur! BUT, they are no longer a scientist. Holding more than one role is the path to failure. The public officials need to recognize and gain the media attention required for success. The capitalists are needed for funds and executive management leadership.

Has this every been done before? Yes, in the US, there are examples in Austin, TX, San Diego, TX and Atlanta (or really most of), GA. There are others. In my two favorite cases UT at Austin and UC at San Diego led the effort. In fact, there are few efforts, if any, that have been led by anything other than the local university.

I think and have seen some exciting, revolutionary and timely projects being done in universities all over the place. Now is the time to get them out. Now is the time for leadership at the universities to create economic opportunities, in MEMS and other science. They need to include many players and this is difficult, however the rewards last for 50 years or more.

IMEC's MEMS programs seek life beyond Moore's Law

IMEC's MEMS programs seek life beyond Moore's Law
By Tom Cheyney, Small Times Senior Contributing Editor

November 12, 2007 -- Belgium's IMEC has become one of the world's leading R&D centers for advanced semiconductor manufacturing, having built a successful business model around active industrial-partner participation, top-flight team members and program development, and judicious government investment. But there's more to the research group than the relentless pursuit of the Moore's Law CMOS scaling path: MEMS and nanotechnology play an increasingly important role as IMEC moves forward.


The Leuven-based organization uses the term "heterogeneous integration" or the catchy "More than Moore" slogan to describe its programs outside of the advanced chipmaking (or "More Moore") arena. A key component of this multifaceted, multiple-application concept is CMORE, which "opens the 200-mm silicon processing facilities for R&D on silicon-technology-based process steps, process modules and complete processes, targeting the integration of additional functionality or performances surpassing those of standard CMOS processes," according to a recent paper by Lou Hermans, IMEC's NEXT department director and strategic business manager for its new silicon technology applications.

Much of CMORE's activity centers around development of process flows for new MEMS device concept and architectures, Hermans told Small Times. "We are mainly focusing on integrated MEMS, which means a combination of CMOS and MEMS technology. Many years ago, we made a choice to start working on silicon germanium as a structural material. Since then we have been continuously developing that technology. We have a number of projects in place where we are using this technology for realizing or testing certain concepts of certain device structures, [such as] micromirror arrays." Other MEMS applications being explored at IMEC include memory devices using cantilever structures (akin to IBM's Millipede technology), accelerometers, resonators, microbolometers, and thermopile-based energy harvesting.

Hermans cited several reasons for choosing silicon germanium. "It doesn't pose any contamination problems for the CMOS process environment. It is ideal for MEMS because of its high Young's modulus (tensile elasticity), high yield strength, absence of creep, no plastic deformation at typical operation temperatures, and insensitivity to fatigue failure."

IMEC employs what Hermans calls "a MEMS last/post-MEMS" or "monolithic integration" approach to MEMS-CMOS processing. "The MEMS structures are fabricated after completion of the CMOS processing on top of the CMOS wafer. The MEMS structures are realized by pure surface or bulk release etching on the completed CMOS wafer or by the deposition of additional structural layers on top of the CMOS circuitry that afterwards will be structured by surface micromachining."

Since the transfer of IMEC's advanced CMOS scaling activities to its 300-mm development fab, there has been much more access to the 200-mm facility for the heterogeneous integration programs, including MEMS, explained Hermans. "This gives us two things: of course, we have more access to the line, but on the other hand, the line is also becoming more stable. In the past, the scaling people always wanted to have the latest lithography tool and the latest deposition tool, in order to drive the scaling.

"Of course, this is not always what you want to have if you're working on applications where you're really making devices, where you're working toward yield, so you would like to work in a more stable environment. Due to the fact that it is not driven by scaling any more, we end up in an environment that is more stable and more suitable for this kind of work."

Some of IMEC's industrial partners have been showing increased interest in the center's MEMS programs. "There's definitely a growing interest, I think, driven by two things," said Hermans. "We are now in a situation that we can better respond to that interest, but it is also driven to some extent by the fact that some of the companies have stopped or are considering stopping their efforts in scaling in house, or are still doing scaling but only in cooperation with a silicon foundry like TSMC or UMC.

"But they are also looking for new products that they can run in their older fabs. So there's an interest for diversification away from pure digital or analog circuits, to circuits with a higher added value, and MEMS is one of the options."