Lifeboat Foundation

Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn’t a working device of any kind — it’s essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it’s apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable’s Paul Cain.

The prototype uses plastic transistors to achieve its flexibility, creating what the company calls OLCD (organic liquid crystal display) screens. FlexEnable says these can achieve the same resolutions as regular LCD using the same amount of power, but, of course, they have that added flexibility. These transistors can be wrapped around pretty much anything, and also have uses outside of display technology. FlexEnable was also showing off thin flexible fingerprint sensors, suggesting they could be wrapped around a door handle to add security without it being inconvenient to the user.

Continue reading “FlexEnable has created a screen you can wrap around your wrist” »

Your smartwatch screen may soon be rather more impressive: This 4.7-inch organic LCD display is flexible enough to wrap right around a wrist.

Produced by FlexEnable from the UK, the screen squeezes a full-color organic LCD onto a sheet that measures just one hundredth of an inch thick, which makes it highly conformable. The company claims that it can easily run vivid colour and smooth video content, which is a sight better than most wearables.

It’s not the first flexible display, of course. LG already has an 18-inch OLED panel that has enough flexibility to roll into a tube that’s an inch across. But this concept—which, sadly, is all it is right now—is the first large, conformable OLCD designed for wearables that we’ve seen.

Continue reading “This 4.7-Inch Organic LCD Wraps Right Around Your Wrist” »

UC Berkeley engineers, in collaboration with colleagues at Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, have developed a 3D printing process for creating basic electronic components, such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, and integrated wireless electrical sensing systems.

As a test, they printed a wireless “smart cap” for a milk carton that detected signs of spoilage using embedded sensors.

Plasmonics, the study of how electrons behave in a metal under an electromagnetic field, requires the use of specialty coherent light sources as a basic tool. Optical interferometry can potentially become more important in biomedicine if only the technology could be made more compact, practical, and proven useful.

Toward that end researchers at Brown University have developed a way of using plasmonics techniques without using a coherent light source at all. This allows optical interferometry at the nanoscale and should lead to new types of biomedical sensors that can do rapid wide spectrum analysis for a variety of markers.

Here’s more details about the technology from Brown University:

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Wireless Power Transmission Market reach $13.11 Billion by 2020. This is an area that I plan to keep a closer eye on especially since IEEE’s recent approved standards on sensors. I have a feeling that we could start seeing some major progress in this space.

DUBLIN, Jan. 27, 2016 /PR Newswire UK/ — Wireless Power Transmission Market (2015−2020) — Valued at $0.72 Billion in 2014 & Is Expected to Grow at a CAGR of 51.5%.

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Integrated circuits traditionally have been a domain reserved for electrons, which course through exquisitely tiny transistors, wires and other microscopic structures where the digital calculations and data processing that underlie so much of modern technology unfold. Increasingly, however, chip designers have been acting on a long-ripening vision of enlisting photons instead of, or in tandem with, electrons in the operation of microprocessors. Photons, for one, can serve as fast-as-light carriers of information between chips, overcoming digital traffic jams that at times put the brakes on electrons. Recently, DARPA-funded scientists designed and crafted a breakthrough microprocessor that combines many of the best traits of electrons and photons on a single chip. The result is a remarkable and elegant hybrid microtechnology that boggles the mind for the intricate complexity of its sub-Lilliputian architecture. To appreciate the engineering acumen involved in the development of this chip and its tens of millions of resident electronic and photonic components, DARPA has produced an annotated, graphical tour of the new chip’s innards. Check it out, and lose yourself in a world of highways, toll gates and traffic circles populated by some of the physical world’s smallest commuters.

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This time, there is a very serious news about virtual reality as Google Inc. is said to be getting ready to unveil a new-fangled smartphone headset.

According to The Financial Times, the new headset will succeed Cardboard, and would be featuring much better sensors, lenses, and a more solid plastic skin.

It’s said the product is the like of Samsung’s Gear VR since it will use a smartphone to display as well as most of its processing power. The only difference is that the current Cardboard VR headset is just a cardboard headset like its name with an inserted smartphone, while the new one will be coming with an extra motion sensor for adding whatever the phone places out.

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More news on Qubits that are surprisingly intrinsically resilient to noise.

While a classical bit found in conventional electronics exists only in binary 1 or 0 states, the more resourceful quantum bit, or ‘qubit’ is represented by a vector, pointing to a simultaneous combination of the 1 and 0 states. To fully implement a qubit, it is necessary to control the direction of this qubit’s vector, which is generally done using fine-tuned and noise-isolated procedures.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the University of Konstanz have demonstrated the ability to generate a quantum logic operation, or rotation of the qubit, that — surprisingly — is intrinsically resilient to noise as well as to variations in the strength or duration of the control. Their achievement is based on a geometric concept known as the Berry phase and is implemented through entirely optical means within a single electronic spin in diamond.

Continue reading “Moving electrons around loops with light: A quantum device based on geometry” »

This agreement places Oxford in a very nice position.

Quantum transport measurements are widely used in characterising new materials and devices for emerging quantum technology applications such as quantum information processing (QIP), quantum computing (QC) and quantum sensors. Such devices hold the potential to revolutionise future technology in high performance computing and sensing in the same way that semiconductors and the transistor did over half a century ago.

Physicists have long used standard electrical transport measurements such as resistivity, conductance and the Hall effect to gain information on the electronic properties and structure of materials. Now quantum transport measurements such as the quantum Hall effect (QHE) and fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) in two-dimensional electron gases (2DEG) and topological insulators – along with a range of other more complex measurements – inform researchers on material properties with quantum mechanical effects.

Continue reading “Oxford Instruments and SPECS Surface Nano Analysis GmbH sign agreement for Nanonis Tramea quantum transport measurement system” »