Tag Archives: electronics

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Memristors – The new component of electronics

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A new component of electronics, first proposed in 1971, has been built by researchers at Hewlett Packard. Memristors join the three existing main components of a circuit – capacitors, resistors and inductors. The main feature of a memristor is its ability to ‘remember’ what charge it had when power runs through it.

Today, most PCs use dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which loses data when the power is turned off. But a computer built with memristors could allow PCs that start up instantly, laptops that retain sessions after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge. “If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off,” Professor Williams told Reuters.

In addition the memristor is very small and once fully commercialised could allow computer chips far smaller than those today, giving good old Moore’s Law another reprieve as conventional methods to keep it going begin to run out of steam.

[via BBC]

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Nokia creates flexible phone prototype that can be worn as bracelet

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Nokia innovates new flexible mobile phonesExciting times in the world of electronics as phone company Nokia have designed a wearable, flexible phone. Resembling a normal handset folded in half, when fully unrolled it can be used as a keyboard but it can also be folded lengthways and widthways and curled into a bracelet to wear on the wrist.

Although current battery technology isn’t good enough to join this flexible technology revolution as improvements in nanowire batteries and even static electricity generating clothing could mean that in ten year’s time we wear our phone/mp3 player/personal computer on our sleeve and link up our headphones to it wirelessly.

[image and story via the Guardian]

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Moore’s Law to end in fifteen years?

microchip Gordon Moore has predicted the expiry of the "Law" that bears his name to occur within the next ten to fifteen years. Moore’s Law is a rule of thumb that states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years (or thereabouts), and it has held up remarkably well since Moore coined it in the mid-sixties.

Indeed, this isn’t the first time Moore has sounded a death-knell for the Law, but as conventional electronics is inherently limited by the laws of physics, it’s plausible that it has to stop at some point. So what does this mean for the exponential theories of Singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil? Or will technologies like quantum computing pick up the ball before semiconductors drop it? [Via SlashDot][Image by oskay]

[tags]Moore’s Law, computing, electronics, futurism[/tags]
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California Voting Machines Insecure, But Use ‘Em Anyway

115608-2206P121 6BThe Secretary of State of California recently ordered a complete security audit of all electronic voting systems in use in the state of California. Despite some concerns about an unrealistic schedule, this appears to be more than security theater — one system was completely decertified, and several other systems (including Diebold and Sequoia systems) were decertified and conditionally re-certified given the imposition of additional security precautions. Bruce Schenier’s got a good roundup of related articles.

I’ve worked the past couple of California elections and have to say that the physical security, at least at the polling sites, is pretty good. Nonetheless, I was glad to see a paper audit tape used last time around.