Soon, power your gadgets

The day may soon come when your cellphone - or just about any other portable electronic device - could be powered by simply taking a walk, two US scientists say.

Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor, both engineering researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have described a new energy-harvesting technology that promises to dramatically reduce our dependence on batteries and instead capture the energy of human motion to power portable electronics.
"Humans, generally speaking, are very powerful energy-producing machines," said Krupenkin, a UW-Madison professor of mechanical engineering. "While sprinting, a person can produce as much as a kilowatt of power."
Capturing even a small fraction of that energy, Krupenkin points out, is enough to power a host of mobile electronic devices - everything from laptop computers to cell phones to flashlights.
In their study, Krupenkin and Taylor describe a novel energy-harvesting technology known as "reverse electrowetting," where mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy by using a micro-fluidic device consisting of thousands of liquid micro-droplets interacting with a novel nano-structured substrate.
This technology could enable a novel footwear-embedded energy harvester that captures energy produced by humans during walking, which is normally lost as heat, and converts it into up to 20 watts of electrical power that can be used to power mobile electronic devices, they said.
Even though energy harvesting is unlikely to completely replace batteries in the majority of mobile applications, the UW-Madison researchers believe it can play a key role in reducing cost, pollution and other problems associated with battery use.

Samsung Launches New Galaxy iPad

South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co launched an upgraded version of its Galaxy tablet in its lucrative home market on Wednesday, seeking to stem the runaway success of Apple Inc's iPad. The Galaxy Tab 10.1, the sequel of the 7-inch Tab introduced in October, is the latest push by the company to challenge the iPad. Apple's iPad sold 14 million units in the first half of this year, compared with analysts' sales estimates of about 7.5 million for the Tab for 2011, the iPad's biggest competitor. "As our smartphone business grew very fast within a very short period of time, I believe it's just a matter of time for our tablet business to improve," J.K. Shin, head of Samsung' mobile division, told reporters. Samsung has emerged as Apple's nearest rival in the booming mobile device industry as it leverages its cost competitiveness and access to chips and core tablet components. It has sharply narrowed the gap with Apple in the smartphone market, but however remains a distant second in the tablet market, which Garner forecasts will surge to 108 million devices next year from an estimated 70 million in 2011. The sale of the Tab in Korea is Samsung's fifth global launch after its U.S. debut a month ago and its sales kickoff in Indonesia, where the company says it commands a 65 percent market share. It has also launched the device in Italy and Sweden. Pricing for the new product, slightly thinner and lighter than iPad 2, starts from $500 in the U.S. market, the same price as the iPad 2. Blockbuster sales of the iPhone, iPad and strong Asian business again helped Apple crush Wall Street's expectations for its third-quarter results on Tuesday. Apple said concern over iPad 2 supply constraints eased and demand was still overstripping supply in some markets. Samsung reiterated on Wednesday it aimed to boost tablet sales by more than five fold this year. It didn't provide specific numbers but analysts expect the company to have sold about 1.5 million units last year.

Generation Of Computers

A study has provided new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.
According to the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, spintronics, which exploits the electron's tiny magnetic moment, or "spin", could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption.
Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors.
While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons' spin.
One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents.
This is called "spin current" and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices.
The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.
However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue.
In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.
"You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves," Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said.
"Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents," Kurebayashi explained.
According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin waves.
Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.

Microscopic Marvels

Intel claims this new family of processors will consume half the power at the same switching speed but will be 37 per cent faster at the same voltage, particularly the lower voltages required for mobile computing devices. They will be 18 per cent faster on high-end consumer machines and servers. What does this mean? Well, it shows Intel continues to follow Moore's law - after Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders, who famously stated way back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a processor would double every two years. But the increasing number of transistors have made computers faster, while the per-unit cost of processing power has gone down dramatically. The new 3D microprocessor will allow the processors on handheld and portable devices to become even faster. A smartphone today has the processing power of a standard desktop computer of half a decade back. The new Samsung Galaxy S2 and the upcoming iPhone 4S have dualcore processors. Whether this new technology will help Intel make a mark in the portable devices space remains to be seen, but the technology major is expected to introduce an Atom-class lowcost processor using this technology in 2012. What it means is that technology will become even faster and more pervasive than it is today. Vinod Dham was the brain behind the Pentium processor. Again, the person behind Intel's drive to make processors ever smaller is another Indian. Kaizad Mistry is an alumnus of the 1984 batch of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. And what about the technology that allows Intel to make the silicon cuts on microprocessers smaller and smaller? There is an Indian behind that as well: Kanti Jain, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur, who developed a technology in 1982 that allowed lasers to make smaller and smaller etches on silicon wafers.