The lead hardware designer of both the original ARM core and the BBC Micro Computer, Professor Steve Furber, is leading an effort to simulate the human brain with ARM cores.  Custom chips with 18 cores each will be used.  Check out the story at Electronics Weekly for more information:   One million ARM cores to simulate brain at Manchester – 7/8/2011 – Electronics Weekly.

Diodes can be found at www.diodes.com.

Apple’s latest magic trick was upgrading their previous A4 chip into a dual core variant, the A5.  This chip powers the recently announced iPad 2 and is likely to be in the upcoming summer release of the iPhone 5 (4s?)  The folks at Chipworks have done some reverse engineering (which may be using actual magic) to see what the inside of the A5 looks like… all 2.9Million gates of it.

Pricing is set at $6 in volumes of 500k, so for hobby work it may be a cost/time trade-off.

ST selling single-chip GPS IC. – 1/27/2011 – Electronics Weekly.

Picture Courtesy of nbitwonder.com

George at nbitwonder caught this outside the Armstrong Hall of Engineering Purdue while walking to class.  The signs read:

I think work should be about making things work.  Better.  Faster.  Smaller.  Smarter.  So I build bridges between what’s known and what’s not.  I tinker.  I toil.  I write poetically in an abundance of languages (including code).  I hack.  I dissect.  I have an insatiable desire to un-complicate the complicated.  I am easily inspired.  I believe that just because it hasn’t been thought of doesn’t mean it won’t be.  Potential is my thrill ride.  Imagination is my most-used tool.  I am a maker, and I am what moves the world forward.

The QR code at the bottom right of the poster decodes to:  http://www.purdue.edu/makers

Always good to see I picked the right school for my EE degree!

Joseph Heremans and Roberto Meyrs at the Ohio State University have been studying materials that could be used to turn heat from ICs into electricity. The research is focused on thermo-electricity and spintronics. In theory, this could mean mutual benefits to heavy processing: more effective heat removal from processors while generating the electricity they need to operate

Continue reading: EDN: ICs could run on heat waste

Steve Buch at Electronics Weekly writes about how researchers Dr. Marie O’Neill and Dr. Jiang Wu at the University’s Institute of Electronics and Communications Information Technology (ECIT) has developed methods to generate true random bits digitally.

Fundamental to all of the ECIT generators is the effect of random noise during the transition from a metastable state to a bistable state.

Whether the output becomes a 0 or 1 depends on conditions, including internal noise, at the instant of input transition.

If you are giving thoughts to creating a cryptographic device, you might want to give their methods a look.

MEMS Gyroscope Picture from Chipworks.com

One of the major feature updates for the iPhone 4 included a gyroscope.  There are two applications that a gyroscope can be used for:  keeping an object in balance and providing precise positioning data.  Obviously, the intended application in an iPhone is improved positioning and control of software objects.  One of the questions I had about the iPhone 4 was whether there was something (very tiny) spinning inside of the iPhone or if the device was solid state.  Until now, I had no idea that solid state gyroscopes existed.  Engineers at iFixIt, with help from Chipworks‘s Electron Microscope, have done a teardown of the iPhone 4′s MEMS based Gyroscope.

The pictures and lessons on how Gyroscopes work is fascinating.  Their article not only educates on how Gyroscopes work, but compare a spinning gyroscope to a MEMS based gyroscope.  The summary is, the iPhone and compact mobile devices like it, are packing some of the highest levels of technology we have on our planet.  Think about that the next time you are sending someone “just a txt.”

Until recently, to transmit 1s and 0s the laser would turn the light would be pulsed on from an off state. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado have reversed the process and have successfully generated a series of “dark pulses.”

Any transmission medium will have irregularities which disrupt communications. What the researchers have found is that by sending Dark Pulses they can minimize the irregularities typically found in Fiber.

According to the lead researcher, Richard Mirin of NIST, it will be a few years before this technology makes it into the commercial marketplace.

More information can be found in this article at PhysicsWorld.

This pattern is called Row Your Boat. As one of the strips starts to get brighter, a nearby strip will join in the fading.  After completing a fade cycle, they start switching colors. There is a random strobe thrown in there as well.  The first 10 seconds are with a diffuser (piece of paper), the last 10 seconds are without.  The final panel will use a diffuser.