Memristor Extends Moore’s Law by Decades and Will Enable Exascale Computers by 2020

Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News    Computer Software Zdnet visited Stan Williams at HP Labs to discuss memristors * It will take us about 3 years before we have commercial memristors. The good news is that they are easy to make and completely compatible with standard CMOS chip manufacturing techniques. They also scale to …

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Computing Beyond Silicon

Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News &nbsp  Computer Software MIT Technology Review looks at the materials for computers after silicon. Researchers are trying to develop alternative materials such as gallium arsenide, graphene, and carbon nanotubes. Silicon will probably be the main material for quite a while but there will be more mixing of materials onto …

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MIT Proposes Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for Natural Gas Power

MIT researchers propose a system that uses solid-oxide fuel cells, which can produce power from fuel without burning it. The system would not require any new technology, but would rather combine existing components, or ones that are already well under development, in a novel configuration (for which they have applied for a patent). The system …

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Calstar Products Makes Bricks Using 5 to 10 Times Less Energy

CalStar Products, Inc. uses advanced technology to make architectural facing bricks and durable pavers for the green building market. Both products contain 40% post-industrial recycled material, use 90% less energy to make, and generate 90% less CO2 than traditional fired clay brick and pavers Building operations consume around 39 percent of the total energy in …

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Silicon Nanotube Battery Anodes Can Store Ten Times More than Graphite Electrodes for lithium-ion batteries

From MIT Technology Review, researchers have shown that silicon nanotube electrodes can store 10 times more charge than the conventional graphite electrodes used in lithium-ion batteries. “In a hybrid car, the battery lasts only 30 minutes using the current technology,” says Jaephil Cho, associate professor of applied chemistry at Hanyang University, who led the research …

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Blind Spots and Fuzzy Vision Looking for Near Earth Asteroids: Space Neighborhood Watch Needs Funding

From New Scientist, existing sky surveys miss many asteroids smaller than 1 kilometre across, leaving the door open to damaging impacts on Earth with little or no warning, a panel of scientists reports. Doing better will require devoting more powerful telescopes to asteroid hunting, but no one has committed the funds needed to do so, …

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Nvidia Chief Scientist Predicts 20 Teraflop Nvidia GPUs in 2015

William J. Dally Chief scientist, Nvidia Corp predicts Nvidia GPUs in 2015 will be implemented on 11 nm process technology that feature roughly 5,000 cores and 20 teraflops of performance. Throughput processors have hundreds of cores today and will have thousands of cores by 2015. Performance scaling of single-thread processors stopped in 2002, Dally said, …

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EUV Lithography Could Be Commercial 2012-2014

ASML Holding NV (Netherlands) tipped a roadmap for the introduction of its first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines at the IMEC Technology Forum. Martin van den Brink, executive vice president for products and technology said “EUV is the cost effective successor of 193-nm lithography below 20-nm.” and that ASML believes it can extend EUV down …

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Solid State Drives Cheaper, 100 times Faster than SAN Hard Disk Arrays

The Enterprise solid state storage disruption is happening now. Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power and at a tenth of the …

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Technological Improvements Raise the Energy Return For Energy Production

1. Improvements in Life Cycle Energy Efficiency and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Corn-Ethanol from researchers at the University of Nebraska Ethanol-to-petroleum output/input ratios ranged from 10:1 to 13:1 but could be increased to 19:1 if farmers adopted high-yield progressive crop and soil management practices. An advanced closed-loop biorefinery with anaerobic digestion reduced GHG emissions by …

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Eric Drexler has more Interesting Articles at Metamodern

Eric Drexler indicates in a new post that stiffness matters for nanotechnology. Drexler also continues his discussion on stiffness of materials and different proteins at e-drexler.com Drexler also has an article about molecular assembly lines and getting away with less programmability. In the comments, Chris Phoenix notes that it is easy to add a useful …

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