At next week’s SPIE Advanced Lithography conference (San Jose, CA), imec announces the successful implementation of the world first 300mm fab-compatible Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) process line all-under-one-roof in imec’s 300mm cleanroom fab. The upgrade of an academic lab-scale DSA process flow to a fab-compatible flow was realized in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, AZ …
The computer industry has become almost fixated on power issues. Power-per-watt is the new metric for CPUs and GPUs, and everything from chips to data centers are now power-limited. The Tilera corp. has developed a series of multicore processors which could dramatically reduce power consumption for certain computing tasks. For tasks not requiring floating-point performance, …
EIA US Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays, July 2011 (105 pages) The Monterey/Santos oil field in California is estimated to four times the technically recoverable oil as the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. The Monterey field is also estimated to have 500 billion barrels of oil in place …
UPDATED- China Daily has a copy of the white paper that describes China space programme’s five-year plan, a China National Space Administration (CNSA) pronounced a Long March-5 rockets “will use non-toxic and pollution-free propellant”. This would catch up to Russian and American rockets that have been using non-toxic fuel for a few decades. BBC News- …
UCLA physicists have made nanomechanical measurements of unprecedented resolution on protein molecules. The new measurements, by UCLA physics professor Giovanni Zocchi and former UCLA physics graduate student Yong Wang, are approximately 100 times higher in resolution than previous mechanical measurements, a nanotechnology feat which reveals an isolated protein molecule, surprisingly, is neither a solid nor …
Researchers at Michigan Technological University are working on an asymmetric capacitor, a new type of electrical storage device that’s half capacitor, half battery. “Being lighter will give them a real advantage in handheld power tools and consumer electronics and hybrid electric vehicles are another potential market, since an asymmetric capacitor can charge and discharge more …
Carnival of Space 224 is up at Smaller Questions Universe Today – engineers at JPL sent commands across 14 billion kilometers (9 billion miles) out to Voyager 2, enabling it to switch to the backup set of thrusters that controls the roll of the spacecraft. This will reduce the amount of power that the 34-year-old …
Alex Knapp at Forbes talks about the example of the limits of airplane speed as an example of real world limits to exponential progress. The speed of rockets continue the speed curve slightly. What made us really fall of the speed of vehicle improvement curve was abandoning the development of nuclear pulse propulsion. Nuclear bombs …
Hitachi has demonstrated a 3D projector that can project images onto real-world objects. For the demo, a 3D image of a bird hatching was displayed on an artificial egg that was cradled in an artificial nest. But that’s not all. Viewers looking at the demo see the bird as a hologram, in that as the …
Universe Today – the SOHO mission (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) shows a sun-diving comet hitting the solar surface on October 1, 2011 and unexpectedly a huge explosion occurs shortly after. Are the two events related? Probably not, but solar scientists don’t know for sure. The region where the coronal mass ejection (CME) originated was on …
Business Week – Contagion from a potential Greek default isn’t priced into financial markets, said Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. “Greece will default,” Roach said in an interview on CNBC today. While the risk of such an event is “pretty close” to being priced in by investors, he said the potential knock-on …