Monday, February 3, 2014

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ARM gets interested in CeRAM

Posted: 03 Feb 2014 01:48 AM PST

ARM Holdings is apparently snuffling around a new non-volatile memory technology that could scale further and perform better than flash memory and resistive RAM (ReRAM).

Carlos Paz de Araujo, a professor at the University of Colorado who is the leading advocate for development of CeRAM said he has interested in the technology from ARM.

Speaking to Electronics 360,  de Araujo said that ARM was supporting his research into a non-filamentary, non-volatile memory technology based on the metal-insulator Mott transition in nickel oxide and other transition metal oxides (TMOs).

Correlated-Electron RAM (CeRAM) can be used to build devices as small as 5 nanometers using an atomic force microscope. Recently de Araujo came up with some sexy "new switch" capabilities of the device. To date CeRAM devices have only been fabricated at dimensions of about 0.8 micron.

Typically R&D that is beyond the scaling of mainstream silicon manufacturing processes and materials has taken many years. But Professor Araujo has been working on the technology for already for five years and there is a large body of resistive RAM (ReRAM) research in place globally as non-volatile memory has been a hotly pursued research topic for several years.

CeRAM differs from other ReRAM developments in that it does not depend on atomic transport to make and break filaments, which brings with it issues of thermal dependence and reliability.

It uses a metal-insulator transition that occurs throughout the crystal structure based on quantum mechanical electron correlation effects,.

This can be considered as a quantum mechanical tuning of electron bands in the material due to electron-electron effects within atoms.

ARM is becoming increasingly relevant to achieving energy-efficiency goals for future mobile and Internet of Fings (IoT). 

Nvidia gets even more open saucy

Posted: 03 Feb 2014 01:46 AM PST

Nvidia released the initial open-source hardware code to support its forthcoming Tegra K1 SoC graphics within Nouveau.

The Tegra K1 is uses Kepler-based graphics and should be rather powerful. Nvidia has already been supporting their binary graphics driver on ARM for several months, but now to complement its official high-performance binary graphics driver is Nouveau graphics driver support for this SoC has not been seen.

Nouveau for years has relied upon community reverse-engineering but it now seems that Nvidia has woken up and smelt the coffee and provided the first hardware enablement patches to the driver itself.

Alexandre Courbot of Nvidia told the DRI mailing list that GK20A is the Kepler-based GPU used in the upcoming Tegra K1 chips.

"The following patches perform architectural changes to Nouveau that are necessary to support non-PCI GPUs and add initial support for GK20A. Although the support is still very basic and more user-space changes will be needed to make the full graphics stack run on top of it, we were able to successfully open channels and run simple pushbuffers with libdrm," he wrote.

This Tegra K1 Nouveau support is still proof-of-concept but it is a sign that Nvidia is getting more open saucy having committed to better open source graphics support in September.

Now this experimental work is limited to Nouveau's DRM kernel driver and not the Nouveau Gallium3D driver nor xf86-video-nouveau DDX.

Nouveau is still stuck to GL3 compared to Nvidia's OpenGL 4.x hardware, the performance is better, and there are other features not found in the open-source Nvidia driver. 

David Cameron has been watching too many cop shows

Posted: 03 Feb 2014 01:45 AM PST

Prime Minister David Cameron is attempting to get his snooper’s charter back online again after being killed off by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for being too expensive.

Cameron now  wants to further legalise the government's ability to spy on pretty much all communications because of what he sees in the fictional cop shows on television.

According to the BBC, Cameron told a parliamentary committee that gathering communications data was "politically contentious" but vital to keep citizens safe.

He said that in the most serious crimes shows, such as child abduction cases, communications data is vital.

“I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device,” he said.

Cameron said that the government had to explain to people that... "if we don't modernise the practice and the law, over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of devices and that is a real problem for keeping people safe".

In other words, because fictional characters on crime drama TV shows make use of data, that is somehow proof that it is necessary. What is interesting is that Cameron is clearly selective in his viewing. If he watched Enemy of the State it would show how government can abuse such information, or maybe that is the idea.

That is right. Because Cameron has seen shows on TV where criminal cases are solved because of technology, he thinks that it is vital that the country should give up its right to privacy. It is just as well he does not watch much science fiction or he would be spending many tax dollars looking for alien technology and monitoring police phone boxes. Sheesh even Thatcher did not get that mad and she was completely barking.

Next he will be calling for a public inquiry into why so many serial killers have hit the town of Bradfield in West Yorkshire over the last decade.

Chinese want to put HP out of business

Posted: 03 Feb 2014 01:40 AM PST

Chinese boffins have come up with a cunning plan to put HP out of business.

For years HP has been making printer ink which is more expensive than gold, but the Chinese have worked out a way to make it from water.

Now although governments are keen to pollute the water supply so their mates in big oil can survive, there is still a lot of the stuff about. Whereas printer cartridges are both ridiculously expensive and harmful to the environment.

Jilin University chemistry professor Sean Zhang and his team said that people still print their emails and all sorts of useless things so a paperless office is still the dream of executives with too much time on their hands.

They created an all-new printing system, using water in lieu of ink on a special paper that changes colour when wet.

Dubbing this paper "water-jet rewriteable," Zhang's team created it with dyes that are invisible until exposed to moisture; the water opens closed, colourless molecules in the paper, triggering the coloration. The paper can be printed on repeatedly, since the words are erasable.

Our guess is though that it will not solve the problems of printing which has to last a long time, like company reports. 

Roman coppers turn to Twitter for parking violations

Posted: 03 Feb 2014 01:38 AM PST

The glorious parking coppers of Rome have turned to Twitter in a desperate attempt to sort out parking in the eternal city.

The City of Rome is rubbish when it comes to parking. The only off-street parking costs you an arm and a leg and citizens are forced to "park creatively". Rather than provide council parking, the local council spent a fortune on electronic cameras which filmed people parking illegally and issued them with a ticket.

This went down like "British food" as the electronic cameras issued a ticket even if it had snapped a picture of the car before. This resulted in some people getting ten parking tickets for what was arguably the same offence.

Now that particular cunning plan has failed, the Roman council has decided to use social notworking to solve the problem.

The council here has asked residents to post photos of bad parking jobs to Twitter. They have asked for mobile phone users to snap pics of drivers who had left their vehicles in no-parking areas, double-parked, or otherwise in violation of city law.

They then asked folks to tweet those photos to the department's Twitter account. In the first 30 days of the campaign, police received more than 1,100 complaints, and officials were able to respond to around 740 of them, handing out several hundred tickets.

The officer in charge of the programme, Raphael Clemente, said that it was a great opportunity to give a sign of modernity, openness and transparency".

Of course, it does mean that you can run passive aggressive rows with your neighbour which costs them a fortune and the Roman Commune still has not solved the problem of what to do about a complete lack of council car parking. 
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