Future in Tablets Technology

A Waterproof tablet PC from Fujitsu is seen lowered into a fish tank at the world's biggest high-tech fair, the CeBIT, on March 6, 2012 in Hanover, central Germany.

Let's look at where the trends point out for upcoming generations of tablet computers.


Transparent Displays :

Transparent glass displays are a staple of technology concept videos and while there has been immense innovation in display technology and devices, not much has translated to mobile devices yet. The next generation of tablets will most certainly move in this direction. Also, the tablets should allow extending the display to a television or another computer or project on a screen in an intuitive manner.

Diverse Form-Factor :

Foldable panels that fit one's pocket and display panels that can be extended to one's preference - the next generation of tablets would not be hard-lined on form factor and dimensions. A tablet, like a phone, is an intimate device and hence needs to be attached like a sensory organ.

File Storage :

As Internet and mobile data continues to grow ubiquitous and online services grow in number and capabilities, your data and preferences live on the cloud. The local storage becomes irrelevant, only sufficing the intermediary needs. Also, this would allow seamless migration from one device to another irrespective of device segment or operating system.

Interface :

While pointing via a mouse is old world, the touch would be the next casualty. Humans don't touch to interact in most cases. We speak or move our hands to explain things. Several devices of the current generation - game consoles, smartphones et al - employ bits and pieces of gesture and voice recognition and the next generations of tablet would have these baked in exhaustively with comprehensive knowledge of local cultures and languages.

Location-Awareness :

One of the biggest leaps that smartphones and tablets allowed was making the phone and apps location-aware using the GPS. This allows the information to be better served and locally relevant. Several services like Foursquare have built successful engagement on top of this, and it is anybody's guess that future evolutions would also bring context to the awareness.

Wireless Charging :

I've wished for this one every time I've snapped my laptop's charger and taken a fall through the cable. While wireless Internet and near-field communication are moving progressively, the future tablets would also cut this last cord.

Capabilities :

Snap your boarding pass, and your tablet would give you your flight details. Or place a phone or another tablet next to it, and data transfer would happen. Advances in near-field communication, image recognition, and augmented reality would give future computing devices immense power to enable seamless communication and enhance productivity in a natural manner.

 

Other Concept in Tablet :

Better battery backup, tougher casing and resistant to a fall or a dip in the water, and an overall holistic ease of managing the hardware.

Samsung planning to build 300 GHz Chips using Graphene

Samsung researchers have developed microprocessor using the Graphene-Silicon Schottky barrier as they can easily control electron flow by increasing or decreasing the height of the barrier.

Samsung also manufactured a basic logic gate device and verified that this logic gate can effectively perform one function. The basic procedure the device can manage is adding. 

The transistor-like gate called a Barristor.

Samsung researcher’s institute has owned other 9 major Graphene-related patents and it is only current company who has built a working microprocessor using Graphene. 

Graphene is a material that permits electrons to move through it 200 times easier than currently used semiconductor silicon.

If we can create a microprocessor using Graphene than we can build CPU which can run at 300 GHz speeds. So, researchers have achieved half of the normal Graphene electron mobility in making microprocessor. 

IBM has predicted theoretical that we can create 1000 GHz microprocessor using Graphene.

Making microprocessor using Graphene is little tough as it is a semi-metal and we can not control electron flow in a semi-metal. 

We can use cooling solutions to control electron flow in Graphene because electron can not pass through it. But the higher electron mobility might help dissipate the heat energy faster in a cooling base.

We can produce microprocessor using combination of Silicon and Graphene but it does not produce desirable results. 

We can transform Graphene in a semiconductor as it can effectively reduce free electron mobility in this semimetal and this technology has successfully used for Silicene transformation.

Researchers "Grow" New Blood Vessels

Synthetic blood vessels that can be made in advance and stored until surgery could help patients undergoing heart surgery, hemodialysis—cleansing of the blood in cases of kidney failure—and other procedures. Laura Niklason, an anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer at Yale University, and her collaborators have grown blood vessels using human cells and tested them in baboons, showing that they provoke no immune rejection and avoid common complications of synthetic vessels, such as clotting, bursting, or contracting over time. Researchers hope these studies will show that the vessels are safe enough to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials.

During bypass surgery, doctors looking to circumvent blocked arteries usually harvest vessels from a patient's leg or arm. But people who suffer from vascular disease or who have had previous procedures may have no suitable vessels left. The other options have complications: grafts from donors are often rejected by the recipient's immune system, artificial plastic vessels have high rates of blood clots and other problems, and vessels grown from a patient's own tissue take more than six months to mature. "Artificial grafts suffer from clotting and obstruction because they are not tissue," says Niklason, especially when plastic is used.

Niklason says she has solved this problem by creating vessels that are derived from living tissue but can be used off-the-shelf and are not rejected by the immune system. Using a technique she developed at MIT in the 1990s, researchers seed tubular scaffolds with smooth muscle cells. The cells secrete collagen and other connective tissue molecules around the scaffolds, forming blood vessels. After the scaffolds break down, the vessels are washed with a detergent that strips away the cells, leaving behind the fibrous tubes of collagen.

Because the tubes contain no living cells, they do not trigger an immune response and have a shelf life of more than a year. The group has previously grown vessels using cells from several different animal species, including canine versions for heart bypass surgeries in dogs.

Now, in a report published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers have grown vessels using human cells for the first time. They used the vessels to link an artery and a vein in baboons, creating a structure called a fistula to mimic the setup required by hemodialysis patients, who have a needle injected into such a link two or three times a week to get their blood filtered. Also, while previous versions of the vessels required a wait of several weeks while the insides of the vessels were "personalized" with some of the patient's own cells, a process that makes them less likely to clog, these hemodialysis vessels did not need that treatment.

"That means they could potentially be immediately available to the patient," says Shannon Dahl, a biomedical engineer who cofounded a biotechnology company called Humacyte with Niklason and another colleague to help bring the technology to market. Humacyte initially plans to test its technology in hemodialysis patients, though Dahl declined to give a timeline for clinical trials.

Researchers ultimately hope to test the vessels for heart surgeries, but they first want to show that the technology is safe and effective. "I would love to get to coronary bypass at some point, but we have to prove that this is a good, safe therapy in other anatomical locations first," says Niklason. A hemodialysis graft is much more easily replaced than a bypass graft if there are infections or other problems.

The researchers' use of baboons also provides important additional support before they move into human trials, says David Putnam, a chemical engineer at Cornell University who studies biomaterials. The reason is that the dynamics of blood flow in baboons are a good model for what happens in humans, he says. "They are going about this very well, very carefully. They're building a house with very strong bricks," he says. "And the next step is humans."

Hitachi Surprises with 7mm 7200RPM 320GB HDD

There are many ways that a new storage solution can cause jaws to be inadvertently dropped. Usually, it is because the read and/or write speed is spectacular, or because some new feature or another is supported. Other times, a device would stand out through being the first of its kind, as it happened with the first SSDs and, later, with the first PCI Express solid state drives. It appears, however, that there might be another way of turning heads.

Toshiba has combined inventiveness with experience in order to come up with a hard disk drive that stands out through being smaller than all of its peers. To be more specific, the SATA 3.0Gbps Travelstar Z7K320 that the hardware maker presented today, though it uses the same 2.5-inch form factor that all compact HDDs come with, is much thinner than one would expect. In fact, it is so thin that it will probably make its way into most ultrathin laptops slated for release during the later parts of 2010.

The actual thickness if of 7 millimeters, a full 2.5mm less than standard units (9.5mm). The performance, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have suffered the same shrinkage effect. The platter still manages to maintain a rotary speed of 7,200RPM (rotations per minute) and, backed by 16MB cache, the maximum transfer rate still gets as high as 1,334Mbps. This is quite significant, especially considering the power draw (1.8 Watts during read/write and 0.8 watts during standby).

As for noise hazards, the humming produced by the storage solution shouldn't go over 23dB when idle and 24dB when seeking. August is the earliest one can expect to see this product, as well a 5,400RPM version, being mass produced, which means that super-thin notebooks will start to show up soon after.

“As a leading personal computing company, we are constantly evaluating and offering new designs and technologies that make computing more enjoyable and affordable for our customers," said Wentao Yang, vice president, Global Procurement, Lenovo Group. "Hitachi's 7mm product family represents important advancements for the industry. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Hitachi and working together to innovate and take the computing landscape to newer smaller heights."

Sony Laser Enables 1TB Optical Disks

It was just a short while ago that Sharp announced its first BDXL Blu-ray disks, with a capacity of 100GB and, soon after, TDK revealed its own plans to join this movement. Later, once the first batch of disks starts selling, the two hope to move on to 128GB disks. Needless to say, these capacities are nothing to be frowned upon, but they may not keep their title as greatest for as long as some might think. Sony, in partnership with Tohoku University of Japan, have apparently developed a laser that has a watt output 100 times higher than the currently highest values for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers.

Basically, the new type of laser has an output of 100 watts and supposedly has the ability to scribe up to 20 times more data on a disk, compared to 'regular' Blu-ray. Essentially, this equals about 1TB. Granted, this technology isn't exactly in line with the vision of a future completely free of the need for optical storage, but a technology like this is still a great step forward. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no mention of how long it will take for it to see practical implementations.

“This latest successful development is an all-semiconductor laser picosecond pulse source with a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers (1 nm = one-billionth of a meter) in the blue-violet region,” the Sony/Tohoku University press releasereportedly states. “It is capable of generating optical pulses in the ultrafast duration of 3 picoseconds (1 picosecond = one-trillionth of a second), with ultrahigh output peak power of 100 watts and repetition frequency of 1 gigahertz. Advanced control of the newly-developed and proprietarily-constructed GaN-based mode-locked semiconductor laser and semiconductor optical amplifier have enabled peak output power in excess of 100 watts to be achieved, which is more than a hundred times the world’s highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers.”

“There are high expectations that this newly-developed semiconductor laser system, which incorporates semiconductor diodes, will be able to be used in a much wider range of applications in the future thanks to technology such as this, which enables the size of devices such as the light source box to be drastically reduced,” they added.