January 29, 2010
10 reasons why I like the iPad
By
Nicolas
Mokhoff
MANHASSET, NY — It's a fact of life that an experience often falls short of the euphoric buildup to it. It's the case with Christmas morning and a charismatic president's first year, and now it's the case with the iPad.
Apple's strategy of holding announcements close to the vest is partly to blame, as the self-proclaimed experts are bound to express their disappointment once the guessing games are over. Indeed, once seen and felt, the iPad elicited its share of "so what" responses. But is it really all that disappointing?
Perhaps it is, if you were expecting an all-in-one computer in a tablet format. But I came away with 10 reasons why the iPad is an achievement of value.
1. It's another Apple game-changer with attitude. Apple did not design the iPad to be an all-in-one tablet computer. But it did aim high with its first entry to address this computing paradigm. Comparing the iPad to e-book readers like the Kindle is pointless. Yes, it has some of Kindle's features, but it goes beyond the e-reader platforms, and will go even further in future versions. No less important, it bears the label of a company with two rich-media-content successes. Don't underestimate the power of the brand that brought us the iPod and iPhone.
2. It extends the touch-input ease of use of the iPhone with faster, 1-GHz processing speed to the Web, videos and images. Back in 2007, when the iPod broke sales records for music players, Apple's vice president of worldwide iPod marketing explained the product's success this way: "People have an emotional connection with music, and the iPod is so easy, the emotional connection is preserved." The iPad expands the bounds of that emotional affinity.
3. It has been born into a universe of apps. The iPhone—a handheld computer that happens to allow phone calls—supported users' many "emotional connections" by letting them switch seamlessly from application to application using touch technology. Now there are more than 140,000 apps for the iPhone, and most of them are available as downloads to the iPad. A software development kit will enable developers to create other applications for the platform.
4. It expands Apple's portable computing platform. The iPad is a multifunction device that compares favorably with large-screen but far more limited e-book readers like the Kindle DX. It features an in-plane switching LCD with 1,024 x 768 resolution and a pixel density of 132 ppi. One can hold it almost any way and still get a brilliant picture, with excellent color and contrast, according to Apple.
5. If you need it, iPad can provide it. An accessory keyboard dock combines a charging station with a full-size keyboard. The dock's connector enables connection to an electrical outlet using the USB power adapter, for syncing to one's computer and accessing accessories like a camera connection kit. Providing the camera kit as an accessory allows for a flexibility/space trade-off according to the user's preferences. I doubt many users would use the iPad to take pictures while mobile, so the need for an on-board camera is questionable.
6. This is more than a new product; it's the continuation of a commitment. One blogger caught this comment from Apple chairman Steve Jobs at the iPad rollout: "More than 75 million people already know how to use the iPad; these are the owners of iPhones and iPod Touches. And there are more than 125 million customer accounts with credit cards, all enabled for one-click shopping on iTunes, the App Store and the new iBook store. We are at scale, and we are ready for the iPad."
7. Technology wins over hype. According to one blogger, the iPad's A4 is a system-on-chip that integrates an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore with a memory controller. According to that blog, brightsideofnews.com, the SoC is mostly ARM IP clocking at 1 GHz, which is the " thermal sweet spot of the core, given that the maximum achievable clock of 1.3 GHz comes with a significant thermal penalty." Speed is everything in touch computers' screen response.
8. It's multilingual. According to Apple, iPad language support includes the following languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, simplified Chinese and Russian. Keyboard support is provided for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Italian, simplified Chinese and Russian. Dictionary support is provided for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Italian, simplified Chinese and Russian. Don't quibble about what "support" means.
9. Apple has gotten a bum rap for too many years. According to the blog entry iPad or iMonopoly?", the iPad is being positioned as a media consumption device, an electronic outlet for large publications, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and as a device to be used in manufacturing or for giving demonstrations on the fly. Apple could control the user experience and the applications market. Take that, Microsoft.
10. EE Times was banned from covering Apple's launch event. Reverse psychology works. I didn't get to play with the iPad, but I feel in my gut that my fellow engineers who love the iPhone and all its high-tech apps will also give the iPad its due as a technological achievement.
See other commentaries on iPad:
The iPad falls short, way short
All hail, mighty iPad
The Apple iPad: Your future third device?
Credit where credit is due
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January 25, 2010
The nano search for batteries
By
Nicolas
Mokhoff
In December last year NIST announced up to $71 million in funding through its Technology Innovation Program (TIP) for 20 new cost-sharing projects that will support innovative, high-risk research in new technologies that address critical national needs.
The new projects include developing unmanned, hovering aircraft for bridge inspections, a high-speed sorting system for recycling aerospace metals, and nanomaterials for advanced batteries, among other projects.
Vincent Caprio, Executive Director of the NanoBusiness Alliance, is especially proud that nine companies are from what he calls "our nanotechnology community."
Two are research projects in battery technologies.
Amprius, Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.) received funds for silicon nanowire production for advanced Lithium-Ion batteries.
A123Systems, Inc. (Ann Arbor, Mich.) was funded to scale up high-risk, low-cost carbon nanofiber manufacturing process.
Good start, but needs to be accelerated.
The faster we can find long-lifetime battery solutions the more we will have unthetered devices roaming our factories, schools and offices.
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January 19, 2010
Tools push robotics development
By
Nicolas
Mokhoff
Recently, National Instruments brought out its LabVIEW Robotics 2009 graphical system design platform for robotic and autonomous control systems. What's it good for?
For one, it can help companies like Alliance Spacesystems deliver space robotics that can operate in extreme environments on Earth and on Mars.
The Alliance Spacesystems robotics design lab uses NI software and software-defined modular hardware to helps rapidly develop, demonstrate, and test a concept prior to implementation on flight hardware.
NI tools were especially useful during concept demonstrations and the prototyping phase of their in-space robotic arms.
Alliance Spacesystems claims that the graphical programming of all LabVIEW tools greatly simplifies complex tasks, such as advanced control algorithm development and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test configurations.
A couple of more examples:
A NI single-board RIO was used to assist in creating an automated "Mosquito" soil-hardness tester tool.
Also, the company's Aerospace Robotics Testbed had an application that demanded a real-time OS and the utmost in reliability in stability and control. They used CompactRIO with low-level control algorithms residing on FPGA and higher-level algorithms, such as the inverse kinematics residing on the embedded, real-time processor.
More details can be found here.
There are many other down to earth robotics applications where prototype tools like those from National Instruments can come in handy.
Care to share your experience?
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January 13, 2010
The best of sensors at ISSCC
By
Nicolas
Mokhoff
Next month's International Solid State Circuits Conference will present the 'best of the best' circuits implemented by researchers in imagers, MEMS, sensors and displays.
Here are some highlights from ISSCC:
A new stable RGBW AMOLED display with OLED degradation compensation that substantially reduces image sticking and increases the useful lifetime of active OLED displays. Paper number [6.3]
A signal processor with the lowest-reported power consumption that extracts the heart's rhythm with elegant simplicity. This circuit consumes only 30microW, enabling it to run off a small battery for months, constantly monitoring the state of the patient for the diagnosis of chronic illness. Paper number [6.6]
Integrated temperature sensors that need no calibration can be used anywhere and everywhere! Quality is not sacrificed with 0.2deg.C 3sigma accuracy from -55deg.C to 125deg.C. Paper number [17.4]
A new aluminum-nitride-on-silicon resonator that is an important step towards integrating high-Q, low-phase-noise reference oscillators on-chip. The associated trans-impedance amplifier has a gain greater than 76dB-Ohm across a bandwidth of 2.5GHz, with a figure-of-merit of 2190GHzOhm/mW, with a 500femtoFarad load. Paper number [17.6]
Time-of-flight sensor with the smallest pixel which enables the first generation of range-finding sensors for gaming applications. Integrated optical sensors and interfaces provides an 80-60 pixel range-finding image sensor with 10-10 micron sq. lock-in pixels. Paper number [22.7]
The first backside-illuminated (BSI) CMOS image sensor with 10Mpixel resolution. The BSI sensor with 1/2.3-inch 10.3 Mpixel image uses1.65-1.65 micron sq. pixels, operates up to 50 frames per second. Paper number [22.9]
For more, see here.
Also, a paper from MIT is intriguing in that it describes a CMOS image sensor, based on a 3-D stacking technology.
Get ISSCC-ed first week in February! And come back to us with your impressions.
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