Future chips could 'self rewire'

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19 October 2011 Last updated at 13:14 GMT By Katia Moskvitch Technology reporter, BBC News Computers of the future may be nothing like today's ones Future microchips may have only one type of component, capable of rewiring itself to do different jobs.

Researchers from Northwestern University in the US have developed a material that can radically change its electronic properties.

A resistor made from it could become a transistor or a diode, according to the report in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The discovery could lead to cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers.

As electronics advance and demands for portability increase, one of the main challenges has been decreasing the size of elementary components.

Technology firms have attempted to address this with a number of innovations, including new ways of building circuit tracks so signals do not suffer damaging interference at ultra small sizes.

The Northwestern University team took a different approach.

"It's becoming more and more challenging to make devices smaller and you need to think of new ways rather than just shrinking things down because you're reaching a fundamental scientific limit here of how small you can make a device," said David Walker, one of the researchers.

"Our solution to this is instead of making things smaller, why don't we try to make them more versatile - by taking all these hardware components and building them into one.

"Think of this as a Swiss army knife of computer hardware, so to speak, where you package a lot of different things all into one device."

Rewiring itself By controlling how the ions (blue) are distributed, it is possible to "steer" current flows - and change the properties of a particular component

To achieve this, the scientists have created a new material that consists of a "sea" of small negatively charged particles and larger, positively charged particles, which are "jammed" in place.

Because the negative particles form conductive regions, they act like conventional copper tracks in a circuit.

Once an electrical charge is applied to the material, those particles can be shifted around and reconfigured.

"Like redirecting a river, streams of electrons can be steered in multiple directions through a block of the material - even multiple streams flowing in opposing directions at the same time," explained the lead researcher, Professor Bartosz Grzybowski, of Northwestern University.

This unusual property could allow a component made from this material to change its functions - allowing, in turn, a future computer to redirect and adapt its own circuitry as required.

"So the computer could send some set of electrical impulses or some type of electrical potential, and that would actually reconfigure the device to operate in a different way," said Mr Walker.

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Eventually down the road it has the possibility to replace silicon-based devices and to make electronics in a completely new way”

End Quote David Walker Northwestern University He explained that there was not yet a name for the new material, but it was unlike any other material that exists today.

Smaller and more powerful

As computers would have fewer components, the scientists believe, it would inevitable be less costly to produce them - and for consumers to buy them.

If such a component were manufactured today, said Mr Walker, it would be four times larger than "IBM's best sized technology out there", but at the same time it would be able to simultaneously fulfil the functions of five different devices - so the overall efficiency would soar by 20%.

And eventually, these components would decrease in size, he added.

"The technology has got the propensity to be smaller, cheaper and more powerful.

"Eventually down the road it has the possibility to replace silicon-based devices that we use and to make electronics in a completely new way that may turn out to be much more promising than the current technology used in all of today's devices."

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This is the future calling

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11 October 2011 Last updated at 09:02 GMT By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News Sometimes it can be hard to get a strong mobile signal When science fiction writer William Gibson observed that the future is already here, it is just not very evenly distributed, he could have been thinking of mobile networks.

Those networks are a patchwork of second and third generation mobile technologies which has become a problem as we do more with our phones than just talk and text.

It means that web access is blazing fast in one location, absent close by and limping along at a snail's pace around the corner.

But, say many mobile operators, this will be a distant memory when fourth generation (4G) mobile technology is put in place.

Big changes

The problem with this claim is that the 4G technology operators are blowing the trumpet for, known as LTE (Long Term Evolution), is not officially 4G.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has the job of deciding which G is which. Under its definition, LTE is 3.9G.

The ITU's standard for 4G technology demands that it be capable of pushing data around at a rate of 1 gigabit per second. LTE is designed to handle a mere 100 megabits per second.

Despite this, LTE will bring in big changes for mobile networks, says Dan Warren, senior director of technology at the GSMA, the industry association for mobile networks.

"The original GSM networks were designed primarily with voice optimisation in mind," he said. "That involved low delay but relatively low bandwidth over an air interface that in the 80s was quite unreliable."

Essentially those early networks were all about talking on the phone with a tiny bit of texting involved. Bracketed around this was lots of error correction technology to ensure your call did not drop out.

But mobile users are no longer happy to do mainly talking and a bit of texting.

"There's a recognition in the industry as a whole that data and access to the internet are of vital importance," said Mr Warren.

This is where LTE comes in.

"When you get to LTE you do not have voice delivered in the traditional way any more," he said. "In LTE everything is treated as data and it is all handled by the same core network."

This means we should be able to get more out of our smartphones, tablets and e-readers as broadband speeds will be generally faster.

Power play

But for all its advances, LTE does have a downside in that it makes very heavy use of the spectrum allocated to it. And some feel that LTE and its successor technologies stick too closely to what has come before.

As phones shrink, the legacy of the network stays with them.

That technology legacy is making itself increasingly evident, claims Rajarshi Sanyal, a telecoms researcher from Brussels.

Working with Prof Ernestina Cianca from the University of Rome and Prof Ramjee Prasad from Aalborg University, he is looking at an alternative way to build a mobile network, one simpler than what we have now but still able to support high data rates.

Their contention is that mobile networks are getting too complicated to manage effectively. That, they say, is not just a problem for operators.

It has a knock-on effect to handsets too.

"Not only are mobile networks today complex but they need active elements at every nook of the network," said Mr Sanyal. That means each handset has to devote a chunk of its processing and battery power to maintaining contact with the network."

As the number of mobile users increases and the cell sizes shrink, this continuous interaction between the handset and the network implies a substantial overhead on the network.

A network in which that burden is lessened would mean phones spend fewer processing cycles and battery power checking in. The researchers have come up with a design for just such a system and are setting up a demonstration to show how their suggested admin-lite network might work.

"With the same processor you leave more room for catering to the next generation of network driven applications," said Mr Sanyal.

The idea has some merit, said Mr Warren.

"If you were to take a purist view and scrap everything we have today and replace it, then absolutely you could do something a lot simpler," he said.

However, he added, the practicalities of building a network mean those simple choices cannot be made.

Money talks

But even as networks get better at handling data and the bandwidth speeds rise, operators could face another problem - how to persuade people to splash out and buy a new LTE handset.

Mobile networks are changing as we do much more than just talk and walk

"Going to go from eight megabits per second to 20 Mbps you will see the difference, but it's not the same impact as if you went from dial-up to broadband," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at market research firm Gartner who specialises in mobile devices.

Selling that first uplift was easier, she said, because the difference was so stark. What also fed into that initial demand for 3G phones was the fact that the handsets that worked on those networks were among the first to have cameras. Together the two drove demand and got people onto those faster networks.

Such a feat is going to be harder to repeat this time around, she said, because all those features we are used to on a smartphone will already be present. And the slight uptick in browsing speed or how quickly applications load may not be enough to get people to fork out for a new handset.

"You can see that cost is an issue if you look at the deployment of 4G," said Ms Milanesi. "It's an issue because operators are going a bit more cautiously simply because they spent so much on 3G licences."

The UK's 4G auction was due to take place in early 2012 but has been delayed to later the same year as regulator Ofcom gathers information from operators about how it should be run.

Operators spent billions to buy a 3G licence and will have just one question about any cash they spend, said Ms Milanesi.

"This time," she said, "they will be asking how do we get some of that money back?"

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Facebook and the Future of Music

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At Facebook's f8 conference Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed some of the details of the Facebook Music Service, which is tied to its new Timeline feature. Essentially, it will allow you to populate your Facebook timeline with a constantly updating list of the music you're listening to from services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, Slacker, iHeartRadio and others.

Those viewing your wall can then click on a track in your playlist and have it immediately stream to their computer, provided that they're also subscribed to the streaming music service. (The details are hazy on whether this is a service-independent solution. So, for example, if you're subscribed to Spotify and your friend is using Rhapsody, will your friend be able to stream that track from Rhapsody?) We'll learn details as they're revealed. In the meantime, there's the question of what impact this may have on the consumption, delivery, and marketing of music.

With you gonna call?

At one time, radio and, later, MTV, determined what would and wouldn't populate the top of the music charts. As radio's listenership has declined and MTV has become increasingly irrelevant to music fans, very little has risen to take its place. While we may have access to millions of tracks thanks to the iTunes Store, Pandora, and various music subscription services, it's difficult to choose what to listen to. Where do you go for guidance?

For many people, the answer lies in their youth--from your friends. Whether it's going to your pal's house and listening to the hip-hop CD he's just purchased, sharing an earbud with your girlfriend, or getting a text from the kid down the street about the song that closed out Glee, we often rely on people whose taste we trust to tell us what's worth listening to.

The problem is that, up to this point, this scheme hasn't been implemented very well. Streaming music services have added social networking components, but it's been a hard sell because most people don't see the value in "renting" their music, thus making it difficult to find friends who belong to one of these services.

No. 1 with a bullet

What Facebook is proposing is to throw its significant user base at the problem. Instead of asking a friend to go out of their way to view your playlist on a music service's website or follow a link that you've tweeted, emailed, or texted, they can simply visit your wall, take a gander at what you're listening to, and click. If they're not subscribed to a particular service, they'll likely be offered the opportunity to join or take the service for a trial spin. Do that and not only can you listen to the streaming music, but you can open a chat window to talk about it with your friend.

This is, of course, a potentially enormous boon for music streaming services. More than anything that's been tried before, this will tempt a lot of people to try one of these services. If the experience is transparent and the price of entry not too painful, it could significantly shift people's attitudes about "renting" music.

And that could be an interesting challenge for Apple and other services that sell music. If you can have access to virtually anything ever recorded (and you put little thought into what that access costs over time), there's less motivation to own music. Apple's iTunes Match, while cloud-based, doesn't address this issue because it works only with music that you own.

Of course Apple may have plans to get into the subscription game as well. It has the contacts and catalog, it certainly has the means of delivery, and it has control of the most popular portable music players on the planet. Given that, it could trump Facebook's efforts, which, at this early date, look a little clumsy given that they're tied to a browser. But, up to this point, Apple hasn't strayed from its "People want to own their music" stance.

Giving them the business

Facebook isn't doing this out of the desire to see the world become a more musical place. It is undoubtedly going to make money from the music services that push content through Facebook. And the music you listen to and share is yet another data point that Facebook can sell to those entities who pay for this kind of information.

It will have an effect on music marketing as well. Certainly we'll see music labels and other related businesses pour their acts and partners' work into the timelines on their walls. Celebrities and "trusted sources" will also pump their timelines full of music. So while there is a measure of democratization here, we'll want to keep an eye on services that are promoted to tell us what to listen to, just as radio was tasked with this job in past decades. The less bleak side of this tarnished coin is that artists will also have the opportunity to stream their music to fans and friends.

But perhaps the most intriguing angle is that we are now a source to be wooed and pitched. Your voice, among the millions, matters to those who are promoting a particular artist or label. To what lengths is the music industry willing to go to promote and reward "taste makers" who influence large numbers of "friends?"

This is music worth watching.

For more Macintosh computing news, visit Macworld. Story copyright © 2011 Mac Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

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