4K TV goes mainstream, but there’s more to come

UltraHD TVs were in every major booth, and they were the most talked-about productat the show. These TVs have a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, or four times as detailed as the 1920 x 1080 pixels of high-definition TV. They’re sharper and don’t pixelate as much when you focus in on one section of the screen. On top of that, many of the TVs can accommodate faster-moving imagery, and they’re all inherently connected. And many of the screens are curved. No doubt the costs are coming down as well. All of that means that the variety of UltraHD TVs we will see this year will grow.

Samsung talked about its SUHD TVs that will have resolution just shy of 8K TV, or 16 times the number of pixels in a high-definition TV. And Sharp also described a screen with 167 percent the resolution of 4K TV. One difference this year: Companies such as Samsung and Sony were making a big effort to make more UltraHD content available, and that’s the ultimate driver of sales.

Digital Set-Top Boxes and Integrated Digital Television Systems

Digital set-top boxes (DSTBs) receive and decode television broadcasts from satellite, cable, and/or terrestrial sources. Integrated digital televisions (DTVs) have built-in digital tuners, demodulators, and source decoders, so they do not require digital set-top boxes that receive digital broadcasts. Traditional DSTBs are designed to receive standard definition (SD) Moving Pictures Experts Group-2 (MPEG-2) video format broadcasts. However, many of today’s DSTBs are high-definition (HD)-ready. In fact, selected cable television service providers, networks, and local terrestrial TV stations are concurrently transmitting both SD and HD content. Over time, MPEG-4 will displace the MPEG-2 format for both SD and HD. When MPEG-4 becomes the standard compression standard, systems implementing reprogrammable logic devices (such as FPGAs) will be able to seamlessly upgrade without having to scrap inventory items or make new hardware. Using FPGAs, manufacturers can design a STB that can decode MPEG-2 video format, and then later upgrade that same STB for MPEG-4 by simply reprogramming the FPGA in-system. High-end DSTBs usually offer personal video recorder (PVR) and/or an HD DVD recorder for Blu-ray functions. Microcontrollers in DSTBs or integrated DTVs can perform a number of functions for these systems, including control panel management and on-screen display (OSD). Many current DSTBs can be classified either as free to air (FTA) or pay TV versions. A pay TV example would be DSTBs designed for DirecTV or Dish Network (in the USA), which require conditional access to decode the audio and video. DSTB manufacturers typically design the PCBs for both low-end and high-end DSTB systems and require a flexible solution for implementing their various designs.

At ‘four sales a second’, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 passes 10 million mark in first month

“Launched globally on April 27, the phone is estimated to be selling at a rate of four units per second,” Samsung said in a statement announcing the news.

The Android-powered Galaxy S4, with its 5-inch 441-PPI display, 13-megapixel camera and slew of snazzy features, is evidently proving a big hit with consumers in the 110 countries where its currently sold. Ten million sales in less than a month makes sales of the previous iterations of the handset appear positively sluggish, though they were, of course, considered impressive at the time.

The Galaxy S3 crossed the 10-million mark 50 days after its launch in May last year, while the S2 took five months to reach the same milestone. As for the Galaxy S, the first handset in the range, that took all of seven months to sell 10 million units after launching in 2010.

“On behalf of Samsung, I would like to thank the millions of customers around the world who have chosen the Samsung Galaxy S4,” Samsung co-CEO JK Shin said in the statement. “At Samsung we’ll continue to pursue innovation inspired by and for people.”

The Galaxy’s S4’s impressive sales figures also indicate a narrowing of the gap previously comfortably enjoyed by Apple with its iPhone – for the first three months of this year, Apple sold an average of 12.5 million handsets per month. Could we see the S4 outselling the iPhone before the end of 2013, or will sales  tail off once the initial enthusiasm for the handset fades?

Late last year it was reported that Samsung is aiming to sell more than 500 million smartphones and feature phones in 2013, improving on sales in 2012 by around 20 percent. Based on Wednesday’s news, phones in the company’s Galaxy S range are likely to make up a sizable proportion of those sales.

In other S4 news, Samsung says in the summer it’ll be launching the S4 in a variety of new colors – Blue Arctic and Red Aurora, followed by Purple Mirage and Brown Autumn – to go with the currently available White Mist and Black Forest offerings.

Small in Size, Big On Power: New Microbatteries the Most Powerful Yet

Though they be but little, they are fierce. The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery -- and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye. Developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

Led by William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering, the researchers published their results in the April 16 issue of Nature Communications.

"This is a whole new way to think about batteries," King said. "A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it."

With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly.

"There's a sacrifice," said James Pikul, a graduate student and first author of the paper. "If you want high energy you can't get high power; if you want high power it's very difficult to get high energy. But for very interesting applications, especially modern applications, you really need both. That's what our batteries are starting to do. We're really pushing into an area in the energy storage design space that is not currently available with technologies today."

The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale.

The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun's group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance.

With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies -- imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery -- until now," King said. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny."

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

"Now we can think outside of the box," Pikul said. "It's a new enabling technology. It's not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It's allowing us to do different, new things."

The National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported this work. King also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory; the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory; and the department of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I.

Quantum Computing Taps Nucleus of Single Atom

A team of Australian engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has demonstrated a quantum bit based on the nucleus of a single atom in silicon, promising dramatic improvements for data processing in ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, which will offer enormous advantages for searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems such as biological molecules and drugs.
The world-first result, to be published in Nature on April 18, brings these machines one-step closer, describing how information was stored and retrieved using the magnetic spin of a nucleus.
"We have adapted magnetic resonance technology, commonly known for its application in chemical analysis and MRI scans, to control and read-out the nuclear spin of a single atom in real time," says Associate Professor Andrea Morello from the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at UNSW.
The nucleus of a phosphorus atom is an extremely weak magnet, which can point along two natural directions, either "up" or "down." In the strange quantum world, the magnet can exist in both states simultaneously -- a feature known as quantum superposition.
The natural positions are equivalent to the "zero" and "one" of a binary code, as used in existing classical computers. In this experiment, the researchers controlled the direction of the nucleus, in effect "writing" a value onto its spin, and then "reading" the value out -- turning the nucleus into a functioning qubit.
"We achieved a read-out fidelity of 99.8 per cent, which sets a new benchmark for qubit accuracy in solid-state devices," says UNSW Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak, who is also Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, where the devices were made.
The accuracy of the UNSW team's nuclear spin qubit rivals what many consider to be today's best quantum bit -- a single atom in an electromagnetic trap inside a vacuum chamber. The development of this "Ion Trap" technology was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.
"Our nuclear spin qubit operates at a similar level of accuracy, but it's not in a vacuum chamber -- it's in a silicon chip that can be wired up and operated electrically like normal integrated circuits," says Morello. "Silicon is the dominant material in the microelectronics industry, which means our qubit is more compatible with existing industry technology and is more easily scaleable."
Morello's PhD student Jarryd Pla is the lead experimental author of the work, which was conducted in collaboration with the groups led by Dzurak and Professor David Jamieson at the University of Melbourne. Morello, Dzurak and Jamieson are all Program Managers in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology.
In September 2012, the same UNSW team reported in Nature the first functional quantum bit based on an electron bound to a phosphorus atom embedded in silicon, "writing" information onto its spin and then "reading" the spin state back out.
With their latest result, the team has dug even deeper into the atomic structure to manipulate and measure the spin of its nucleus. This is the core of an atom, containing most of its mass, but its diameter is only about one-millionth that of the atom's diameter.
"This means it's more challenging to measure, but it's almost completely immune to disturbances from the outside world, which makes it an exceptional quantum bit," says UNSW engineering PhD student Jarryd Pla. "Our nuclear spin qubit can store information for longer times and with greater accuracy. This will greatly enhance our ability to carry out complex quantum calculations once we put many of these qubits together."
Electron spin qubits will likely act as the main "processor" bits for quantum computers of the future, coupled with other electrons to perform calculations. But nuclear spin qubits could also be integrated and could provide a useful memory function or help implement two-bit logic gates between the electronic qubits, the researchers say.
Demonstrating quantum memories and two-qubit logic gates is the main focus of the UNSW team for the near future. They are also exploring ways of improving the accuracy of their nuclear and electron spin qubits even further, by moving to a purer form of silicon.

Super-Nanotubes: 'Remarkable' Spray-On Coating Combines Carbon Nanotubes With Ceramic

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Kansas State University have demonstrated a spray-on mixture of carbon nanotubes and ceramic that has unprecedented ability to resist damage while absorbing laser light. Coatings that absorb as much of the energy of high-powered lasers as possible without breaking down are essential for optical power detectors that measure the output of such lasers, which are used, for example, in military equipment for defusing unexploded mines. The new material improves on NIST's earlier version of a spray-on nanotube coating for optical power detectors and has already attracted industry interest.

"It really is remarkable material," NIST co-author John Lehman says. "It's a way to make super-nanotubes. It has the optical, thermal and electrical properties of nanotubes with the robustness of the high-temperature ceramic."

The composite was developed by Kansas State. NIST researchers suggested using toluene to uniformly coat individual nanotubes with a ceramic shell. They also performed damage studies showing how well the composite tolerates exposure to laser light. NIST has developed and maintained optical power standards for decades. In recent years, NIST researchers have coated optical detectors with nanotubes because of their unusual combination of desirable properties, including intense black color for maximum light absorption.

The new composite consists of multiwall carbon nanotubes and a ceramic made of silicon, boron, carbon and nitrogen. Boron boosts the temperature at which the material breaks down. The nanotubes were dispersed in toluene, to which a clear liquid polymer containing boron was added drop by drop, and the mixture was heated to 1,100 degrees C. The resulting composite was then crushed into a fine powder, dispersed in toluene, and sprayed in a thin coat on copper surfaces. Researchers baked the test specimens and then exposed them to a far-infrared laser beam of the type used to cut hard materials.

Analysis revealed that the coating absorbed 97.5 percent of the light and tolerated 15 kilowatts of laser power per square centimeter for 10 seconds. This is about 50 percent higher damage tolerance than other research groups have reported for similar coatings -- such as nanotubes alone and carbon paint -- tested with the same wavelength of light, according to the paper. The nanotubes and graphene-like carbon absorb light uniformly and transmit heat well, while the oxidation-resistant ceramic boosts damage resistance. The spray-on material also adheres well to the copper surface. As an added bonus, the composite can be produced easily in large quantities.

After light exposure, the coatings were analyzed using several different techniques. Electron microscopy revealed no major destruction such as burning or deformation. Other tests showed the coating to be adaptable, with the ceramic shell partially oxidizing into a stable layer of silicon dioxide (quartz).