Nanotube Radio

The complete radio (left) and magnified views of nanotube transistors wire-bonded into standard packages (right) [Photo courtesy: John Rogers Research Group, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign]

John Rogers and his colleagues from the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, IL and Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems, Linthicum, MD have reported the development of the first practical transistor radio made entirely of carbon-nanotube based electronics.

Carbon nanotubes can be thought of as single sheets of graphite rolled up into tiny tubes. They are also semiconductors and thus have been used to create different electronic devices including tiny transistors and even a nanometre-size radio receiver. Because of their tiny size and high electrical and thermal conductivity, they could be used to create very small and extremely fast electronic circuits.

The team worked out a way to align thousands of the nanometre-diameter tubes in sheets in order to create electronic devices that can handle sufficiently large currents for practical use. Unlike previous nanotube radios, which produced very weak signals that needed further amplification, the team were able to listen to a local broadcast on headphones connected directly to a nanotube transistor. Since individual nanotubes in each transistor device operate in parallel and independently, the devices can produce large current outputs. This means that they can have high levels of gain and amplification in both the RF and audio frequency ranges.

More importantly, many devices can be produced at once and integrated into circuits. Such features were absent from nanoradios and other electronic devices that incorporated only single nanotubes. The team is now building medium-scale circuits containing up to 100 transistors and are also implementing advanced designs to improve the RF response and power efficiency of the systems.

Reference
"Radio frequency analog electronics based on carbon nanotube transistors"
Coskun Kocabas, Hoon-sik Kim, Tony Banks, John A. Rogers, Aaron A. Pesetski, James E. Baumgardner, S. V. Krishnaswamy, and Hong Zhang,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Published online on January 28, 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0709734105, Abstract Link

World's Fastest NAND Flash Memory from Intel and Micron Technology

High Speed NAND [Image courtesy: Micron Technology]

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology Inc. today unveiled a high speed NAND flash memory technology that can greatly enhance the access and transfer of data in devices that use silicon for storage. The new technology – manufactured by the companies' NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) – is five times faster than conventional NAND, allowing data to be transferred in a fraction of the time for computing, video, photography and other computing applications.

The new high speed NAND can reach speeds up to 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) for reading data and 100 MB/s for writing data, achieved by leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four-plane architecture with higher clock speeds. In comparison, conventional single level cell NAND is limited to 40 MB/s for reading data and less than 20 MB/s for writing data.

Here are some examples of the specific performance advantages of high speed NAND in today's most popular devices :

-- When used in a hybrid hard drive, high speed NAND can allow the system to read and write data anywhere between two or four times the speed when compared to conventional hard drives.

-- With the popularity of digital video cameras and video on demand services, high speed NAND can enable a high-definition movie to be transferred five times faster than conventional NAND.

-- With the pending USB 3.0 interface, high speed NAND is expected to effectively deliver on the increased data transfer rates of the new specification, where conventional NAND would act as the bottleneck in system performance. USB 3.0 is aiming for 10 times the bandwidth of current USB 2.0 solutions, or approximately achieving 4.8 gigabits per second.

-- As NAND continues to move into the PC platform, the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface (NVMHCI) can take advantage of high speed NAND in solutions such as Intel® Turbo Memory, allowing for even better system performance. NVMHCI is designed to provide a standard software programming interface allowing operating system drivers to access NAND flash memory storage in applications such as hard drive caching and solid-state drives.

For more information on high speed NAND, the applications and opportunities for the technology, visit Micron's Web site at www.micron.com/highspeednand.