Victory in the technological marketplace goes to the smart, prepared, and persistent. The editors of IEEE Spectrum selected and reviewed nine projects--five worth watching and four that missed the mark.
"The Battle for Broadband" Microsoft is an unlikely television system provider, and Swisscom is an unlikely system operator. Yet together these two companies are shaping TV's future.
"A Foggy Notion" The rain in Bavaria falls mainly on a large and wildly expensive central-station solar power plant. How can you run a solar power plant without sun?
"Super Charged" Did your car battery ever go dead and strand you miles from nowhere? Dead batteries could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a tiny South Korean company. NessCap Co., in Yongin, is out to replace your car battery with a completely different source of electric current--a capacitor. Actually, it's called an ultracapacitor because it can store a billion times more charge than a normal capacitor, which does its work in electronic circuits. The new device, which looks like a real winner, has enough charge to rev up the starter motor and then power the other electrical/electronic systems in the car.
"DVD Copy Protection: Take 2" Unauthorized copying of DVDs is a serious irritation to--and financial drain on--makers and distributors. A second attempt to thwart the theft is no better than an earlier one.
"Flat, Cheap, and Under Control" For Applied Materials' eCMP, flat is where it's at. Polishing silicon wafers as each layer of circuitry is added has become indispensable to chip making, but it becomes more complex as circuits are further shrunk. A change in materials used to insulate the microchip's wires in the coming generations means current methods of polishing would tear the circuits to shreds. But Applied Materials has a plan: replace the abrasive slurry now used with one that allows electricity to flatten the wafer.
"Digital Dullard" How much knowledge can a robotic brain hold and successfully impart? Billionaire Paul Allen's electronic science tutor fails to make the grade.
"Viva Mesh Vegas" Beyond the network lies the mesh. Municipalities are pioneering a mobile broadband technology that could leapfrog cellphones and WiMax.
"Passport to Nowhere" Instead of a mere photograph, the U.S. government wants to add a radio-frequency ID chip to the passports of citizens from some 27 cooperating countries. The IC would hold the encoded facial characteristics of the bearer, and at a port of entry the biometic data would be downloaded to a computer running face-recognition software. The computer would then see if the face on the chip matched the face of the passport holder, who would be asked to look into a camera. Yes, it sounds as if the system would be very hard for anyone, including terrorists, to forge. But what makes the project a loser is that face-recognition software has not yet operated reliably; even a small percentage of false positives could bring the port of entry to a standstill. A would-be terrorist might also obtain a passport legally.
"Sun's Big Splash" Sun Microsystems' Niagara chip is a winner. It is the first commercial chip designed from the ground up to improve performance by using a technique called multithreading, which allows the processor to switch among independent instruction streams. Sun is hoping the new chip will help the company regain market share by putting its servers ahead of competitors HP, IBM, and Dell.
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