Computer Science - Hardware

A new Media Lab system turns LCD displays into giant cameras that provide gestural control of objects on-screen. And that’s just for starters.

by Larry Hardesty

The iPhone’s familiar touch screen display uses capacitive sensing, where the proximity of a finger disrupts the electrical connection between sensors in the screen. A competing approach, which uses embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers, is just now coming to market. But researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have already figured out how to use such sensors to turn displays into giant lensless cameras. On Dec. 19 at Siggraph Asia — a recent spinoff of Siggraph, the premier graphics research conference — the MIT team is presenting the first application of its work, a display that lets users manipulate on-screen images using hand gestures.

Read more: Computing with a Wave of the Hand

Computer Science - Hardware

by Larry Hardesty

By designing chips that can be built using existing fabrication processes, MIT researchers show that computing with light isn’t so far fetched.

Computer chips that transmit data with light instead of electricity consume much less power than conventional chips, but so far, they’ve remained laboratory curiosities. Professors Vladimir Stojanović and Rajeev Ram and their colleagues in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and Microsystems Technology Laboratory hope to change that, by designing optical chips that can be built using ordinary chip-manufacturing processes.

Read more: Selling Chip Makers on Optical Computing

Computer Science - Hardware

by David Orenstein

Electronic devices can't work well unless all of the transistors, or switches, within them allow electrical current to flow easily when they are turned on. A team of engineers has determined why some transistors made of organic crystals don't perform well, yielding ideas about how to make them work better.

Providing insight into a frustrating inconsistency in the performance of electronics made with organic materials, Stanford researchers have shown that the way boundaries between individual crystals in a film are aligned can make a 70-fold difference in how easily current, or electrical charges, can move through transistors.

Read more: Stanford-led Research Helps Oversome Barrier for Organic Electronics

Computer Science - Hardware

Graphics processing units provide computational horsepower 

For a billion years after the Big Bang, the universe experienced its “dark ages,” a time when space was a vast sea of atomic hydrogen. That period ended with the birth of stars, galaxies, and black holes, ultimately leading to the brilliant skies above us at night. 

“The basic building blocks of our universe formed during the dark ages,” said Lincoln Greenhill, a senior research fellow and lecturer on astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “But our understanding of this incredibly important time is in fact based on very little hard data.”Greenhill, together with U.S., Australian, and Indian colleagues, is planning to map the dark ages in search of clues about this time. They’re building a revolutionary radio telescope — 8,000 antennas spread across 1.5 kilometers of desert — deep in the Australian outback. The antennas will generate so much data, however, that without a new kind of computing, running at faster speeds while requiring lower power, the project would be impossible.

Read more: Harnessing Fun for Serious Science

Computer Science - Hardware

by Tom Simonite

In cult sci-fi tale Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most powerful computer in the universe was charged with finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about energy use and generation, climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

Read more: Science's Most Powerful Computer Tackles First Questions

Computer Science - Hardware

by Christine Blackman

Stanford researchers have developed a method of stacking and crystalline semiconductor layers that sets the potential for three-dimensional microchips.

The scientists added tiny growing crystals called nanowires to a sheet of silicon, and then topped it off with a layer of non-crystalline (amorphous) germanium. With heat, the nanowires, which have the same internal structure as that of the silicon, transformed the amorphous germanium layer into a perfect crystal. Integrating germanium onto silicon is a difficult process that is important for fabricating future, three-dimensional integrated circuits, on microchips.

Read more: Stanford Researchers Frow Nanowire Crystals for 3-D Microchips