Weixiao Haung and new GAN transistor.

Even before Weixiao Huang received his doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his new transistor captured the attention of some of the biggest American and Japanese automobile companies. The 2008 graduate's invention could replace one of the most common pieces of technology in the world--the silicon transistor for high-power and high-temperature electronics.

The water cooling technology was built into IBM's 3D chips Enlarge Image A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said. Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of "hair-width" cooling arteries. They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components. The technology was demonstrated in IBM's 3D chips, where circuits are stacked one on top of the other. Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel , enhancing performance and saving critical space. "As we package chips on top of each other....we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don't scale," explained Thomas Brunschwiler at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. "In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling." Cool running Heat is seen as one of the major hurdles of producing ever smaller and quicker chips. 3D chip It took IBM a decade to work out how to build 3D chips It is the by-product of the movement of electrons through the tiny wires connecting the millions of components on a modern processor. As more and more components are packed on to chips - Intel recently launched a processor with two billion transistors, for example - the problems become worse. As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in a search for the most efficient way to take the heat off the chip industry. For example, in 2007, US researchers built tiny wind engines that created a "breeze" made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips. But the problems are exacerbated in the multi-storey chips which IBM, as well as others, believe offer "one of the most promising approaches" for building future processors. Each 4cm sq sandwich is just 1mm thick but pumps out close to 1kilowatt - 10 times that generated by a hotplate. Conventional cooling techniques such as fans and heat sinks do not work as well with the 3D technology, particularly as heat has to be drawn away from between the individual chips. To get around this, researchers piped water through sealed tubes just 50 microns (millionths of a metre) in diameter, between individual layers. Water is much more efficient than air at absorbing heat and so even with tiny amounts of liquid flowing through the system the researchers saw a significant effect. The idea of pumping liquids around computers is not entirely new. Early mainframe computers had water pumped around them. High end computers have been "modded" for a number of years with water coolers and various researchers and companies have put forward proposals for directly cooling chips with fluids. In 2003, Stanford University spin-out company Cooligy showed off its Active Micro-Channel Cooling (AMC) technology which allowed fluids to circulate through hundreds of tiny channels on the upper surface of a chip. The technology was used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 desktop computer, released in 2004. IBM has said its water-cooling technology could be in products within five years.

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100 th bithday to cell phone

History has forgotten Nathan Stubblefield, but thanks to the arrival of the 100th anniversary of his then-pioneering invention, the man's finally receiving his due. In 1908 Stubblefield had the idea to use a complicated rig of wire and large poles set up around a train track, road, or river. When a train, vehicle, or boat traveled past the wires, a transmitting device on the vehicle would send an audio signal to a receiving device in the distance using magnetic waves. A patent was granted for the device on May 9 of that year, which some are now crediting as the first wireless communications device ever. To wit, Virgin Mobile is honoring Stubblefield on the centennial of the patent with a set of web pages about the man. (Click through the photo gallery to get a better idea of how such a device worked. It's really pretty fascinating.) Unfortunately, Stubblefield's invention wasn't entirely practical. The transmitter and receiver were enormous and far from portable (see picture), and they required so much wire that it would have been considerably more efficient to simply run the wire between the two transmitters instead of using wireless communications. Still, it's nice to remember Stubblefield as a pioneer in a field that, at the time, few felt would have much of a future. History has of course shown of course that Stubblefield was on to something bigger than he knew: Harris Interactive's latest poll shows that 14 percent of adults use a cell phone exclusively at home now, sans land line. Post

FLASH ON MOBILE- ADOBE WAY

Watching TV on a mobile can be a frustrating experience

Adobe has announced a plan to try to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices and set-top boxes.

Dubbed Open Screen the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia handling software can be used.

Adobe will stop charging licencing fees for mobile versions of Flash and plans to publish information about the inner workings of the code.

In taking this step Adobe hopes to repeat on mobiles the success its Flash technology has enjoyed on the web.

Video deal

Adobe estimates that its Flash player is installed on more than 98% of net-connected desktop computers.

The Open Screen plan will build on Flash Lite - Adobe's version of its multimedia player designed for mobile gadgets - that is already on millions of handhelds.

The ultimate aim of Open Screen is to make it much easier for TV and film makers to send their content to mobiles and on other devices such as set-top boxes.

It aims to do this by creating one flexible player technology that can run on any small-form device but only demands that developers write code once for it.

At the moment trying to get games or video on to different devices can be frustrating because of the plethora of hardware and software quirks on each gadget.

Adobe's four-step plan involves ending license fees; removing restrictions on the use of files in SWF and FLV format; publishing detailed information about the program interfaces for its Flash player and opening up information about its Flash streaming technology.

The move is the latest in a series that are aiming to open up Flash and get more devleopers working with it.

It is also part of the larger plan for Adobe Air - an overarching code development system that aims to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Adobe said it was working with Arm, SonyEricsson, Nokia, LG and other gadget makers on the Open Screen initiative as well as content partners such as the BBC, MTV and NBC.

Adobe faces competition from Microsoft which is trying to get Silverlight - its answer to Air - on to mobiles too.

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