Stick-on memory
Better and cheaper camera technology has made us all closet documentary-makers of our own lives, and an offshoot of this is a growing scrapbook culture. Scientists at Hewlett Packard's UK research labs are aiming to make the most of this. They have created the world's smallest wireless data chip, which will allow us fit more images in our scrapbooks. Called a Memory Spot, it can store up to half a megabyte of video, audio or hundreds of pages of text and it's tiny enough to be attached to postcards, photographs and other memorabilia.
Looking for a digital wireless solution to adding sound to photographs, the HP scientists came up with this experimental chip, based on CMOS (a widely used, low-power integrated circuit design), about the size of a grain of rice. Program manager, John Waters describes the concept, 'We are running at 2.5Ghz and using the same system for transferring power from one circuit to another, we can transfer information either to or from the chip.'
粘贴型的存储器
越来越先进和便宜的照相机技术已经使我们都成为了我们自己生活的纪录片制作人,而与此同时发展起来的其中一个分支便是迅速成长起来的剪贴簿文化。惠普在英国的研究实验室的科学家们正努力充分利用这个趋势和资源。他们已经创造了世界上最小的无线数据芯片,这将允许我们存储更多的图象在剪贴本上。人们称其为记忆芯点,它能存储半兆的视频,音频或者成百上千张的文本,同时它的形状足够小以至于可以粘贴在明信片,照片和其他大事记等文件上。
为了试图寻找一种数字无线的途径把声音嫁接到照片上,惠普的科学家们提出了这款实验芯片,并将其基于互补金属氧化物半导体上(一种广泛使用的,低功率的具有完整电路设计的半导体),其大小和稻米的谷粒相仿。程序设计经理约翰.沃特斯是这样描述这个概念的,‘我们正在以2.5Ghz的速度运行并且利用同样的系统从一个电路到另一个电路转移能量,我们发现能够实现对这个芯片的信息输入和输出。’