USC battery wields silicon nanowires to hold triple the energy, charge in 10 minutes

There's no shortage of attempts to build a better battery, usually with a few caveats. USC may have ticked all the right checkboxes with its latest discovery, however. Its use of porous, flexible silicon nanowires for the anodes in a lithium-ion battery delivers the high capacity, fast recharging and low costs that come with silicon, but without the fragility of earlier attempts relying on simpler silicon plates. In practice, the battery could deliver the best of all worlds. Triple the capacity of today's batteries? Full recharges in 10 minutes? More than 2,000 charging cycles? Check. It all sounds a bit fantastical, but USC does see real-world use on the horizon. Researchers estimate that there should be products with silicon-equipped lithium-ion packs inside of two to three years, which isn't long to wait if the invention saves us from constantly hunting for the nearest wall outlet.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: USC

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By: Unknown On 8:41 PM

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Silicon Valley entrepreneur Krikorian quits Amazon board

Blake Krikorian, of id8 Group Holdings, arrives at the Sun Valley Inn in Sun Valley, Idaho July 9, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking

SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Dec 28, 2012 6:37pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Blake Krikorian has quit the board of Amazon.com Inc about a year and a half after joining to take up an unspecified role at the buyer of a company he owned.

Krikorian, known for co-founding Sling Media in 2004, informed the rest of the board on Wednesday of his intention to resign, Amazon said in a Friday filing.

Spokesman Ty Rogers added that the serial entrepreneur, whose latest endeavor is home-automation startup id8 Group R2 Studios Inc, has sold a company and quit in order to take up a position at the acquirer. He did not name the company involved or the buyer.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Krikorian's year-old startup was in acquisition discussions with Amazon rivals Apple Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp. It cited sources as saying the trio of tech powerhouses coveted R2 Studios' home-oriented technology as they expanded their own forays into living-room media entertainment.

R2 Studios recently launched a Google Android application to allow users to control home heating and lighting systems from their smartphone. Krikorian's Sling Media -- which was sold to EchoStar Communications in 2007 -- made the "Slingbox" for watching TV on computers.

Krikorian, known also for doing double duty as an angel investor, joined Amazon's board in September of last year, a move hailed as helping propel Amazon's own substantial efforts in online media. (Reporting By Edwin Chan; Editing by Gary Hill and Bob Burgdorfer)

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By: Dilusha On 8:25 PM

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IBM to showcase high-speed silicon nanophotonic technology at IEEE

A new IBM technology that has been in development for more than 10 years will be showcased this week at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. It’s called silicon nanophotonics and according to the technology company, it could extend the life of networking equipment by a significant margin.

The technology uses pulses of light to transmit large amounts of data at very high speeds - up to 25Gbps per channel. Existing optical networks use individual silicon and photonic components but this new method would put all of that functionality onto a single chip.

Solomon Assefa, a nanophotonics scientist for IBM Research, says silicon allows for very dense integration. Instead of having just a single lane, this technology could allow for 50 different lanes, exponentially increasing bandwidth in the process.

Big Blue says the technology will ultimately replace interconnects currently used in data centers, servers and supercomputers. Experts are concerned because computers are becoming faster than the methods used to help them communicate with each other, introducing an unnecessary performance bottleneck that needs a solution before hardware could be pushed further.

This isn’t the first we have heard of silicon nanophotonics as IBM published a proof of concept in 2010. Since then, however, they have figured out how to build the components using current generation fabrication processes (90 nanometer, in this instance) while still maintaining the same level of performance and reliability that was originally conceived. They also claim that the technology can become a reality without incurring excessive cost.

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By: Dilusha On 12:01 PM

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