Category Archives: Engineering

IBM Believes New DRAM will Double Performance

By combining techniques in process and circuit design, IBM believes it can put as much as 48 Mbytes of fast DRAM on a reasonably sized CPU when its 45nm technology becomes available in 2008.
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BM combined two advances to enable the new memory integration. The company found a way to migrate its deep trench technology used for DRAMs from CMOS to its silicon-on-insulator (SOI) logic process. In a paper last December, IBM described that work that involved suppressing the floating-body effect in SOI.

Article on Sergey Brin

The Story of Sergey Brin by Mark Malseed:

In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.
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When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.) Aside from the physical beauty of Stanford’s campus, Sergey knew the school’s reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the time, though, his focus was squarely on getting his doctorate.

He provides another example of someone born outside the USA providing great benefit to the US. The United States has done very well allowing others to flourish here.

Shouldn’t Google Toolbar spell check have Sergey and Brin as words?

Undersea Restaurant

Take a vacation and visit this cool engineering project: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa Rangali Island (they broke link so I removed it).

Bionanotechnology Future

Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:

The lack of specifiability of our modules was a key challenge to commercialization. Specification will require detailed basic investigations of the properties and chemistry of nanoparticle materials in biological systems. In addition, we will have to establish analytical tools and quantitative descriptors to detail the distribution of properties present in a population of nanoparticles. This is categorically different from specification for organic molecules and proteins, in which properties can be effectively described by an average. In nanomaterials, performance properties may be dominated by a relatively small population of particles, so averaging cannot always be used.

Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.

Chimps Used Stone “Hammers”

Ancient chimp-made ‘hammers’ fuel evolutionary debate:

The stone hammers that the team discovered, essentially irregularly shaped rocks about the size of cantaloupes – with distinctive patterns of wear – were used to crack the shells of nuts. The research demonstrates conclusively that the artifacts couldn’t have been the result of natural erosion or used by humans. The stones are too large for humans to use easily and they also have the starch residue from several nuts known to be staples in the chimpanzee diet, but not the human diet.

Using so-called “percussive technology” to free the edible parts of nuts is more complicated than it sounds. “We know that modern chimpanzee behaviour regarding nut-cracking is socially transmitted and takes up to seven years to learn,” Mercader says. “Some of the nuts require a compression force of more than a thousand kilograms to crack. And the idea is to crack the shell but not smash it – it’s not a simple technique.”

The discovery suggests that a ‘chimpanzee stone age’ reaches well back to ancient times. “Chimpanzee material culture has a long prehistory whose deep roots are only beginning to be uncovered,” the authors write.

Pakistan Engineering Education

HEC’s Unconvincing Mega Projects by Pervez Hoodbhoy:

The on-going efforts at reforming higher education are turning into a disaster. Billions are being spent on mindless mega projects. The 15-fold increase in the funding of Pakistani universities over the last six years may have delivered a marginal improvement, but it is superficial and likely to be temporary.
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a realistic and modest course of action with real chances of success would have to be designed differently. We should initially aim for, at the very most, two properly planned new engineering universities under the collective authority of the European Union. We also need external help for adding engineering departments to existing universities, and to massively upgrade existing ones. It is still not too late to ask for this.

While I have no knowledge of the this situation in Pakistan the thoughts expressed in the essay make sense to me. I support investing in science and engineering education as a aid to economic growth and societal well being. But that investment must work with the existing local situation.

Mini Helicopter Masters Insect Navigation Trick

Mini helicopter masters insect navigation trick:

A miniature robotic helicopter has revealed a simple yet effective visual trick that lets insects fly so adeptly without sophisticated avionics.
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As insects fly forwards the ground beneath them sweeps backwards through their field of view. This “optical flow” is thought to provide crucial cues about speed and height. For example, the higher an insect’s altitude, the slower the optical flow; the faster it flies, the faster the optical flow.

Previous experiments involving bees suggest that optical flow is crucial to landing. Maintaining a constant optical flow while descending should provide a constant height-to-groundspeed ratio, which makes a bee slowdown as it approaches the ground. Distorting this optical flow can cause them to crash land instead.

Biomedical Engineering Opinion

An insight into biomedical engineering

Nevertheless, the strict regulatory procedures that must be adhered to in biomedical engineering can be frustrating and feel like a barrier to innovation, even though engineers in this field are often working at the leading edge of technology. Colin Hunsley says: “Anything new has to be shown to be better than what is currently available. A modern hip replacement, for example, is expected to last for 15 years or more; even with thorough testing via the formal clinical trials process, it can be hard to prove conclusively that a new development is significantly better.

The take-up of new products and techniques also depends to some extent on the way the market operates. In the UK, for instance, the National Health Service (NHS) funds most healthcare, whereas the USA market is driven by private medical insurance. With the budgeting structure of the NHS, it can be difficult to justify the adoption in one department of a more expensive treatment, even if it could lead to significant long-term savings for another department. This illustrates why it is important that biomedical engineers understand the market in which they operate.

Schoofs Prize for Creativity 2007

Single-handed fishing kit reels in first place in invention competition:

Brian “Sunya” Nimityongskul got the idea for a system for one-armed fishing while recovering from shoulder surgery last summer. “I wanted to be fishing and not sitting at home,” he says. “Being an engineer, I decided I’d do something about it.” He worked on it during his free time, doing the design and machining himself

Nice Looking Toaster

See how the toaster works. More design examples