Over at the IEEE Spectrum there is an article about turning contact lenses into portable displays. So far they have the resolution on working prototypes up to 1×1 but have a non working prototype up to 8×8. The obvious question is “how soon can we play quake on our eyes?”
or at least a technical discussion of some of the problems with LED based lighting appears in the most recent issue of IEEE Spectrum. Good read if you skip most of the device physics (unless you happen to like that sort of thing in which cast feel free to read all the details).
Not much new but a group at NIST has also been able to produce memristors, this time on a flexible sheet. Based on the description in the article I expect a flood of additional announcements as more teams discover that the unintended effects seen in new products turn out to be memristors in disguise.
I’ve just read an article on memristors in the IEEE spectrum and have to say that this is probably the coolest new development in semiconductors I’ve heard of in a long time. The article ends with
I’m convinced that eventually the memristor will change circuit design in the 21st century as radically as the transistor changed it in the 20th. Don’t forget that the transistor was lounging around as a mainly academic curiosity for a decade until 1956, when a killer app—the hearing aid—brought it into the marketplace. My guess is that the real killer app for memristors will be invented by a curious student who is now just deciding what EE courses to take next year.
and I agree with this statement. The concept is exciting enough to almost wish I were back in school ready to take on this challenge, but only almost, I’m pretty happy sitting way up here in the abstraction level where I can assume that HW exists and focus on firmware, drivers, and other “low level” software. Also the fact that I’m completely unable to follow the math in the article, which is the dumbed down version for a general EE audience, suggests that I probably wouldn’t have done very well, though I might have studied harder.