CURVACEOUS BATTERIES
A new generation of curved batteries will allow electronic devices to be built in shapes that till now have been impossible. Mobile phones, for example, have had to be designed around their batteries, which are normally shaped like a fat rectangle or a cylinder. These shapes have been forced on designers because rechargeable lithium-ion batteries need strong metal cases to keep the stack of electrodes inside them pressed firmly together, says Ben Borves of Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Philips鈥檚 solution is to punch holes through the electrode stack and fill them with a polymer. When thermally set, the polymer behaves like a rivet, holding the stack together. This should allow any shape of battery stack to be produced, says Borves, including curved and even spherical ones.
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CUTTING THE COST OF HOME CINEMA
Intel is developing an imaging chip that it hopes will cut prices for large, high-definition, rear-projection TV sets from around $4000 to under $2000.
Today鈥檚 highest-definition projection TVs generate the picture by scanning a beam of light across chips covered with an array of movable micro-mirrors controlled by the TV signal. The technique was invented by Texas Instruments. n place of the micro-mirrors, Intel is using an ultra-flat slab of silicon with a reflecting surface covered with an array of liquid crystal cells. The video signal switches individual cells from dark to transparent, allowing the light beam to be reflected from the surface and onto the screen.
The technique, called liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), was invented by Philips, but the company found it tough to make the silicon surface flat enough to produce a sharp picture at affordable prices. Intel says its microchip manufacturing engineers have solved the problem.
PACKING THEM IN
Tiny MP3 players will hold even more tunes thanks to a new stripped-down miniature hard drive from Cornice of Longmont, Colorado. To speed up data retrieval, the $70, 2-gigabyte, 2.5-centimetre-wide drive is stripped of components traditionally included in hard drives. Cornice鈥檚 engineers found that most consumer devices 鈥� from GPS units to MP3 players 鈥� do not need them. The firm uses the extra space to pack in more magnetic disc platters.
