microchip

TOKYO--The world's largest maker of automotive microcontrollers--the electronic brains that control millions of vehicles built by major automakers--is shifting production from a key crippled plant to two other plants, but it will take months before shipments can start.

The move by Renesas Electronics, which controls 41 percent of the global automotive chip market, signals months of shortages of the highly specialized parts, already in tight supply before the March 11 earthquake in Japan. Japanese and North American automakers could face production shutdowns if the pipeline runs dry.

Renesas will move production from its Naka plant, which built 25 percent … Read more

The concept of swallowing microchip-embedded pills that are activated by stomach acid to transmit data isn't entirely new. But it could go from concept to market quite quickly, predicts Swiss firm Novartis.

In January, Novartis committed to spending $24 million on the smart pill technology developed by Redwood, Calif.-based Proteus Biomedical. This week, the company projects that it will seek regulatory approval--at least in Europe--within 18 months.

"We hope within the next 18 months to have something that we will be able to submit to the regulators," global head of development Trevor Mundel told the … Read more

The National Football League's desire to bring technology to the game may be exciting to techie sports fans, but a recent report claiming that the league wants to put microchips into its footballs to increase referee accuracy could cause significant debate between the purists who welcome human error and those who want every call to be right.

According to Reuters, a German chip company called Cairos Technologies is currently in talks with the NFL to bring its microchip technology to footballs. The technology, which was originally designed for soccer balls, helps referees know when the ball has crossed a … Read more

It's getting harder and harder to hide from your doctor.

Researchers at the University of Florida today unveiled the tattletale pills, standard pill capsules that come with microchips and digestible antennas to alert caregivers, family members, etc., when the pill has been ingested.

"It is a way to monitor whether your patient is taking their medication in a timely manner," says Rizwan Bashirullah, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida, in the school's news report.

Developed in part to improve medication compliance in clinical trials, where failure to take experimental drugs … Read more

A team of engineers and chemists at Brigham Young University has created a silicon microchip they say can reliably detect specific proteins or viruses from even small samples at low concentrations.

Their invention, which is forthcoming in the paper version of the journal Lab on a Chip, works much the way a coin sorter does, only on a microscopic scale, screening for particles purely by size. This renders sample sizes and concentration levels almost irrelevant, because particles are trapped by size, not number, thereby allowing for much earlier detections of viruses.

"Most of the tests that you're given … Read more

Microchip technology can now enable chemists to perform more than 1,000 experiments at once, according to researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles.

A team of scientists from the university and other organizations have developed a chip based on microfluidics--the channeling of minute amounts of liquids and chemicals. The chip is designed to be plugged into a computer so chemists can perform multiple chemical reactions on the chip automatically.

In a study, the UCLA scientists produced a chip capable of conducting 1,024 reactions simultaneously, which the scientists used to identify inhibitors to the enzyme bovine carbonic … Read more

Correction on Wednesday at 11:27 a.m. PST: A press release on which this story was partially based misidentified which NASA mission the technology will be used for. This post was updated with correct information. The energy-harvesting sensors are part of research for forthcoming Mars Scout Missions.

Engineers at Kansas State University have developed a radio with sensors and microprocessors that can transmit data and is self-sufficient when it comes to power.

The device, called by the engineers an "energy-harvesting radio," is essentially a wireless sensor with microprocessor and radio that can transfer a flash of data … Read more

Scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are working on a microchip that uses micropipes of water to cool itself, IBM announced Thursday.

The chip's components are built in a 3D stack instead of side by side on a silicon wafer.

Chips built in a three-dimensional stack formation offer more pathways for info to be processed and can shorten the distance chip information needs to travel by as much as 1,000 times, according to Thomas Brunschwiler, a senior engineer in the Advanced Thermal Packaging Group at the IBM Zurich Research Lab who … Read more

Two scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to use light beams for picking up, holding, and moving around cellular and microscopic objects on a microchip, MIT announced Tuesday.

Matthew J. Lang, assistant professor of MIT's biological and mechanical engineering departments, and David C. Appleyard, graduate student in the biological engineering department, determined that using infrared light on select silicon wafers is a way to use optical tweezers as a tool for manipulating objects on microchips.

The breakthrough could have applications in both the biology and electronics industry, according to Lang.

While the idea of … Read more