Automotive night vision market to reach USD5bn by 2016, says ABI Research. April 13, 2011 // Julien Happich Traffic statistics demonstrate that accidents are significantly more likely at night than in daylight. Automotive manufacturers and their Tier 1 supplier partners are addressing this issue by developing multiple solutions. Brighter forward lighting that does not dazzle other drivers has been improving for years via High Intensity Discharge or Xenon lamps and automatic high-low beams. Emerging LED technology will allow even more design freedom. And now night vision appears set for steady if not spectacular growth. ABI Research expects night vision installations to grow from 103,000 worldwide (valued at USD 373 million) in 2010 to 1.7 million (about USD 5 billion) in 2016.
“Night vision has always been considered an interesting but expensive luxury feature,” says ABI Research principal analyst David Alexander, “although when the second generation went into production in 2008, it included pedestrian detection. Visit ABI Research at www.abiresearch.com. Spectrum: MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors. Though memristors are dense, cheap, and tiny, they also have a high failure rate at present, characteristics that bear an intriguing resemblance to the brain's synapses. It means that the architecture must by definition tolerate defects in individual circuitry, much the way brains gracefully degrade their performance as synapses are lost, without sudden system failure. Basically, memristors bring data close to computation, the way biological systems do, and they use very little power to store that information, just as the brain does.
For a comparable function, the new hardware will use two to three orders of magnitude less power than Nvidia's Fermi-class GPU. For the first time we will begin to bridge the main divide between biological computation and traditional computation. The use of the memristor addresses the basic hardware challenges of neuromorphic computing: the need to simultaneously move and manipulate data, thereby drastically cutting power consumption and space. Optical Gas Imaging Redefines Industrial Gas Leak Detection. 01 September 2010 Jane Alexander, Editor with David Francoeur, FLIR Systems, Inc. Gas leaks have been affecting peoples' lives since ancient times.
Now, there's no excuse for many of them. In ancient Greece, people traveled from far and wide to listen to the Oracle of Delphi, who claimed to be in direct contact with the god Apollo. They came in hopes of gaining special knowledge about themselves and their futures (including, for example, when to plant their crops). What would those trusting knowledge-seekers have thought if they had known that instead of speaking to and for Apollo, the Oracle had simply been exposed to harmful ethylene gas?
This is just what modern-era researchers discovered: The Oracle's prophecies and popularity were associated with an ancient gas leak. These daysWhile we no longer seek the council of Apollo, as a global society, we are still using a great deal of ethylene. Industrial gas leaks tend to occur within a mass of valves, flanges and piping. Fig. 1. Fig. 2. New Wafer-Level Microlens Molding Process From EV Group Extends. New Monolithic Lens Molding (MLM) capability enables up to eight-megapixel-and-higher-resolution devices Chiba, Chiba Prefecture Japan /PRNewswire/ - SEMICON JAPAN -- EV Group (EVG), a leading supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today announced that it has developed a new micro-lens molding process that can enable volume production of very-high-resolution (up to eight megapixels and higher) wafer-level optics for use in smart phones, pico projectors and myriad other applications.
The new Monolithic Lens Molding (MLM) capability, which was developed in-house by EVG's process development team, is available as an option on the company's IQ Aligner UV nanoimprint lithography (UV-NIL) system or can be upgraded to existing equipment. EVG expects to ship its first IQ Aligner with the MLM option in the first half of 2011. Founded in 1980, EVG is headquartered in St. SOURCE EV Group. Eetimes. IBM Research and European Union aim to greatly improve chip design time, cost and reliability.