Project for reliable terascale memory

Financed by its Framework Program 7 Future Emerging Technology fund, the European Commission has introduced the three-year joint research project Terascale Reliable Adaptive Memory Systems (Trams), reports Semiconductor Today.

Trams aims to investigate the impact of the increasing variability and unreliability of components in future terascale memory systems, and to create new design paradigms that can secure their reliable operation in future multicore processors and system-on-a-chip applications.

It is expected that, as a result of the continuing miniaturisation of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors and performance improvement described by Moore's law, in the next decade a single silicon chip will be able to perform many billions of operations per second and provide many billions of bytes per second off-chip bandwidth.

At the Stanford University in California, a monster is being brought to life, not by a mad scientist, but by computer scientist Professor Marc Levoy and his team, writes The Independent. Made from the spare parts of the photographic industry bolted on to a powerful computer, the Frankencamera may be incredibly ugly, but it will be the world's first open-source camera.

By giving researchers, programmers and the curious who buy the almost-£600 (R7mo) Frankencamera control for the first time over all the functions of a camera, Professor Levoy hopes those users will develop, as with the iPhone, the innovative ideas and applications necessary for the next revolution in photography: computational photography.

"Computational photography will change how we do photography," says Levoy. "It should allow you to fix things that you can't currently - whether by combining pictures in a different way, or by fiddling with optics so that more is recorded than on a normal camera; basically to do what Photoshop can do, but the moment you take the photograph."

Politicians and scientists speak of them hopefully as 'home runs' and 'game changers', the long-shot technology breakthroughs that could produce a major advance toward the nation's future climate policy goals, states the New York Times.

After years in a status closer to science fiction than reality, the travelling wave nuclear reactor is emerging as a potential 'game changer', according to a US Department of Energy official. It helps that the reactor is the product of a team of top scientists backed by the deep pockets of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "We believe we've developed a new type of nuclear reactor that can represent a nearly infinite supply of low-cost energy, carbon-free energy for the world," said former Bechtel physicist John Gilleland.

This reactor works something like a cigarette. A chain reaction is launched in one end of a closed cylinder of spent uranium fuel, creating a slow-moving 'deflagration' - a wave of nuclear fission reactions that keeps breeding neutrons as it makes way through the container, keeping the self-sustaining reaction going.