Great CNBC reports:....SEC investigating possible fraudulent accounting?...
www2.marketwatch.com{5E40F92B-8AD2-427E-BE08-435F05D71B11}
16 in premarket
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Innovative silicon-chip design from Lucent's Bell Labs may speed rollout and lower costs of wireless networks
FOR RELEASE WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 07, 2001
SAN FRANCISCO -- Researchers at Lucent Technologies' (NYSE: LU) Bell Labs have created the first all-silicon chips for the part of wireless networks that receives radio signals from mobile handsets. The development, announced today at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here, could reduce the size and cost of wireless base stations and also could provide network operators with more installation options.
Today's radio receiver in base stations contains 10 to 20 chips comprised of gallium arsenide, which is a substantially more costly semiconducting material than silicon, yet is needed to satisfy the high-performance requirements of a wireless network. For instance, the radio receiver must handle many weak signals simultaneously, then amplify and filter them before further signal processing occurs.
"Only recently have circuit designers made silicon chips for radios that rival the performance of gallium arsenide," said Bell Labs researcher Jenshan Lin. "Our silicon-based radio receiver is the first of its kind."
Lin and his colleagues, Olga Boric-Lubecke and Penny Gould, created a radio receiver comprised of only three silicon chips -- roughly the size of a quarter - which is 100 times smaller than the gallium arsenide-based radio. The silicon chips also are 10 to 100 times less expensive to manufacture.
"Because base stations with a silicon-based receiver would be smaller, service providers would have greater flexibility when installing them," said Boric-Lubecke. "For instance, the base stations could be placed in less obtrusive locations, such as behind billboards or on top of utility poles. This might help speed the deployment of the mobile Internet as it continues to grow."
The all-silicon fabrication approach also may lead to the combination of a base-station radio receiver and digital signal processor on a single chip. "This would further reduce the base-station cost and move closer to creating a system-on-a-chip solution for base-station radio receivers," Gould said.
The Bell Labs silicon-based radio receiver could be used for all major mobile wireless standards, as well as future third-generation (3G) standards.
With 30,000 employees in 30 countries, Bell Labs is the world's largest R&D organization dedicated to communications and the leading source of new communications technologies. Bell Labs has generated more than 28,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. Medals of Science and six U.S. Medals of Technology. For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at bell-labs.com.
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Lucent Unit Takes Storage Into Third Dimension
(01/30/01, 7:56 p.m. ET) By Margaret Quan, EE Times
Lucent Technologies Inc. launched a new venture Tuesday devoted to commercializing holographic data storage -- a high-density, high-transfer-rate technology that researchers believe has the potential to vastly improve data storage and allow rapid distribution of digital content.
The new company, InPhase Technologies, will be located in Longmont, Colo., near the heart of the data-storage industry.
Nelson Diaz, former vice president and general manager of StorageTek Corp.'s tape drive business, will be president and chief executive officer of InPhase.
The business aims to commercialize technology based on a photopolymer material, and storage media and manufacturing technology co-developed by Lucent (stock: LU) and Imation Corp. (stock: IMN) under a 1999 agreement.
InPhase gains access to these technologies via a license from Lucent, Murray Hill, N.J.
Unlike magnetic storage used by disk drives, which read and write data in a fixed, two-dimensional plane, holographic data storage (HDS) uses optical components to read data in three dimensions.
Data can be stored inside a three-dimensional translucent matrix or diffraction grating, which can be read by shining a laser beam through it.
As the signal beam passes through the matrix, the grating creates patterns of light and shadow that can be interpreted by optical sensors as the 1's and 0's of binary code.
Imation, Oakdale, Minn., is the major corporate investor in InPhase.
Three venture capital firms -- Signal Lake, Westport, Conn.; Madison Dearborn Partners, Chicago; and Newton Technology Partners, in Seoul, South Korea -- have supplied an undisclosed amount of seed funding for the enterprise.
The money will be used to fund development, pay for product development, and hire engineers and a marketing staff over the next two years, Diaz said.
As with other ventures it has created, Lucent said it intends to spinoff InPhase as a separate company in three to four years.
No time line has been set for the introduction of products, and it's not clear which storage markets the business will target.
Diaz said he believes the technology will allow "point-of-sale kiosks" where consumers would purchase movies stored on very cheap media, or be incorporated into information systems for data archiving and retrieval.
Unlike competing efforts, the first incarnation of the technology is designed to be write-once. Future rewriteable versions are planned.
Development and productization of the technology will be directed by InPhase's chief technology officer, Kevin Curtis, who led the holographic storage group at Bell Laboratories' Physical Research Lab, Murray Hill.
All six researchers in that group have joined InPhase, which plans to hire more engineers.
InPhase's ambitious mission involves technology that has been researched for more than 20 years, but which has yet to realize its promise.
Lucent said issues involving systems, materials, and funding have stalled development over the years and prevented the technology's commercialization.
In addition, HDS has been overshadowed by more rapid advances in magnetic technology, which has achieved greater-than-expected speed and capacity improvements by exceeding what were once thought to be its physical limits.
At the same time, progress in HDS proved more difficult than imagined.
HDS took another blow last November when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency stopped all government funding of HDS research.
Lucent has been one of the few companies to fund its own holographic data storage research.
In earlier efforts to commercialize the technology, the company struck a deal with Imation in 1999 to build a prototype HDS system and evaluate its commercial potential.
Since then, those partners have improved materials and systems technology enough to launch a business around it.
Curtis claimed that his group has used lasers, originally developed for DVD, to reach storage densities of 300 Gbits per square inch and transfer rates of "many tens of megabytes per second," using up to 1 million 1-bit-wide data channels, he said.
The company's technology rests on the invention of a photopolymer with bit-storage characteristics and environmental ruggedness suitable for extreme temperature and humidity.
Some analysts have warned that the pace of density advances in traditional magnetic storage could make InPhase's efforts futile.
For example, TeraStor Corp., which promised to dramatically advance disk capacities through optically assisted magnetic storage techniques, has quietly faded.
"Optical technology is a technology of the future and always will be," said John Monroe, disk drive analyst at GartnerGroup/Dataquest, San Jose, Calif.
Others disagreed. Because of the ability to expand in three directions, not two, the rate of storage increases could surpass that of magnetic rigid disk storage, said Dan Tanner, senior analyst storage and storage management at the Aberdeen Group, Boston.
But the problem won't just be designing the storage medium itself, Tanner pointed out.
If data rates do dramatically increase, it will be up to read-channel and network designers to avoid creating new bandwidth bottlenecks in the rest of the system.
InPhase won't be the only startup trying to turn HDS technology into commercial products. Rivals reportedly include Holoplex Technologies Inc., Pasadena, Calif., founded by Demetric Psaltis, a professor of electrical engineering at California Institute of Technology.
IBM Corp.'s Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif., has conducted significant HDS research for many years, though the company isn't spinning off a holographic data storage business.
With Rockwell Science Center, Thousand Oaks, Calif., and Stanford University, the IBM research center was involved in the government-funded Holographic Data Storage System consortium in the mid 1990s.
That group achieved "a new world record" for storage density and data rates, said Hans Coufal, manager of science and technology at the IBM Almaden center.
"With the final demo [last year], we achieved more than was expected -- we reached 250 gigabits per square inch," Coufal said.
And in an HDSS demo with Rockwell and Stanford University, the group achieved a data rate of 10 Gbits/s, Coufal said.
IBM (stock: IBM) continues to develop HDS technology and may be exploring some "game changes" that could facilitate manufacturing, lower costs, and improve the appeal of HDS, Coufal said.
But IBM does not plan to commercialize the technology any time soon.
"For our own applications, the technology is not quite there yet," Coufal said.
Coufal called the HDS startups "pioneers who could change the complexion of the game for everyone. I personally would like them to succeed." |
