Notes of interest from Apple’s Q107 conference call [u]
Apple on Wednesday released results for its fiscal 2007 first quarter ended December 30, 2006, which included record revenue of $7.1 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.0 billion, or $1.14 per diluted share.
Some notes follow from the conference call with analysts and members of the media:
This is a preview of Notes of interest from Apple’s Q1 2007 conference call.
Apple Inc’s annual developer gathering is currently scheduled to take place during the second week of June, nearly two months earlier than last year’s event, AppleInsider has learned.
People familiar with the conference planning say the Cupertino-based Mac maker has reserved the dates of June 10th through the 15th for the event, with a keynote presentation by chief executive Steve Jobs slated for Monday the 11th.
As has been the case in recent years, the week-long conference will reportedly take place at the Moscone West convention center in downtown San Francisco. Dates, however, could shift ahead of Apple’s formal announcement early next month.
WWDC 2007 is widely expected to represent the official coming out party of Apple’s next-generation Leopard operating system, following full disclosure of its feature set during a separate event in the preceding months. Current company roadmaps also indicate that launch of at least one new Mac system will coincide with the developer conference.
This is a preview of Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2007 slated for June.
Microprojector technology could let handheld gadgets like mobile phones and iPods display big pictures.
Mobile devices can store pictures and videos, but viewing them on such a small screen isn’t ideal. Microvision, based in Redmond, WA, hopes to solve this problem with a microprojector the company plans to reveal at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The system, composed of semiconductor lasers and a tiny mirror, will be small enough to integrate into a phone or an iPod, says Randy Sprague, chief engineer at Microvision.
Right now there is great interest in putting projectors in phones. Indeed, major phone manufacturer Nokia is “looking at” different technologies to integrate projectors into mobile devices (see “The Future of Cell Phones”). As the fabrication technology used to make the components of these projectors matures, it is becoming more economically feasible to create a projector small enough to fit into a handheld device, says Microvision’s Sprague.
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs)–which already make color displays in mobile phones and other devices brighter and more efficient–have taken a step closer to competing as sources of white light, too. In an OLED, electricity running through thin layers of organic materials causes them to emit photons. But only half the photons make it out of the materials, and three-fifths of those get scattered to the edges. Stephen Forrest, a University of Michigan electrical engineer, and graduate student Yiru Sun came up with a trick for making the diodes brighter: they use imprint lithography to stamp a hexagonal array of lenses, each a few micro meters in diameter, into a polymer substrate (left). The lenses direct light outward rather than sideways, boosting light output by 70 percent. “It’s a significant benefit,” says Vladimir Bulovi´c, co-head of MIT’s Laboratory of Organic Optics and Electronics. “There’s a lot of light in the OLED that never makes it out.” Eventually, energy- efficient sheets of glowing plastic could replace traditional light bulbs. Forrest says that with directive lenses and other improvements, OLEDs could reach an output of 100 lumens per watt in a couple of years, which would be better than the 90 lumens per watt of fluorescent bulbs. Manufacturing costs would then be the major remaining hurdle.
Hewlett-Packard researchers have designed a faster, more energy-efficient chip by packing in more transistors–without shrinking them.
In the chip-making industry, the best way to increase the speed of electronics and make them cheaper has always been to shrink a chip’s transistors to create room for more. But now researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs have announced a radically different approach: a design that creates room for eight times more transistors on a chip, while avoiding the need to make the transistors smaller.
These nanoscale crossbars, developed at HP, could lead to an entirely new chip architecture that would improve chip performance without shrinking transistors. The crossbars are to be placed on top of the transistors, replacing the wire interconnects currently found between them and freeing up space for more transistors.
Credit: Hewlett-Packard Company
“For a long time, we in the industry have been obsessed with this idea that higher capacity [chips] and lower cost equals smaller transistors, and we’ve been investing the bulk of our efforts in this area,” says Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director of quantum-science research at HP Labs. The new research, Williams says, “is the first proof that it’s possible to dramatically improve integrated circuits without shrinking transistors.”
This is a preview of Novel Chip Architecture Could Extend Moore’s Law.
Researchers have bigger plans for multi-touch screens than the novel interface on Apple’s iPhone.
When Steve Jobs demonstrated Apple’s new phone at Macworld recently, the feature that elicited the most “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience was the touch-screen interface: it allowed more than one touch at a time. This “multi-touch” technology adds functions such as allowing a person to easily zoom in and out of pictures and Web pages by pinching the screen with two fingers.
But the full power of multi-touch technology might be unleashed in screens far larger than those on phones. Over the past few years, Jeff Han, consulting research scientist at New York University, has developed an inexpensive way to make large multi-touch screens accommodating 10, 20, or even more fingers. He envisions applications ranging from interactive whiteboards to touch-screen tables and digital walls–any of which could be manipulated by more than just one person. And this month, Han has unveiled Perceptive Pixel, his new company based on the technology.
This is a preview of Touch Screens for Many Fingers.
Researchers at Intel have announced the world’s fastest silicon modulator–an advance that could cut bandwidth costs and make computers run faster and cooler.
Today’s computer processors are strictly electronic devices, transmitting data by means of electrons traveling through copper wires. But this technology is relatively slow and produces heat. Now, researchers at Intel have developed an optical device that could play a key role in replacing electrons and copper wires with photons and beams of light. The team has demonstrated a record-breaking silicon modulator that can encode data at a rate of 30 gigabits per second–nearly as fast as many nonsilicon modulators currently used in fiber optics hardware.
A silicon modulator that can operate at these speeds, says Mario Paniccia, Intel research fellow and director of the Silicon Photonics Technology Lab, could make it possible to design faster computers that include photonic chips. In addition, Paniccia says, it could be part of an all-silicon photonic chip that might be used in fiber optic networks. Since silicon devices are easy to mass-produce and relatively inexpensive, the chips could replace more expensive network hardware, reducing the cost of bandwidth.
This is a preview of Intel Speeds Up Silicon Photonics.
alling a “game changing” energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.
EEStor’s ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to “replace the electrochemical battery” in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.
The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.
The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids–all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America’s quest for energy security. A Texas company says it can make a new ultracapacitor power system to replace the electrochemical batteries in everything from cars to laptops.
Over the years we’ve managed to do a lot of nifty things with silicon, yet we’ve never gotten around one problem with the stuff: it’s rigid and brittle. Silicon is great if you want to build electronics, but lousy if you want to wear them.
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Dick Tracy aside, there are plenty of people who could benefit from wearable electronics. Surgeons, for example, could operate with enhanced sensitivity—and increased reaction time—if they had warning sensors built right into their latex gloves. All sorts of life-saving health monitors could be developed.
Fortunately, the wait may finally be coming to an end now that researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working on a technique that stretches silicon. The trick, says John Rogers, a professor in the school’s department of materials science and engineering, is to use very, very thin silicon—100 nanometers, to be exact, or 1/1000 the thickness of a human hair.
These nanoscale crossbars, developed at HP, could lead to an entirely new chip architecture that would improve chip performance without shrinking transistors. The crossbars are to be placed on top of the transistors, replacing the wire interconnects currently found between them and freeing up space for more transistors.
