Line regenerative AC motor? Most of you are aware that if an AC induction motor is pushed above its synchronous speed by an external force, the motor will become a generator. This sometimes happens inadvertently when attempting to decelerate a motor faster than the load inertia will permit. The resulting regeneration often causes an overvoltage trip within the AC drive powering the motor. This property of a standard motor however, can be used to load a spare drive. It just requires two motors, coupled together. One motor is connected via a contactor to the power line, and the other to your spare drive. You start the drive, and spin up the motor to 60 Hz, carrying the mechanically coupled motor with it. After it stabilizes, you simply close the line contactor, and then attempt to push the motor above 60 Hz with the drive. The line-connected motor will begin to act as a generator, with the power line as a load. The primary caution: be certain that you have verified rotation of the line-start motor. You’ll stand a chance of shearing the line shaft if the motor attempts to reverse when you close the line contactor.

DC motor load? A DC motor is also a generator. Again, you mechanically couple two motors together. This can be two DC motors, if you’re testing DC drives, or an AC and a DC if you’re testing AC drives. You create a load by varying the field strength of the coupled DC motor, while the armature is connected across a resistor bank. With little or no field excitation, there will be minimal loading, but as you increase the field strength, the motor will begin to generate. The advantage of this over the other system, is that’s a little easier to control the loading, and you don’t have to achieve any particular speed. The disadvantage is that you require a heat dissipating resistor bank, and an external, adjustable field supply of some sort.

It was later purchased by KB Toys and then sold to D.E. Shaw, which merged the retailer with the Parent Co.”EToys.com is a highly respected brand with a rich heritage of innovation and growth, and we look forward to championing the next phase of its evolution,” Jerry Storch, chairman and chief executive officer of Toys “R” Us, said in a statement.The Toys “R” Us purchase also includes e-commerce site BabyUniverse.com and parenting resource Web site ePregnancy.com. All three Web sites will continue to operate under their current domain names.Denver-based Parent Co. listed assets of $20.1 million and debt of $35.7 million when it filed for Chapter 11 protection following a disappointing holiday season.

Net sales were about $20 million in the first half of fiscal 2008, compared with about $106 million for all of the previous year, court papers show.The Parent Co. said at the time of its bankruptcy that it planned to sell its assets at auction. The company’s other units include BabyUniverse, Dreamtime Baby, PoshTots, Gift Acquisition and My Twinn.Wayne, N.J.-based Toys “R” Us is the nation’s biggest toy and baby products retailer with more than 1,550 stores.

The acquisition is a big boost for Toys “R” Us, which will receive all of the traffic currently meant for eToys. eToys.com’s Compete.com rank is 14,059, suggesting the site receives hundreds of thousands of page views each month.

Sources tell us that the judge and debtors have not yet signed off on the deals at the domain auction, but that this should happen soon. [Update 4:58 PM CST: Domain Name Wire has reviewed court documents showing that the judge has approved the purchase. Interestingly, the document claims "The Sales Procedures obtained the highest and best value for the Purchased Assets". If they give this same line in the other sales, I'd argue it's not true. Here's the final asset purchase document including $2.15M amount.] The transcript of the auction should be made public in March, and I’ll post any interesting details in the auction transcript at that time.
One thing’s for sure: the companies that knew about this auction got good deals and didn’t want anyone else to know about it before it took place.

applications are progressing quickly is the large technology base that has been developed in robotics research in the past three decades (11,37). Results in mechanical design, kinematics, control algorithms, and programming that were developed for industrial robots are directly applicable to many surgical applications. Robotics researchers have also worked to enhance robotic capabilities through adaptability (the use of sensory information to respond to changing conditions) and autonomy (the ability to carryout tasks without human supervision). The resulting sensing and interpretation techniques that are proving useful in surgery include methods for image processing, spatial reasoning and planning, and real-time sensing and control. To understand the advantages of using robots in surgery, it is helpful to consider the differences inhuman and machine characteristics (summarized in Table1); many promising applications are based on unique robotic capabilities. One key difference is precision and accuracy, or more generally, the ability to use copious, detailed, quantitative information. The combination of 3-Dimaging data, computers, and intra surgical sensors, for example, allows robots to accurately guide instruments to pathological structures deep within the body. Another important difference is that specialized manipulator designs allow robots to work through incisions that are much smaller than would be required for human hands or to work at small scales, where hand tremor poses fundamental limitations. Humans are superior, however, at integrating diverse sources of information, using qualitative information, and exercising judgment. Humans have unexcelled dexterity and hand-eye coordination, as well as a finely developed sense of touch. Unlike interaction with robots, interaction with human members of a surgical team for instruction and explanation is straightforward. These differences in capabilities mean that current robots are restricted to simple procedures, and humans must provide detailed commands, using preoperative planning systems or by providing explicit move-by-move instructions. Even in the most sophisticated systems, robots are specialized to specific tasks within procedures; humans must prepare the patient, make many of the incisions and sutures, and perform many other functions. Robotic systems are best described as”extending human capabilities”rather than”replacing human surgeons.

The earliest model, as far as I can recall, was the HTC Shift, introduced more than a year ago.  It was a device which was ahead of its time, running both Windows Mobile and Windows Vista simultaneously, with an embedded HSDPA module for wireless broadband connectivity.  I do not think it is available for sale anymore. There are currently three models on the local markets with embedded WWAN capability, if you don’t count the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 package that Maxis was hawking in conjunction with its wireless broadband service a few months ago and which is no longer available.

The three models are:
Twinhead NX10g
FTEC eeBook G10X-3G
MSI U120H
I believe I’ve covered all three in this blog, some in more detail than others.  Here are the specifications for comparison (some manufacturers provide more details than others).

Twinhead NX10g – RM 1,999

Inclusive 3.5G HSPA Internal Module
Stylish with 10″ WXGA
Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz)
free upgrade from 250Gb [From 160Gb, 2Gb RAM]
Built-in Web Camera, Bluetooth
Wireless LAN
10/100Mpbs LAN
Non Explosive Lithium ion Battery
Cards Reader, Express Card Slot
3 x USB Port, 1 x VGA Port
Free Twinmate Sleek Case
Pre-installed with XP Home
1.2kg lightweight with 10.2″ Wide Screen
Fanless Design-An engineering breakthrough that has permanently eliminated the risk of overheating due to fan failure.
Non Explosive Lithium ion Battery [Good God, what is a "non-explosive" battery!?!!?]
Twinmate series comes with 3 years limited local warranty

FTEC eeBook G10X-3G – RM 1,899

Intel Atom N270 processor (1.6Ghz)
2Gb RAM
120Gb HDD
10.2″ SWVGA
1.3 megapixel webcam
WiFi
4-in-1 card reader
3 USB 2.0 ports
HSDPA modem (for 3G)
5 cells lithium ion battery
1.4kg
Genuine Windows XP Home
1 year warranty

MSI Wind U120H – RM 1,988

Intel® Atom™ N270 Processor
Genuine Windows XP Home
10” Wide Screen Display
Exclusive MSI EasyFace( Face Identification software) Inside
Built-in Latest 3.5G (HSDPA) Solution for 3G Communication
Ergonomic Big-Size Keyboard and Touch Pad
Hard Drive with Massive Capacity
Built-in High Resolution Mega Pixels Webcam
Built-in High-Performance 2 Channel Stereo Speakers, and
Microphone
802.11b / g / n Wireless Lan with Bluetooth
Comprehensive Multi-Media Application Interface

Sorry, no pictures this time folks, shops in Malaysia are very protective of their pricing and don’t like people snapping pictures of their products.  I have heard that they hire ex-Gurkha special forces soldiers who can kill you with their pinkie finger should you decide to breach this unwritten rule.
So head on down to their store if you’re interested in getting this thing.  Not a bad deal, if you ask me.  Maybe if you were patient enough, they would pay you to take this thing off their hands.

Gregg Bartlett, GlobalFoundries Inc.’s senior vice president of technology and R&D, planted a brave banner on the field with his Wednesday (July 14) keynote, saying that the company would install a production-grade EUV lithography tool in 2012, and actually use it in production by perhaps 2014.
But much of the industry remains deeply skeptical. Symptoms of the uncertainly were visible in an afternoon session on advanced lithography.
Jongwook Kye, principal member of technical staff at GlobalFoundries, filled in some of the concerns that might have been obscured by Bartlett’s flag-planting. Kye pointed out that lithographers were already working at numerical apertures far higher, and a k1 far lower, than were thought feasible a few years ago.

Even so, random patterns were nearly impossible to print. And lithographers are running out of options. Kye warned that the full cost of double-patterning was growing so high that EUV—should it’s vastly expensive machines ever be available—was looking like a low-cost alternative. Still, he said, spacer-defined double patterning would probably be necessary on some critical—and sufficiently regular—layers.

But in general, Kye argued, there are no magic fixes. The way forward will be increasingly complex 193-nm lithography, made possible by unprecedented cooperation between technology and design teams.
“In the past, the link between technology developers and chip designers was only the process design kit,” Kye said. “Now that is not enough. The two groups must sit together.”

Technology teams must tell designers what features can actually be printed, Kye said. And designers must deliver layers that use only feasible patterns. In exchange, the technology team can deliver useful yields and improved performance, without having to wait for the end of the EUV rainbow, he said.

A starkly different view came from a purveyor of a technology that few semiconductor designers have been watching: nano-imprint. Ben Eynon, vice president of semiconductor business development at imprint equipment vendor Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII), argued that for NAND flash production at leading-edge geometries, his company’s systems would soon be the best available choice.

Eynon cited calculations done at Toshiba suggesting that at an advanced process node the total cost of ownership for imprint would be half that of EUV, and a quarter that of double patterning. Those numbers depend on availability of a mask replicator, an imprinting device that creates many working imprint masks from one e-beam-written master.

Eynon said the replicator should ship by the end of 2010, and that speed for mask-inspection tools was sufficient to ensure an affordable flow of production masks. The claim that imprint is near production viability for flash is rather startling. Molecular Imprints has already established itself in production of patterned media for disks. But conventional wisdom has held that the relatively high defect densities of the process—tolerable on disk platters—would give unacceptable yield for ICs. And certainly that is still the case for designs such as SoCs, where much of the circuitry has no redundancy.

But it appears that Molecular’s work on the two primary defect sources—particle contamination and damage of the mask—has brought the defect density down to where NAND flash’s powerful error correction can deal with it. In summary, Eynon argued that when NAND production managers ran out of other alternatives, imprint would be ready to step in.

As delays and questions continue to plague EUV, and as the cost estimates for double-patterning continue to spiral, expect to see more managers like Kye taking highly pragmatic mixed-technology approaches, and drawing back-end design teams deeper into the complexities of process decisions.
And watch for radical ideas—mechanical imprint patterning, multi-electron-beam, and perhaps others—to opportunistically snap up critical layers on particular kinds of devices, where a radical idea might just seize the crown.

The new graphene-based electrode fabrication process, also developed by researchers at the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), has been licensed to Vorbeck Materials Corp. (Jessup, Md.) for commercialization.

The graphene process was developed at PNNL in cooperation with Princeton researcher Ilhan Aksay under a cooperative research and development agreement with Vorbeck. PNNL said it has demonstrated that ultra-thin sheets of grahene can be fabricated on lithium-ion battery electrodes to yeild vastly shorter recharge times.

Vorbeck is developing a commercial process that duplicates PNNL’s success in the lab; it has branded its graphene electrode material “Vor-x”. Vorbeck separately developed “Vor-ink”–a graphene-based conductive ink licensed from Princeton University that allows electronic circuits to be printed.

Using the new Vor-x material, researchers also hope to increase the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries without slowing their recharge time–a traditional trade-off with conventional lithium-ion battery technology.Funding for the battery research was provided by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund.

The IPL group claims the culprit is Cadence. The IPL group is demanding that Cadence take down and remove the message. ”IPL Alliance member companies and their customers using iPDKs have reported that Cadence Virtuoso issues a warning message indicating that non-SKILL PCells are not supported,’’ according to a statement issued by the IPL Group .
”The warning message started to appear when Virtuoso IC6.1.3 was first released. We believe this to be misleading. Our members and their customers have rigorously tested and validated that all iPDKs work in Cadence Virtuoso 6.x. The Python PCells (PyCells) in iPDK use the same OpenAccess PCell plug-in mechanism used by Cadence SKILL PCells and are completely interoperable. PyCells work correctly and yield the same results in Virtuoso, Custom Designer, Titan, and Laker,’’ according to the IPL group.

Cadence declined to comment on the matter.
The IPL Alliance was started in 2007, with five founding members: AWR, Ciranova, SpringSoft, Silicon Navigator and Synopsys. Mentor Graphics and Pulsic joined as supporting members. The newest members are the following entities: TSMC, Helic, JEDAT, Magma, Micro Magic and Virage Logic. Recently, LFoundry, TowerJazz and others joined the group.
A PDK, as defined by the IPL, is a set of technologies to enable a complete analog and mixed-signal design flow. This consists of foundry-verified data files, such as schematic symbols, component descriptions, parameterized cells (p-cells) and callbacks.
Not all are on board with IPL, however. One EDA vendor, Cadence Systems Design Inc., refuses to join IPL and views the IPL-backed flow as a competitive threat to its analog EDA tool suite, dubbed Virtuoso. Cadence dominates the custom EDA landscape. Cadence’s p-cell libraries are written in a rival and proprietary language called Skill, which is said to lock customers into Virtuoso. IPL is attempting to break Cadence’s monopoly in custom design, but the group has also tried to reach out and work with the EDA vendor.