Friday, March 29, 2024

HP’s Tiny Chip Could Have Huge Impact

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HP’s Labs will unveil a tiny, wireless chip today that could make audio
and visual information as well as digital documents far more broadly
accessible.

HP’s “Memory Spot” research team has developed a memory device, based on
CMOS (define) integrated circuit design, that includes a built-in
antenna and 10 Mbits/sec. data transfer rate, comparable to Wi-Fi
(define) speeds.

Low Power? How about none? Just like an RFID (define) chip, the Memory Spot is completely self-contained with no need for a battery or external electronics. HP said
it receives power through “inductive coupling” from a special read-write
device, which can then extract content from the memory on the chip.

Inductive coupling is the transfer of energy from one circuit component to
another through a shared electromagnetic field. A change in current flow
through one device induces current flow in the other device.

HP says the chip is about the size of a grain of rice (2 mm by 4 mm square).
Working prototypes have storage capacities ranging from 256K to 4 megabits,
or enough to store a short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of
text. HP said larger capacities are also possible for future versions.

Analyst Tim Bajarin has seen the prototypes and is very excited about its
potential a few years down the road.

“It’s a fascinating technology, but remember this is only a technology
announcement coming out of HP Labs,” Bajarin, president of Creative
Strategies, told internetnews.com. “For it to become a commercial
product, HP’s got to line up all kinds of partners to make the chips, make
the readers, and set up any licensing. It’s going to be a two- to five-year
process for this to become ubiquitous.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

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