IEE Review
Volume 49, Issue 11, December 2003
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Volume 49, Issue 11
December 2003
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- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, page: 2 –2
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031109
- Type: Article
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- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, page: 5 –5
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031110
- Type: Article
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(2 pages) - Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, page: 8 –8
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031111
- Type: Article
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(12 pages) - Author(s): D. Ross
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 22 –23
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031101
- Type: Article
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The UK's ID card is another piece of good news for the bullish biometrics sector but industry figures are now urging caution. The proposed card's changing shape since 1995 reflects the development of technology in that time: from magnetic stripes to smartcards with digital photos and biometric parameters such as facial recognition, iris scans or fingerprints. The biometrics industry is excited because such schemes could drive biometrics to the mass market. However, there are problems with implementing such schemes which are briefly discussed in this article. - Author(s): D. Lenton
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 24 –25
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031102
- Type: Article
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Thousands more young engineers are to be offered the chance to work in the UK. The Government wants to focus on the contribution foreign nationals can make to filling skills gaps in areas like engineering. Few dispute the need to encourage highly skilled people with specific experience to boost the economy. Less well publicised, however, was a parallel initiative that could see a big increase in the number of young people looking for jobs in engineering. There is a real demand in sectors such as research and development and financial services for maths, science and engineering specialists. We hope that this scheme will encourage overseas students to study in the UK and following graduation be a real asset in the workplace. But is there really a serious shortage of this sort of graduate, and what will be the impact of such a large number of people joining the ranks of UK nationals chasing jobs? These questions are discussed in this article. - Author(s): D. Lenton
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 26 –27
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031103
- Type: Article
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What will it take to deal with the UK's nuclear waste? The author reports from a special meeting called to discuss the problem. Managing one of the biggest engineering projects of the coming decades in a way that satisfies everyone involved will rest with a new body the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). A Liabilities Management Unit (LMU) at the Department of Trade and Industry is working to ensure the NDA hits the ground running. There is clear government intent to get on with decommissioning. The Unit has already completed the first national look at what needs to be done, carrying out site assessments to create a catalogue of assets and liabilities and establishing links with stakeholders like BNFL and UKAEA. - Author(s): J.P. Keithley
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, page: 29 –29
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031112
- Type: Article
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Cooperation between nanotech researches and instrumentation designers is a key to innovation says the author. - Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 30 –32
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031113
- Type: Article
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- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, page: 33 –33
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031114
- Type: Article
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- Author(s): M. Williamson
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 34 –37
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031104
- Type: Article
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Is part of the world tuning into satellite radio? Noah Samara, the chairman and CEO of WorldSpace, founded the company in 1990. Using untapped bandwidth in the gigahertz spectrum and the broad geographical coverage of a satellite beam, he envisaged a revolution in radio broadcasting. The plan was to launch three satellites into geostationary orbit to provide near-global coverage and beam digital, `CD-quality' radio services to anyone with a receiver. Today, the WorldSpace network comprises two satellites AfriStar, launched in October 1998, and AsiaStar, launched in March 2000. Together they cover Africa, the Middle East, Western Europe and Asia. The deployment of AmeriStar, covering South and Central America, has been postponed for financial reasons. Each spacecraft broadcasts three beams, each capable of delivering more than 40 channels and ancillary data services directly to flat-panel antennas on portable receivers and to personal computer adapters. Each satellite has a bit-rate capacity of about 9 Mbit/s and service providers can choose to broadcast at data rates ranging from 16 kbit/s (for monophonic AM channels) to 128 kbit/s (comparable to stereo CD performance). - Author(s): R. Dettmer
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 38 –40
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031105
- Type: Article
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Paul Mockapetris is the inventor of the Internet's Domain Name System. This article discusses why domain names are booming on the Net. As originally envisaged, the DNS was restricted to matching domain names and IP addresses, but Mockapetris decided to "overstep" his mandate and design a system that could be extended to include additional data types. As the DNS has grown in scale, its attractions as a distributed database have become increasingly powerful. There are currently some two million DNS servers on the public Internet, and around five times that number behind corporate firewalls contributing to the DNS's caching activity. - Author(s): C. Edwards
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 42 –45
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031106
- Type: Article
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Could the next generation in semiconductor process technology be undermined by the legacy of unresolved technical problems? As we enter 2004, the next phase in integrated circuit manufacturing will begin in earnest, with companies starting to ramp up production of chips based on the 90 nm process. But bad experiences with the 130 nm process, which was heavily delayed by manufacturing problems, have made chipmakers cautious. Many companies are holding back from moving to the new process until they see the results that the more optimistic chipmakers get. A number of those who have decided to take the plunge early have been careful to keep their options open and trade off die size or speed against manufacturability. Thanks to rapid advances in lithography-the photographic processes used to create tiny features on chips-transistors have shrunk more quickly than was expected in the late 1990s. These gains have not been reflected in other chip-level features. Chipmakers have faced increasing problems scaling down the wires that join transistors together. To maintain an effective doubling in density between generations, the distance between the wires and their lateral thickness has to reduce by about 30%. Unfortunately as the wires get closer together, interference between signals on adjacent wires becomes harder and harder to overcome. - Author(s): L. Collins
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 46 –49
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031107
- Type: Article
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Some people work better under stress: major players in the semiconductor industry are betting on the same being true for silicon. The semiconductor industry is investigating a new way of making the transistors that are the basic building blocks for almost all integrated circuits (ICs). It promises to squeeze more device performance out of current manufacturing processes, or to get the same device performance using less power. The technique is known as 'strained silicon' and has become a hot topic in semiconductor research in the past two years. In 2002 eight papers on strained silicon were presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting, a key research conference. This year there will be 16. What strained silicon does is allow you to go faster without going smaller. This may present some relief for an industry that is under pressure from the exponentially rising costs of its manufacturing processes. - Author(s): N. Flaherty
- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 50 –53
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031108
- Type: Article
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Ever falling chip geometries are beginning to raise serious doubts as to the long-term viability of flash. Quantum tunnelling is integral to the operation of flash memory, and as chips are getting smaller the ultra-thin tunnelling barrier is becoming increasingly prone to breaking down. A second problem is with the lifetime of flash-based devices, which can be limited to around 100000 cycles. This is fine for some applications, but inadequate where data storage requirements extend over decades. Flash is also quite slow and difficult to program, two problems that are getting more significant as chip areas increase and supply voltages fall. There are three technologies looking to replace flash: magnetic RAM (MRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) and ovonic RAM. All of these use new materials to create truly nonvolatile memories with long lifetimes. Getting any one of them to replace flash in the marketplace will depend on producing a sufficiently small memory cell, while at the same time minimising the number of additional processing steps required. - Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 54 –55
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031115
- Type: Article
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- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 56 –57
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031116
- Type: Article
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- Source: IEE Review, Volume 49, Issue 11, p. 58 –59
- DOI: 10.1049/ir:20031117
- Type: Article
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Editor's comment
Letters
News
Back on the cards [ID cards]
What skills crisis?
Coming clean [nuclear waste]
Crossing alliances
Gadgets
Complex business
Satellites rock! [satellite radio]
What's in a name [Internet Domain Name System]
Small chips in crossed wires
Silicon takes the strain
Flash [computer memory]
Technology
Reviews
Events
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