John Boyd

Here comes the wallet phone [wireless credit card]

This paper discusses NTT DoCoMos latest offering, the wireless credit card. DoCoMo, Japans largest cellphone system operator, is working with major travel and banking organizations to extend the reach of its e-wallet service. These wallet phones are equipped with a wireless smart card chip, called FeliCa, and can be used to make electronic purchases at stores or vending machines, act as boarding passes on certain domestic flights, and authorize entry through corporate security doors. A year after DoCoMo introduced the e-wallet, the company has shipped about 6 million of the handsets. The company is expected to ship about 15 million handsets by the end of 2006.

An internet-inspired electricity grid

Japans plan to phase out its nearly 50 gigawatts of nuclear capacity over the next two to three decades has opened a window for renewable energy in the country. But swapping wind and solar power for that nuclear generation, which produced 30 percent of Japans electricity prior to the 2011 Fukushima crisis, could also lead to major disruptions in energy supply, warns Rikiya Abe, a University of Tokyo professor. The problem, says Abe, who came to academia after working in the electrical generation industry for 30 years, is that Japans grid-and indeed that of many developed countries-is set up to be centrally controlled. The utilities have to carefully regulate the grids frequency and voltage by maintaining a fine balance between power generation and changing demand. A diverse group of large Japanese firms is starting to explore a solution-a gradual reorganization of the countrys power system so that in the end it resembles the Internet, routers and all.

Let there be (a new kind of) light [NEWS]

Recent events on the business front and advances in the lab could soon transform the way about lighting our homes and buildings. Significant strides in developing organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) may allow architects in the next few years to integrate this power-efficient and tractable technology into basic building materials, enabling entire structures to be turned into luminous edifices. Konica Minolta Holdings, a Tokyo-based manufacturer of imaging products, and General Electric Co., one of the worlds largest lightbulb makers, formed a strategic alliance to accelerate development of OLED lighting and vowed to ship products in the next three years. A major challenge all OLED manufacturers face is how to make their products cost-competitive with the ultracheap incandescent and fluorescent lighting products on the market.

Canon and Toshiba go their own way in flat panels

The article presents the alliance between the Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp., both in Tokyo. The alliance was formed to meet the soaring demand of the consumers on large flat-panel screens. They intend to produce and market large flat-panel screens for TVs based on surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) technology. This technology is newcomer to the big-screen wars, which have been dominated by liquid-crystal displays (LCD), follower by plasma displays, and projection TVs using cathode ray tube (CRT). This article also presents the advantages of SED technology over LCDs, CRTs and plasma displays.

Giving supercomputers a second wind [News]

The speed of high-performance computing has soared from around 100 gigaflops in 1993 to over 50 petaflops today and is on course to hit the longsought exascale (1018 floating- point operations per second) mark in the 2020s. Yet this remarkable supercomputing progress can be something of a super nightmare for the institutes and government agencies asked to invest the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars that leading systems can cost.

Japan's green dreams delayed

In the wake of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, with nuclear power?s future uncertain, Japans parliament passed a bill in August aiming to boost green energy production. The bill-commonly called the feed-in tariff or FIT law-requires Japans 10 power utilities to purchase electricity generated by suppliers of such renewable energy sources as solar, wind, and biomass and is slated to go into effect this summer. But its implementation is far from ready, and some energy experts believe it will be decades before it really helps.

Nifty new cellular phone systems race to capture Japan's consumers

Y O S H IK A Z U T S U N O /A F P COMMUNICATIONS • In February 1999, Japan’s cellphone giant NTT DoCoMo Inc. (Tokyo) introduced the innovative i-Mode cellular phone system, with ingeniously designed handsets and feature menus that permitted customers to do things like download ring tones and exchange text messages much more easily than with earlier mobile phones. It was the i-Mode’s meteoric takeoff, more than any other factor, that convinced communications companies around the world that “third-generation” (3G) cellular technology—with features like i-Mode’s, but even better and faster—was the wave of the future. European cellphone companies paid upwards of US

A new silicon PV record [News]

100 billion for 3G licenses, and the International Telecommunication Union (Geneva, Switzerland) allocated new spectrum generously to accommodate what was often called at the time the “wireless Internet.” Now all eyes once again are on Japan, where two 3G cellular systems have been introduced, one by DoCoMo, the other by its long-standing competitor, KDDI Corp. (Tokyo). The two systems are in a race for world domination, and the first lap is taking place in Japan. One system, wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA), is preferred by the big European players; the other, CDMA2000, is backed by many of the U.S. heavyweights. Both are based on technology commercialized by Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) that allows signals to occupy the same bandwidth at the same time without becoming confused. Commercialization of 3G systems in Europe has been much slower to start than expected, though the British affiliate of Hutchison Wampoa Ltd. (Hong Kong) has introduced limited service in the UK, Italy, Sweden, and Austria based on WCDMA. Even in Japan, the race was slow to get started, and it is far from over. Nevertheless, it has now entered an unexpectedly exciting phase, and that’s because the late-starting horse on the outside track, KDDI, looks to be winning so far. Its CDMA2000 subscribership is rapidly approaching 10 million, whereas DoCoMo’s WCDMA system has yet to win one million users [see table, above]. While it’s too soon to draw any hard and fast conclusions about what the status of the race implies for the two contending cellular technologies globally, this much can be safely said: so far the 3G contest is not playing out in Japan according to script.

Update - Mixing Memory To Speed Solid-State Drives

Theres a new king of silicon solar cells. Researchers at Kaneka Corp., a resin and plastics manufacturer based in Osaka, have come up with a single-crystal heterojunction silicon solar cell that achieves a record-breaking 26.3 percent efficiency-a 0.7 percent increase over the previous record. That may not seem like a lot, but its really a big step when you consider that the theoretical maximum efficiency for such cells-which make up about one-quarter of annual global production by gigawatts-is just over 29 percent.

Home fuels cells to sell in Japan - [update]

The pricey MacBook Air you covet, with its small, lightweight, shock-resistant solid- state drive (SSD), may have a secret. Despite their advantages, solid-state drives suffer not just from enormous price tags but also from slow performance during certain key operations. Now Korean engineers report that through a clever mix of two types of memory, they can give solid- state drives a boost without also jacking up their price. Unlike a traditional hard-disk drive, which can write new data directly over recorded data, the NAND flash memory that makes up solid-state drives requires free memory space in which to write. Thats usually not a problem when you have to write large chunks of sequential data, such as a video clip. But it is a problem when you have to make frequent small additions and changes to existing data. If, for instance, you need to update a file, the original data must be copied to a fresh memory block so that the first block can be erased. The new data can then be merged with the original and written back to the first block.