Member Article

Extremely micro-chip

A microchip the size of a grain of rice that can be attached to almost any object has been developed in the US. The chip, developed by Hewlett Packard, is a memory device based on CMOS, a widely used, low-power integrated circuit design. The chips could be embedded in a sheet of paper or stuck to any surface.Potential applications for the chip include storing medical records on a hospital patient’s wristband; providing audio-visual supplements to postcards and photos; helping fight counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry; adding security to identity cards and passports; and supplying additional information for printed documents. The chip has a 10 megabits-per-second data transfer rate – 10 times faster than Bluetooth™ wireless technology and comparable to Wi-Fi speeds. With a storage capacity ranging from 256 kilobits to 4 megabits in working prototypes, it could store a very short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. Future versions could have larger capacities.Ed McDonnell, the project manager of the “Memory Spot” research team said: “The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .