July
20, 1998 Design News
Technology Bulletin
Late developments that shape
engineering
by Laurie Peach, Associate Editor
Six wheels better than four
A steel six-wheel shopping cart with nylon webbing
siding and child seat won the ninth annual National
Engineering Design Challenge for a safer shopping cart,
sponsored by JETS, a national, non-profit educational
organization that promotes educational excellence in
math, science, and technology in high schools. To prove
its stability, three students balanced on the buggy's
side during competition. The cart stood motionless.
A novel six-wheel design is the key to the cart's steadiness.
On the standard cart, the turning wheels are in the
front and the pivot point is in the back, creating front-wheel
steering. The diameter of the smallest circle it can
make, therefore, is twice the cart's length. The Queen
of Carts' two center wheels not only act as stabilizing
wheels and keep the cart going straight, but also are
the pivot point. The cart can turn from either end--from
front or back around the center wheels. Also, while
standard carts carry most of the load in the front over
the turning wheels, making them difficult to maneuver
under heavy loads, the Queen of Carts can easily carry
loads up to 1,200 lb. Alysse Beutel, Patrick Flannery,
Judith Luckie, Jessica Rudy, and Rebecca Wilson from
West Perry High School in Elliottsburg, PA designed
the Queen of Carts. FAX: (212) 967-7292
New wave of workstations on the horizon
Here's another entry in the workstation sweepstakes.
Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) introduced the Pentium
II XeonTM, a line of processors for midrange
and higher server and workstation applications. The
440GX-workstation chipset supports a front-side bus
speed of 100 MHz, has an AGP port for graphics, and
can support 2 Gbytes of memory. The dual 400-MHz Pentium
II processor with 256 Mbytes RAM is built with a thermocoupler
diode so OEMs can monitor core temperature. With this
new architecture "Intel is bringing dual processing
capabilities at affordable prices to the workstation
market segment," says Raghu Murthi, director of
product marketing, workstation product division, Intel.
In 1,000 unit quantities, the Pentium II Xeon processor
400 MHz with 512 KB L2 cache costs $1,124 and the Pentium
II Xeon processor 400 MHz with I MB L2 cache is $2,836.
The dual Pentium II Xeon processor workstations will
allow developers to do real-time configuration changes
and rendering on one platform. The developer can continue
designing on one processor while the second does the
rendering as it is developed. It is also fast. "Applications
will run 10 to 20% faster than the Pentium II processor
workstations," Murthi continues. "Ours is
the fastest processor on the market today, bar none."
Workstations with the Xeon processor are ready for shipment.
FAX: (253) 371-7129
Sun's motherboard design breaks systems apart to rebuild
Sun Microsystems (San Jose, CA) isn't going to be left
behind. The company developed a four-way embedded SPARCTM
multiprocessor board, the Ultra AXmp, using Sun's new
Computer Core Technology (CCT). CCT combines core system
ASICs, memory, and SPARC CPUs in a modular package.
"This is the first time this building-block approach
has ever been done," says Sun's Jeff Veis. With
a modular approach, people can pick any flavor of I/O
they want and design accordingly. "CCT allows designers
to get back in the game," he says. By partitioning
the core components of Sun's four-way architecture in
a dense and modular package, the company can offer three
times the computer density or one-third the size of
an average office system, while increasing the integration
flexibility for the embedded market. The Ultra AXmp
can be deployed in an industrial, rack-mount chassis
in either a horizontal or vertical orientation. The
board, specifically targeted for telecommunications
and networking OEMs, will be available in the second
half of 1998. Embedded configurations start at $7,500
in volume quantities. FAX: (408) 544-0180.
LCDs make way for LEPs
Light-emitting polymer (LEP) technology from Cambridge
Display Technology (CDT, Cambridge, England) may soon
find its way into commercial flexible displays. DuPont
(Anaheim, CA) and CDT entered into a two-year joint
development agreement to supply plastic substrates coated
with LEP material to electronics manufacturers in large
volume within three years. CDT holds a patent on the
LEP technology. Displays will initially be incorporated
into products such as VCRs, CD players, mobile phones,
lighted signs, and alarm clocks. LEP technology can
be produced with existing manufacturing equipment, and
still offer the low voltage benefits of traditional
light-emitting diodes and the large area patternability
associated with current LCDs. Phone: (302) 695-3332.
Good things come in small packages, even lasers
Using chaos theory and an egg-shaped cavity, scientists
from Yale University (New Haven, CT), Lucent Technologies
Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ), and the Max Planck Institute
of Physics (Dresden, Germany) developed semiconductor
microlasers with more than 1,000 times the power of
conventional, disk-shaped microlasers. These tiny energy
sources are 0.05 mm in diameter, or as wide as human
hair. The researchers say the experimental lasers could
either be used to speed up voice, video, Internet, and
other forms of communication that use fiber-optic networks
or become the basis for entirely new networks. The discovery
could allow manufacturers to build computers that would
operate with light instead of electrons, with fiber
optics replacing wiring. Instead of using the traditional
circular laser cavity, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone
suggested changing the shape to an oval or egg. "If
it's a circular cylinder, a lot of the laser beam gets
wasted and doesn't get out at all," Stone says.
Experiments showed that, above a critical deformation
level, the light pulses would travel in a bow-tie pattern.
They suffer less internal reflection and emit light
in four narrow, controllable beams. An enormous increase
in output power accompanies this change, Stone says.
Each beam has an output of 10 mW, increasing the laser's
total output to 40 mW, compared to 40 microwatts in
the round cylinder. FAX: (203) 432-2207.
Filter turns bubbling crude into Texas tea, black
gold
Jed Klampet shot varmints to find his billion-dollar
oil well. Teh Fu Yen, Ph.D., a professor of environmental
and civil engineering at the University of Southern
California School of Engineering, developed an inexpensive
filter instead. "In preliminary tests, our filter
removes as much as 60% of the sulfur [from crude oil]
in a single pass," says Yen. To make the filter,
an engineer heats a mixture of two metals to nearly
1,000F and sprays it through a nozzle. Emerging as a
fine crystalline powder, this "intermetallic"
substance is bonded to an inert substrate, such as carbon
fiber. The coated substrate is then packed into a hollow
glass cylinder--creating a large interior surface. The
greater the surface, the higher the efficiency of the
filter. To remove sulfur, Yen treats the intermetallic
powder with particular chemicals to produce a crystalline
structure containing small pits that match the size
and shape of sulfur molecules. "The crystalline
structure can sort out the bad without affecting the
good," says Yen. "Analogous methods of nanotechology
might also be used to remove nitrogen compounds, metals,
and other impurities. South America, China, Canada,
and certain republics of the former Soviet Union have
large reserves of crude that are heavily contaminated
with sulfur, metals, and other impurities. Intermetallic
filters could purify such oils both efficiently and
economically." By altering the crystalline structure,
variants of the intermetallic filter might also be used
to treat sewage and purify wastewater, Yen suggests.
E-mail to tfyen@mizar.usc.edu
.
Weather or not, it's safer flying
The weather channel may take to the air--much to the
benefit of those of us who fly. Honeywell (Phoenix,
AZ) and NASA are joining forces to create a worldwide
aviation weather distribution and display network called
AWIN, Aviation Weather Information System. There were
radio transmissions in the past from ground control,
says Dr. Charles Scanlon, senior research scientist
for NASA, "but it is hard to put a radar picture
into words." Combining digital communication technology
with powerful yet small PCs, Scanlon hopes to drastically
reduce aviation accidents within the next 10 years.
"Weather is a factor in 30% of all accidents,"
he says. In-situ turbulence and forward-looking sensors
will send information to Earth where turbulence maps
will be generated and data linked back to the aircraft.
All equipment must be flight-hardened, meaning no electromagnetic
influences, must withstand so many G-loads of force,
and will not catch fire. Initial implementation should
be within five years. FAX: (757) 864-2034.
Hide and go seek, robot-style
Since they conquered the task of programming "observer"
robots to track "target" robots, Stanford
computer scientists are tackling the more difficult
problem of getting their observers to stalk robots on
the move. The autonomous observer does more than follow
its target around at a discreet distance. The spy robot
continuously calculates where it needs to be to ensure
that the target doesn't disappear behind a column or
down a hallway. The robot measures distances to walls
and furniture with a horizontal laser range sensor and
uses this information to create a two-dimensional floor
plan. A built-in horizontal video camera creates a series
of overlapping three-dimensional views of the space.
The robot combines this information into a 3D rendering
of the area. The robot has a second camera focused on
the ceiling to help it track its position. The target
robot doesn't stand a chance of blending in, with a
black-and-white pattern stenciled on every side. In
an associated project with Professor Ruzena Bajcsy's
group at t
Tweet This
3 
