Dream Jobs 2008 Sigrid Close Studies Shooting Stars with the World’S Biggest Radars Australia’S Transcontinental Solar Car Race Wireless’S Virgin Territory

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THE MAGAZINE OF TECHNOLOGY INSIDERS 02.08 SPECIAL ISSUE: DREAM JOBS 2008 SIGRID CLOSE STUDIES SHOOTING STARS WITH THE WORLD’S BIGGEST RADARS AUSTRALIA’S TRANSCONTINENTAL SOLAR CAR RACE WIRELESS’S VIRGIN TERRITORY

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volume 45 number 2 international 02.08

FRONT UPDATE 7 CANCER SCREENING IN A TANGLE A controversial breast-cancer technology is coming to market. By Morgen E. Peck

8 BIG JUMP IN MICRO- PROCESSOR MATH

9 REINVENTING THE WHEEL

10 CAN WIND ENERGY KEEP GROWING?

11 ELECTRONIC GENE THERAPY

12 BRAKE-BY-WIRE FOR FREIGHT TRAINS

14 THE BIG PICTURE Cranial calculations. OPINION 5 SPECTRAL LINES Format wars at the Consumer Electronics Show: one down, more to go.

6 FORUM The (relative) safety of Tasers, the tainting of online gaming, and measuring entropy.

21 TECHNICALLY SPEAKING The snowclone: A higher-order cliché? THE EXTRA SPECIAL REPORT By Paul McFedries MILE: David Downey designs and then fi eld- 23 DREAM JOBS 2008 DEPARTMENTS tests fi tness When your day job is this much fun, can you really call it “work”? 3 CONTRIBUTORS products; Roger Hill builds 4 BACK STORY computers to 40 GADGETS GAB AT 60 GHz track penguins in To juggle gigabits of high-defi nition video, wireless networks 17 CAREERS Antarctica; must move way, way up the spectrum. By Behzad Razavi Here are a few tips to make the most the Nuna 4 solar of your business trips. By Carl Selinger car races through Australia. 46 ACROSS THE OUTBACK 18 PHOTOS: DOWNEY: COLBY TOOLS & TOYS LYSNE; HILL: RICK DAHMS; ON PHOTONS ALONE We take an all-electric motorcycle for PENGUIN: EUREKA/ALAMY; NUNA 4: HANS-PETER a spin. By Brian Santo & Mark Santo VAN VELTHOVEN Solar car racing teams recently tested their mettle, their survival

skills, and some cutting-edge EV technology. By Sandra Upson 19 INVENTION

COVER: CHIP SIMONS 20 BOOKS A science writer faces his lifelong demon: chess. By Vasik Rajlich

56 THE DATA How free, really, is solar energy?

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volume 45 number 2 international 02.08

WWW.IEEE.ORG/______THEINSTITUTE______AVAILABLE 7 FEBRUARY ON THE INSTITUTE ONLINE NASA HELPS SOCIETY CELEBRATE 50 YEARS Learn how the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society was able to get its commemorative anniversary pin on the recent Endeavor shuttle mission. NASA mounted the pin on a plaque and presented it to the IEEE.

THE LUKE AT SPECTRUM ONLINE ARM [above] empowers its users to handle DEAN KAMEN’S a cordless drill as artfully as a set of ARTIFICIAL ARM keys; Dean Kamen [right] hopes Dean Kamen—perhaps best known WWW.______to start clinical trials this year. SPECTRUM.______for inventing the Segway—let IEEE PHOTOS, FROM LEFT: DIRK VAN DER MERWE; IEEE.ORG______Spectrum’s Sarah Adee tour his com- DEKA RESEARCH; NASA pany, DEKA, where he has been working on a prosthetic arm for the U.S. Defense Department. IEEE COMPUTER The Luke Arm, named for the extraordinarily lifelike SOCIETY LAUNCHES prosthesis worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, can be CAREER SITE Keep up with technology advances adapted to any amputation and any user interface: it can and new business approaches on the even be wired directly into the nervous system. Kamen IEEE Computer Society’s Build Your Career Web site, which features online explains how he is reinventing the prosthetic arm to take technical courses, training aids, and it from “the Flintstones,” as he says, into the 21st century. columns that address industry issues. CONFERENCE ONLINE FEATURES: ALSO ONLINE: COVERS RFID Find out about the technical and policy FEELING A LITTLE FLAT? Spectrum’s • Webcasts challenges facing radio-frequency Josh Romero looks at how long-promised • Radio identiﬁ cation technologies at the IEEE technologies will ﬁ nally let you capture, • News International Conference on RFID, set display, and re-create the three- • Audio downloads to take place 16 to 17 April in Las Vegas. dimensional world in all its splendor. • Podcasts • Jobs Topics will include antennas and LEARNING FROM KATRINA In the next • Career Accelerator Forum security and application issues. installment of the video series exploring • IEEE Xplore® digital library engineering lessons taken from Katrina, • Interviews Denise Wilson examines the continuing • Opinions impact of the disaster on local residents. • More!

IEEE SPECTRUM (ISSN 0018-9235) is published monthly by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2008 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 3 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5997, U.S.A. The editorial content of IEEE Spectrum magazine does not represent offi cial positions of the IEEE or its organizational units. Canadian Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40013087. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to Circulation Department, IEEE Spectrum, Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Cable address: ITRIPLEE. Fax: +1 212 419 7570. INTERNET: [email protected]. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS-IEEE Members: $21.40 included in dues. Libraries/institutions: $205. POST MASTER: Please send address changes to IEEE Spectrum, c/o Coding Department, IEEE Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offi ces. Canadian GST #125634188. Printed at W224-N3322-Duplainville Rd., Pewaukee, WI 53072-4195, U.S.A. IEEE Spectrum circulation is audited by BPA Worldwide. IEEE Spectrum is a member of American Business Media, the Magazine Publishers of America, and the Society of National Association Publications.

2 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

IEEE MEDIA STAFF DIRECTOR; PUBLISHER, IEEE SPECTRUM James A. Vick, [email protected] ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, SALES & ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Marion Delaney, [email protected] RECRUITMENT SALES DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Michael Buryk, [email protected] BUSINESS MANAGER Robert T. Ross MARKETING & PROMOTION MANAGER Blanche McGurr, [email protected] DEAN ADAMS MORGEN E. PECK, INTERACTIVE MARKETING MANAGER Laura Book, [email protected] is a journalist and one of our interns in LIST/RECRUITMENT MARKETING MANAGER Ilia Rodriguez, [email protected] television producer 2007, wrote the lead REPRINT SALES +1 212 221 9595, ext. 319 based in Bangkok. story in Update [p. 7], DEPARTMENT ADMINISTRATOR Faith H. Jeanty,[email protected] He traveled to about a questionable ADVERTISING SALES +1 212 419 7760 TELEPHONE ADVERTISING/SALES REPRESENTATIVE northwest Thailand to interview technology for breast-cancer John Restchack +1 212 419 7578 ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER Felicia Spagnoli Salinee Tavaranan [p. 36] and screening. Using her background SENIOR ADVERTISING PRODUCTION COORDINATOR found the experience enlightening. in neuro science, Peck has reported Nicole Evans ADVERTISING PRODUCTION +1 732 562 6334 “[It] made me understand that on electronic treatments for IEEE STAFF EXECUTIVE, PUBLICATIONS Anthony Durniak alternate sources of energy are migraines and the eff ects of brain IEEE BOARD OF DIRECTORS much easier to implement and implants on human behavior for PRESIDENT & CEO Lewis M. Terman maintain than I’d thought possible. Spectrum Online. +1 732 562 3928 Fax: +1 732 465 6444 [email protected] PRESIDENT-ELECT John R. Vig Approached thoughtfully, they TREASURER David G. Green work with nature, rather than VASIK RAJLICH is the pro- SECRETARY Barry L. Shoop PAST PRESIDENT Leah H. Jamieson against it. It opened my eyes.” grammer of Rybka, currently the

VICE PRESIDENTS highest-rated computer-chess Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou, Educational Activities; John Baillieul, COLBY LYSNE, program in the world. He was Publication Services and Products; Joseph V. Lillie, Member & Geographic Activities; George W. Arnold, President, Standards based in Kansas proﬁ led in our 2007 Dream Jobs Association; J. Roberto B. de Marca, Technical Activities; Russell J. Lefevre, President, IEEE-USA City, Mo., has report [February]. This month DIVISION DIRECTORS shot suits, ath- the former international chess Giovanni De Micheli (I); Thomas G. Habetler (II); letes, and artists for master reviews King’s Gambit: Curtis A. Siller Jr. (III); Edward Della Torre (IV); Deborah M. Cooper (V); Irving Engelson (VI); dozens of national magazines. A Son, a Father, and the World’s John D. McDonald (VII); Thomas W. Williams (VIII); Frederick C. Mintzer (IX); William A. Gruver (X) “Photographing Dave Downey Most Dangerous Game by Paul REGION DIRECTORS at Garmin’s world headquarters Hoff man [p. 20]. Howard E. Michel (1); John C. Dentler (2); William B. Ratcliff (3); Robert J. Dawson (4); David J. Pierce (5); Loretta J. Arellano (6); was a blast,” Lysne says [p. 27]. Ferial El-Hawary (7); Jean G. Remy (8); Enrique E. Alvarez (9); Janina E. Mazierska (10) “We didn’t even get in trouble for BEHZAD RAZAVI,

DIRECTORS EMERITUS watering the floor. Now that’s a an IEEE Fellow, Eric Herz, Theodore W. Hissey great corporate culture!” is a professor of

IEEE STAFF electrical engineering EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & COO Jeff ry W. Raynes, CAE ROBB at the University +1 732 562 5400, [email protected] HUMAN RESOURCES Betsy Davis, SPHR MANDELBAUM, of California, Los Angeles. In +1 732 465 6434, [email protected] PUBLICATIONS Anthony Durniak a freelance “Gadgets Gab at 60 GHz” [p. 40], he +1 732 562 3998, [email protected] journalist based shows how tapping into the upper CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Sally Ericksen +1 732 562 5345, [email protected] in Brooklyn, N.Y., reaches of the radio-frequency EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES Douglas Gorham +1 732 562 5483, [email protected] reports in Update on the first big spectrum can make the wireless STANDARDS ACTIVITIES Judith Gorman CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WORAWALAN BOONRAVIKUL; CHRISTOPHER GUDAS; upgrade since the 1870s of the home a reality. +1 732 562 3820, [email protected] MEMBER & GEOGRAPHIC ACTIVITIES Cecelia Jankowski technology used worldwide to +1 732 562 5504, [email protected] stop freight trains [p. 12]. Look for CHIP SIMONS, ANGELINA HUANG; EMILY NASH; RANDI SILBERMAN; STEVE CHELLBERG CORPORATE STRATEGY & COMMUNICATIONS Matthew Loeb, CAE +1 732 562 5320, [email protected] his feature article on the struggle who photographed BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Richard D. Schwartz +1 732 562 5311, [email protected] to deploy this revolutionary Sigrid Close for our TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES Mary Ward-Callan technology in a forthcoming issue cover and her Dream +1 732 562 3850, [email protected] MANAGING DIRECTOR, IEEE-USA Chris Brantley of IEEE Spectrum. Jobs proﬁ le [p. 24], +1 202 785 0017, [email protected] got hooked on photography work- IEEE PUBLICATION SERVICES & PRODUCTS BOARD PAUL McFEDRIES, who writes ing for his high school newspaper. John Baillieul, Chair; Tayfun Akgul, Duncan C. Baker, John T. Barr IV, Mohamed E. El-Hawary, Gerald L. Englel, Gerard H. Gaynor, our Technically Speaking column He realized that it improved his Roger A. Grice, Marion O. Hagler, Jens Hannemann, Donald N. Heirman, Evelyn H. Hirt, Hirohisa Kawamoto, Phillip A. Laplante, [p. 21], is a technical and language social life and allowed him to miss Mary Y. Lanzerotti, Michael R. Lightner, George F. McClure, Adrian V. Pais, Roger D. Pollard, Saifur Rahman, Suzanne M. Rivoire, writer with more than 40 books class for offi cial business. He and Jon G. Rokne, W. Ross Stone, James M. Tien, Robert J. Trew, Stephen Yurkovich, Amir I. Zaghloul to his credit. He also runs Word Close bonded, Simons says, and IEEE OPERATIONS CENTER Spy, a Web site and mailing list “shared a moment,” reminiscing 445 Hoes Lane, Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331 U.S.A. Tel: +1 732 981 0060 Fax: +1 732 981 1721 that tracks new words and phrases about the times each had lived in (http://www.wordspy.com).______eastern Pennsylvania.

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 3

EDITORIAL EDITOR Susan Hassler, [email protected] EXECUTIVE EDITOR Glenn Zorpette, [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Elizabeth A. Bretz, [email protected] SENIOR EDITORS Harry Goldstein (Web), [email protected]; Jean Kumagai, [email protected]; Tekla S. Perry, [email protected]; Philip E. Ross (Resources), [email protected]; William Sweet, [email protected] SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS Steven Cherry, [email protected]; Samuel K. Moore (News), [email protected] ASSOCIATE EDITORS Erico Guizzo, [email protected]; Joshua J. Romero (Web),[email protected]; Sandra Upson, [email protected]______ASSISTANT EDITOR Willie D. Jones, [email protected] SENIOR COPY EDITOR Joseph N. Levine, [email protected] COPY EDITOR Michele Kogon, [email protected] EDITORIAL RESEARCHER Alan Gardner, [email protected] ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANTS Ramona Gordon, [email protected]; Nancy T. Hantman, [email protected] IEEE SPECTRUM JOURNALISM INTERN Sarah Adee, [email protected] INTERN Francesco Ferorelli, [email protected] She didn’t need them. During CONTRIBUTING EDITORS John Blau, Robert N. Charette, Peter Fairley, her drive through the vast empty Alexander Hellemans, David Kushner, Robert W. Lucky, Paul McFedries, Dispatch From Kieron B. Murphy, Michael Riordan, Carl Selinger, Seema Singh, spaces of the outback, the sight of a John Voelcker grazing emu or, inexplicably, a cross- Down Under ART & PRODUCTION country bicycle rider helped ward SENIOR ART DIRECTOR Mark Montgomery efore the reporters off drowsiness. Then there were the ASSISTANT ART DIRECTORS Laura H. Azran, Brandon Palacio covering the Panasonic dead kangaroos, mostly roadkill, PHOTO EDITOR Randi Silberman B World Solar Challenge and the large vultures that ﬂ apped DIRECTOR, PERIODICALS PRODUCTION SERVICES Peter Tuohy were released into the wilds of languidly above the bodies. EDITORIAL & WEB PRODUCTION MANAGER Roy Carubia SENIOR ELECTRONIC LAYOUT SPECIALIST Bonnie Nani Australia, a safety offi cer sat them Travelers who ﬁ nd baby kanga- WEB PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Jacqueline L. Parker

down and delivered a rapid-ﬁ re roos, or joeys, in the pouches of their WEB PRODUCTION SPECIALIST Michael Spector set of instructions: Remember fallen mothers take them to a rescue EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD to constantly refuel. (You might center run by Chris “Brolga” Barns, Susan Hassler, Chair; Marc T. Apter, Francine D. Berman, Jan Brown, ﬁ nd yourself stranded 300 kilo- in the oasis of Alice Springs. He Raffaello D’Andrea, Stephen L. Diamond, Hiromichi Fujisawa, meters from the nearest town.) rears them until they’re old enough Kenneth Y. Goldberg, Susan Hackwood, Erik Heijne, Charles H. House, David H. Jacobson, Christopher J. James, Ronald G. Jensen, Don’t scramble around in the to return to the wild, supporting the Mary Y. Lanzerotti, Ruby B. Lee, Tak Ming Mak, David A. Mindell, brush. (Australia is home to eff ort with donations from tourists, C. Mohan, Fritz Morgan, Andrew M. Odlyzko, Leslie D. Owens, Barry L. Shoop, Larry L. Smarr, Harry L. “Nick” Tredennick III, 12 of the world’s deadliest varieties who line up to hold sleeping kanga- Bill Weihl, Bas¸ak Yüksel

of snakes.) Don’t drive at night. roos for AU $5 a hug. EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE

(You might hit a kangaroo.) As Barns explains it, it’s all for IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10016-5997 Associate Editor Sandra Upson the best in this, the harshest of all Attn: Editorial Dept. Tel: +1 212 419 7555 Fax: +1 212 419 7570 Bureau: Palo Alto, Calif.; Tekla S. Perry +1 650 328 7570 [above], preparing for her solo worlds. Exhaust fumes from cars Responsibility for the substance of articles rests upon the authors, trek across the continent, began driving through the arid landscape not the IEEE or its members. Articles published do not represent offi cial positions of the IEEE. Letters to the editor may be excerpted to wonder whether it was such a leave traces of moisture, and those for publication. good idea after all. Sure, no one droplets support the growth of ADVERTISING CORRESPONDENCE knew which of the solar cars vegetation, which in turn attracts IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10016-5997 would successfully reach Adelaide, animals to the shoulder of the Attn: Advertising Dept. +1 212 419 7760 3000 km away. But would she highway. Upon meeting a clan The publisher reserves the right to reject any advertising. get that far? Mildly terriﬁ ed, she of solar racers, Barns praised REPRINT PERMISSION stopped by a grocery store to pick their vehicles for their kangaroo- LIBRARIES: Articles may be photocopied for private use of patrons. A per-copy fee must be paid to the Copyright Clearance Center, up a dozen cans of Red Bull. friendly lack of emissions. ❏ 29 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970. For other copying or republication, contact Business Manager, IEEE Spectrum.

CITING ARTICLES IN IEEE SPECTRUM COPYRIGHTS AND TRADEMARKS: IEEE Spectrum is a registered trademark owned by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics IEEE Spectrum publishes two editions. In the international edition, the abbreviation INT appears at the foot of each Engineers Inc. Careers, EEs’ Tools & Toys, EV Watch, Progress, page. The North American edition is identifi ed with the letters NA. Both have the same editorial content, but because of diff erences in advertising, page numbers may diff er. In citations, you should include the issue designation. For Refl ections, Spectral Lines, and Technically Speaking are trademarks example, the fi rst Update page is in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 45, no. 2 (INT), February 2008, p. 7, or in IEEE Spectrum, of the IEEE.

Vol. 45, no. 2 (NA), February 2008, p. 13. TINE LAVRYSEN

4 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

There’s polite murmuring about working toward a standard, but that could also be players, sotto voce, choosing up teams

One Format War Is Over. Is Another Beginning?

ormat wars. They’ve a studio that had been been the Achilles’ heel of the bankrolling HD-DVD F consumer electronics industry, big time—announced and the bane of consumers, since it would no longer the VHS vs. Betamax hostilities support that format. of the early 1980s. Standards- The HD-DVD alliance setting organizations like the immediately canceled IEEE and industry consortia its long-scheduled CES hold countless meetings to avoid press conference, a move them, yet they break out with that signaled surrender. astonishing regularity. So if you’ve been on The battle of the blue disks the fence about upgrading seems, fi nally, to be over. For your home video system, several years now, two separate go ahead and climb down industry alliances, one led by on the Blu-ray side. Sony, Panasonic, and Philips, the But just as one confl ict ends, normal driving speeds, something other by Toshiba and NEC, have a new one is heating up. Oh, the that’s not currently possible. clashed over the next-generation sides are politely murmuring The idea has a lot going for it. digital disk format. about working toward a With a tuner chip added to your Both contenders—Blu-ray Disc standard, but those murmurs cellphone, iPod, or other portable and HD-DVD—use blue lasers could also be the sound of device, you’ll be able to watch local to read and write data and have players choosing up teams. news, sports, weather— anything exquisitely high-quality video At stake? The ability to send you can get over the air. It’ll be resolution. The biggest diff erences free, over-the-air local television, an inexpensive extra for manu- between them: Blu-ray has larger broadcast to cellphones and facturers and a nice feature for storage capacity and is more other consumer electronics consumers. It’ll cost broadcasters LIVE FROM LAS VEGAS expensive; HD-DVD has slightly devices, over U.S. broadcasters’ a bit to add the necessary equip- At CES, less storage and is cheaper. Neither existing spectrum. ment to their towers, but they’ll wireless was advantage has been compelling. At CES, Woo Paik, president benefi t from the larger audiences. sizzling—wireless USBs, WiMedia, And since moving from DVD to and CTO of LG Electronics, But, alas, now there are at least WiMax, HDMI, either Blu-ray or HD-DVD means brought out prototypes of what two competing technologies for a and extreme getting a new player and a high- LG calls MPH devices—Mobile prize only one can win: no broad- proximity wireless like Sony’s new defi nition TV, consumers haven’t Pedestrian Handhelds. He said caster is going to put multiple sets Transfer Jet exactly been stampeding to the the company will be ready to of equipment on its towers, and technology. stores to change over. On top ship products about a year from no consumer is going to change The new cool gizmos use fl ash. of which fi lm studios have been now. Then Samsung’s director of devices or swap out cards while High-defi nition putting out high-defi nition home digital media, J.W. Park, brought driving down the highway. Both camcorders that movies in both formats, which out models of what Samsung LG and Samsung made it clear store 5 or more hours of video PAUL SAKUMA/AP PHOTO always gives consumers pause. calls Advanced-VSB devices. that they’re moving ahead and on a 32-gigabyte But days before the 2008 The two sets of devices decode will continue to do so. memory card will International Consumer two diff erent technologies that We’ll likely hear a lot more make disk and tape cameras Electronics Show (CES), in modify the U.S. digital broadcast about this as the year goes on. as dated as the January, Warner Brothers— system to receive a strong signal at Stay tuned. —Tekla Perry dry-plate kind.

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A SPECTRUM Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page BEF MaGS A SPECTRUM Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page BEF MaGS forum currents exceeding 8 A. only one-fourth of what The neuromuscular- triggers ﬁ brillation in incapacitating eff ects of pigs and doesn’t report the Taser are due more on the four fatalities to the eff ects of these brought to court. I peak currents than to expect IEEE Spectrum the much lower stated to disqualify such one- average current. sided articles when Larry Fennigkoh dealing with issues as IEEE Member Milwaukee controversial as the safety of the Taser. was very disap- Martin Lurie IEEE Member I pointed with the Taser Newton, Mass. write-up. The authors are no doubt very PLAYING CLEAN talented, but engineer was a bit dismayed to Mark W. Kroll sits on I read “Playing Dirty” Letters do not TOUGH TASERS available in my day, I the Taser International [December]. What represent opinions egarding the of the IEEE. Short, would have put fewer board, and electro- Richard Thurman concise letters are R articles on Taser people in the hospital. physiologist Patrick is doing is against preferred. They guns in the December Glenn Marin Tchou received a “gift” the terms of service may be edited for Whittier, Calif. space and clarity. issue [“How a Taser of test equipment from of online games. Additional letters Works”], I suggest o say that 1.9 milli- Taser. This may explain Glorifying such actions are available online that they left out what Tamperes is the why Kroll provides in these games is in “And More Forum” at http://www. should have been a average current avail- no details on the four wrong. It has little to spectrum.ieee.org. very critical part of the able from a Taser X26, court cases in which do with people buying Write to Forum, analysis. To consider while nominally and the Taser was found to bling on eBay and more IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th the consequences of not technically correct, be the primary cause of to do with the fact that Floor, New York, NY using or having access completely understates death and disparages these people destroy the 10016-5997, U.S.A.; to a Taser should be a and misrepresents the three of them. Were games. It would have fax, +1 212 419 7570; necessary part of such electrical output from they thrown out of been better to document e-mail, _____n.hantman [email protected]. a review. these devices. At pulse court on a technicality how to combat this in As a retired peace durations of 100 to or because the Taser online gaming and not offi cer, I was a victim 140 microseconds and was not to blame? It treat it as the next big of numerous assaults. a pulse-delivery rate of also may explain why thing to make money. For a variety of reasons, 19 hertz, the duty cycle Tchou doesn’t complain Simon O’Doherty IEEE Member it is axiomatic that of the Taser waveform about a current level Dublin keeping distance from is less than 0.3 percent. an assaulting individual As such, the delivered is important. In my day, average current will CATCHING A CODE the tools were a gun or be relatively low. I N THEIR article “Controlled Chaos” [December], a stick. Sticks produce recently measured I Antonio Nucci and Steve Bannerman described fractured skulls and the electrical output their proposed early-warning detection of viruses other broken bones, from a Taser X26 into and worms by measuring the entropy of traffi c I assure you. While I do a series of precision on trunk communication lines. That may indeed not know any statistics, high- voltage, nonin- protect the network; however, individual computers I am comfortable in ductive 300-, 1000-, would still retain snippets of viral code. The authors asserting that there and 4000-ohm loads do not address the diffi cult tasks of identifying the is much more danger and found that the signatures of those viral codes after an attack on from a fractured skull median peak currents the network and of purging the malicious code. than from a Taser shot. approach 4 amperes, Myron Kayton Had such a tool been with maximum peak IEEE Life Fellow, Santa Monica, Calif.

6 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

more online at www.spectrum.ieee.org

Untangling a New Breast Cancer Screening Technology An Australian company takes on a controversial technique to screen for breast cancer: X-raying hair

ermiscan Holdings, a the technique was fi rst reported, After she published her results, A HAIRY start-up fi rm in Sydney, no independent laboratory has many women were eager to ditch PROBLEM: An Australian fi rm Australia, says it plans to ever been able to make it work. the discomfort of their yearly F plans to launch commercialize a controversial Fermiscan’s test is based mammograms. “All the women a competitor breast-cancer-screening on technology licensed from who were at our breast-cancer to X-ray technology that most scientists Veronica James, a physics pro- clinic were saying: ‘Don’t give me mammography. have given up on. The technology fessor at the Australian National any of these tests. Here’s some of The technique fi nds marks of would replace traditional X-ray University in Canberra, who my hair,’ ” says Keith Rogers, a breast cancer mammography with a test requir- reported in 1999 that she could medical- imaging expert and profes- in the X-ray ing just a hair sample—and access detect an abnormality in the hair sor of materials science at Cranfi eld diff raction to a multimillion-dollar particle of women with breast cancer. In University, in Swindon, England. pattern of a woman’s hair. accelerator called a synchrotron. her research, James shot a con- He was one of the fi rst to try to PHOTO: JOHNNY Fermiscan is betting that women centrated beam of X-rays at single reproduce James’s work. When HERNANDEZ/GETTY IMAGES will greatly prefer off ering a hair strands of hair. When the beam Rogers failed to fi nd the same sample to suff ering the discomfort hit the hair, the diff racted X-rays diff raction pattern, James publicly of mammography. Having ana- formed a pattern on the detector rejected his results, claiming that lyzed 800 hair samples collected related to the molecular struc- Rogers had not properly followed from women as they go in for ture of keratin, a protein found in her methodology. James, who routine breast exams, Fermiscan hair. James claimed to fi nd a dif- formerly consulted for Fermiscan, says it will be ready to start off er- fuse additional ring in the diff rac- declined to comment for this article. ing screenings by the end of 2008. tion pattern from hair samples At least seven research groups, The trouble is, eight years after of women with breast cancer. including one with which James

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 7

“It would be bloody wonderful if it worked” —medical imaging expert Keith Rogers regarding Fermiscan’s technology

briefl y collaborated, have three- dimensional X-ray now tried and failed to mammography machines at reproduce her results. “Some a cost of hundreds of thou- very eminent people have sands of dollars per unit. tried to reproduce it,” says The Fermiscan test will Rogers. “The irritating cost the consumer about thing is I so much want to US $200 per sample, says believe her, but I can’t fi nd David Young, Fermiscan’s the proper evidence.” managing director. That’s Halfway through its more than the $50 to $150 it recent trial, Fermiscan costs for a mammogram in claimed that hair analysis the United States, but with has an 82 percent probability Fermiscan the clinic wouldn’t of detecting breast cancer in need to purchase and main- Intel Makes a person who has the disease, tain its own imager. The nearly matching the best Fermiscan test should take A Big Jump In results from mammography just 24 hours to complete, trials. However, hair analysis including the time it takes to Computer Math has only a 77 percent chance ship the hair to the Advanced of correctly confi rming that Photon Source at Argonne Long the ugly stepchild of computer arithmetic, people without the disease National Laboratory, in division is getting a much needed makeover really don’t have it, mak- Illinois, where Fermiscan has ing the test less reliable than its tests done. Young says that hat does programmers to retreat from some mammography trials. the company will fi rst market the mortgage the less accurate but faster If it succeeds, Fermiscan its services in Southeast Wcrisis have to software tricks they’ve used could wedge itself into a Asia, through a joint venture do with microprocessor as a substitute for division. lucrative market. About with regional health- architecture? It turns out “Divide had become the 1 million mammo grams care provider Avia Reed that calculating prices for long pole in the tent,” says were conducted in 2007 International, in Singapore. those fi nancially dubious Steve Fischer, the lead in the United States Although most scientists mortgage-backed securi- architect for Penryn. “We alone, according to the in the fi eld have given up on ties is a division-intensive tried at least to chop the U.S. Food and Drug the technique, some remain process, and division has pole in half. It’s still long Administration. Companies hopeful that it will work. long been the weak link in a compared to some func- such as GE, Hologic, and “I wish [them] really well microprocessor’s arithmetic tions. But it’s a lot better.” Siemens are encourag- because it would be bloody operations. With Intel’s The new divider is a ing clinics to upgrade wonderful if it worked,” new crop of 45-nanometer variation on the old one, and purchase digital and says Rogers. —Morgen E. Peck processors, code-named known as SRT Radix-4. SRT Penryn, the company is (for Sweeny, Robertson, making the fi rst substantial and Tocher) is basically a upgrade in its processors’ souped-up version of long divider since the original division that generates two Pentium came out in 1993. bits of the answer with each The speedup doubles the step. The new Radix-16 number of bits calculated divider works fundamen- with each tick of the tally the same way but processor’s clock and will computes four bits in each make a substantial diff erence step. Getting those other to fi nancial and scientifi c two bits was no simple task. computing. And because “I would say that the divider Intel powers so much of really pushed the edge

EYE-OPENING: X-ray diff raction patterns from the hair of women with the computer market, the in terms of the max clock INTEL [left] and without [right] breast cancer. PHOTO: FERMISCAN development could tempt frequency performance for

8 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Penryn,” says Fischer. Of all who worked on the fl oating- quotients. But Penryn only number of clock cycles the processor’s new archi- point units for the Intel and matches AMD’s divider for required to finish a floating- tectural tricks, the divider HP Itanium architecture and 64-bit numbers, accord- point division to change was most dependent on the the IBM Power architecture, ing to Chuck Moore, chief much. But the company chip’s 45-nm features and thinks the new division engineer for AMD’s next is going for “a substantial redesigned transistors [see rate might infl uence how generation of processors. improvement” in the “The High-k Solution,” IEEE software is written. “People Since its Athlon chip number of those divisions Spectrum, October 2007]. who use the Intel architecture debuted in 1999, AMD has the processor can work The new divider is a will, I think, be more inclined been using a technique on at once, says Moore. nod to the importance of to use division and not look called convergence. Unlike Despite some dedicated scientifi c and fi nancial for ways to avoid it,” he says. in SRT, which calculates eff ort by the two Silicon calculations, which require Because they’ll be taking bits of quotient at a steady Valley rivals, “nobody is precise manipulation fewer inexact shortcuts, pace, convergence operates satisfi ed with these division of large floating-point computer simulations and at an accelerating pace, says times,” says David Matula, numbers—a standard other scientifi c programs Debjit Das Sarma, princi- a professor of computer number format that includes could come up with better pal member of the technical science at Southern a sign, an exponent, and a answers. (The Power and staff at AMD. Though con- Methodist University, in fraction, all in a 32-, 64-, or Itanium architectures do vergence takes more clock Dallas, who has consulted 80-bit package. “Sometimes division with software that cycles than SRT Radix-16 to for and competed against software has avoided relies on a circuit called a get to 32 bits, it takes fewer AMD in the past. He believes the use of the divide in fused multiply adder.) cycles to go from 32 bits to that makers of scientifi c [favor of] a look-up table Penryn’s floating-point 64 and would take fewer software would be satisfi ed or some approximation. divider pulls it ahead of still to go to 80 or beyond. only if division took no more Scientifi c work can’t rely the division scheme used In future processor than twice as long as multi- on that,” says Fischer. in processors made by architectures such as plication. Still, “I’m glad Peter Markstein, a retired its main rival, Advanced Bulldozer, due out by 2010, Intel is in the game again,” computer-arithmetic expert Micro Devices, for 32-bit AMD does not expect the he says. —Samuel K. Moore

REINVENTING THE WHEEL o prevent rollover accidents, new T cars sold in the United States since 2004 have been outﬁ tted with tire- pressure monitors that warn the driver when tires are going ﬂ at. But the battery- powered initial version of the technology has proved expensive. A consortium of tire manufacturers hopes to cut the cost. It’s testing a sensor embedded in the tires that needs no battery and can radio pressure data from the tire to electronics inside the car. The secret is a cheap, coin-size device called a PZT bimorph that harvests energy from the tire’s motion via a miniature piezoelectric springboard. The tire makers are working with EoPlex Technologies, in source passes its multiyear tests, carmakers may Redwood City, Calif., which has tuned its three- start to use wireless sensors to cut back on the dimensional printing technology to construct the kilometers of wiring in today’s cars. For more, complex devices on the cheap. If the new power see http://spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/bimorph. ❏ BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN CHRISTIE BRYAN

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 9

Unanticipated power ﬂ ows could overload lines ranging from the Czech Republic to the Netherlands

Can Wind Energy Continue Double- Digit Growth? The need for backup power has been overstated, but grid interconnections are crucial

ind power studies, under the direction supplies a large of Hannele Holttinen, a Wproportion of the senior research scientist electricity in countries like at the Technical Research Denmark, Germany, and Center of Finland, in Espoo. Spain, and its use is growing at The fi rst draft of that an explosive pace around the analysis, issued in November, world. Government incentives found that in some cases for and the high cost of fossil fuels every 100 megawatts of wind have combined to make wind power, you need 100 MW farms a good investment for of fossil, nuclear, or hydro- WIND NOT WANING: Wind power’s rapid growth, especially in Europe, power-generation companies. electric as a backup. But in is sustainable only if grid interconnections improve. PHOTO: ACCIONA But that investment comes general, the analysis argues, at a price: the potentially reserves can be much lower grids—an oversimplifi cation ticipated power fl ows that expensive systems needed where there’s ready access to that exaggerates the variability saturate the grids of neighbor- to make transmission grids a large electricity grid. Much caused by wind farms and ing nations. In recent years run reliably, regardless of depends, therefore, on the thus the cost of reserve power this has forced grid operators wind’s famous fi ckleness. The size of the region studied. to balance it out, Holttinen to curtail scheduled trans- question is, how much does The IEA found that the believes. Whether those inter- fers of power between grids. that cost? To date, power larger the area examined, connections are up to the task In 2008, the grid operators grid studies have produced the greater the number of of stabilizing wind-tossed warn, the unanticipated power widely divergent estimates. power plants available to electric grids is a real question. fl ows could overload lines Conclusions diff er, for fi ll the gap when the wind Wind-farm installation anywhere from the Czech instance, about how much wanes. Mainly as a result of in Europe grew an estimated Republic to the Netherlands. reserve generating capacity this issue, projections of how 38 percent last year, up from Europe’s grid operators must be built to keep the lights much it would cost to add 19 percent in 2006, bring- bet they can prevent most of on when the wind dies down. needed reserve capacity diff er ing the total capacity to about the wind-related overloads The uncertainties are a big by a factor of 10 or more— 67 gigawatts (roughly the by adjusting their control problem for policy- makers, swinging from an extra equivalent of 20 to 25 standard- schemes and further limiting because such grid-related €0.50 to €4 (about US $0.74 size nuclear power plants). At power trades, while a pair of costs will ultimately deter- to $5.88) per megawatt- those rates, European grid new 380-kilovolt transmission mine how much wind power hour in regions that use operators report, windmill lines in northeastern Germany is too much. 20 percent wind power. construction is outstripping expected on line in 2009 will The International Energy Holttinen’s team found growth in transmission capac- prevent the rest. Until then, Agency (IEA) in Paris created that those models yielding the ity. The result is that in wind- operators say they might be a research team to do a highest costs tend to ignore farm-rich countries such as forced to shut down some meta-analysis of 19 national the modeled grid’s inter- Germany and Denmark, high wind farms when the wind or regional wind and grid connections with neighboring winds cause large and unan- blows strong. —Peter Fairley

10 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Microchip Enables Electronic Gene Injection news Tiny electrodes could bring gene therapy into the brain brief

new method of inserting a technique that uses tiny elec- FUEL FROM genes into brain cells could trodes, instead of a virus, to slip SUNSHINE At fi rst blush, you Agreatly simplify the search genetic material into cells. The might lump claims for brain-disorder treatments, electrodes send a pulse of electricity about a machine that according to research reported that briefl y blasts holes in the turns sunshine, air, this month. It uses an array of neuron’s membrane. Segments and water into fuel along with e-mails electrodes, each 100 micrometers of genetic material coating the insisting that some- wide, to inject genetic material electrodes can then enter the one in Nigeria will into individual neurons. The cell before it seals up again. pay you handsomely technique’s inventor thinks it could Each electrode can also monitor to help free up a be the key to examining thousands the injected neuron’s electrical large sum of money. But engineers at of genes for answers to vexing activity, such as the rate at which the Sandia National neurological problems, with the it pulses. The gene transfer might Laboratories, in hope of one day performing gene alter that activity in a recognizable Albuquerque, say therapy in the brain. way. “This is about delivering genes they have created a device that can Gene therapy involves in a much more controlled fashion,” break water into inserting genetic material into Muthuswamy says. He and hydrogen and oxy- a malfunctioning cell to alter its graduate student Tilak Jain describe gen using sunlight. activities and cure disease. Doing the technique in the February In another reaction this in the brain would be par- 2008 issue of IEEE Transactions carbon dioxide can be converted to carbon ticularly challenging, mainly on Biomedical Engineering. monoxide, which because very little is known about For now, the array is intended then combines with how networks of neurons func- only for brain cells that have been hydrogen to make tion or how to safely alter the grown atop it, not yet in humans or hydrocarbons such as methanol, ethanol, components of such a network. even laboratory animals. But that’s and even gasoline or Generally, genetic engineers enough for some scientists. “It’s diesel fuel. More at start by injecting into a target really hard for us to make sense http://spectrum.ieee. region a virus that has been of any nervous-system network,” org/jan08/5866. says Julie Kauer, a molecular phar- PHOTO: RANDY MONTOYA modifi ed to include human genes. SHOCK TREATMENT: Neurons on In a technique called transfection, macologist at Brown University, a microchip have holes temporarily the virus will infect some cells and in Providence, R.I., who studies blasted into their membranes by a deposit its genome inside them. If individual neurons. With the pulse of voltage. Genetic material can things go as planned, the human array, “you could see if something then slip into the cell through the holes and alter the cell’s function. genes inserted by the virus replace aff ects a neuron’s fi ring rate ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN or restore a nonfunctional gene in or changes its fi ring pattern.” the neuron. But viral transfection The microelectrode arrays can tor at the National Institute of is laborious and diffi cult to control: also target specifi c types of neu- Neurological Disorders and a virus will transfect neurons more rons in a network. Diff erent kinds Stroke, in Bethesda, Md., suggests or less arbitrarily. “If you transfect of neurons have diff erent electro- that the arrays will help scientists the wrong neuron, you can change physiological properties. The understand neuron interactions the overall function in a part of electrodes can read these prop- by letting them alter one neuron the brain in a really dramatic erties as if they were a neuron’s at a time and watch how other way,” says Jit Muthuswamy, a signature. Thus only neurons neurons respond. “This technol- biomedical engineer at Arizona with the proper signature might ogy can be adapted to answer State University, in Tempe. receive a zap from the electrode. all kinds of gene-therapy ques- Muthuswamy has invented Danilo Tagle, a program direc- tions,” Tagle says. —Sandra Upson

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 11

The old brake technology has “been pushed about as far as it’s going to go” —Dana Maryott, BNSF Railway

Brake-by-Wire Comes To Freight Trains Electronically controlled pneumatic brakes could help stop accidents and speed cargo

nside a large boxy building controlled pneumatic brakes in Germantown, Md., a (ECP) are intended to displace I 150-car freight train is the venerable air brake system braking to a halt. At engineer fi rst patented by George Chuck Wolf’s signal, air from Westinghouse in 1869 and each car’s reservoir instantly now used around the world. begins pounding into the New rules by the Federal about as far as it’s going to go,” but it’s hard to get the railroad cylinder in a cacophony of Railroad Administration says Dana Maryott, director industry to change,” says FRA clangs and chuff s. The brakes (FRA) may fi nally start to of locomotives and air brakes deputy administrator Cliff Eby. are fully set in just 12 seconds: make ECP mainstream in at the Burlington Northern So in 2006, for trains oper- unusually fast, but this is an the United States, which Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway. ating with ECP, the FRA unusual train. It’s made up is home to the largest rail ECP’s advantages are provisionally relaxed rules only of brake components: freight network in the world. many: improved control, that require brake inspec- the air pipes that normally ECP was developed in greater safety, and higher tions en route. If univer- run underneath the cars the early 1990s as longer effi ciency—as trains stop sally implemented, the rule instead arc overhead in a and heavier trains strained faster and more reliably, they change could save the indus- skeletal canopy. Wolf, who is the Westinghouse system, can also go faster, with less try $125 million a year. principal systems engineer which signals the brakes wear and tear. What’s more, if The rule change already at Germantown’s Wabtec sequentially from the engine anything goes wrong with a appears to be having an eff ect. Railway Electronics, is testing by draining compressed car’s brakes, the car’s onboard Last October in Pennsylvania, a revolutionary electronic air from a pipe that runs computer automatically takes Norfolk Southern Railway system that activates all of a the length of the train. It’s a them off -line and signals the inaugurated the fi rst U.S. train’s brakes simultaneously. relatively slow process: the locomotive. “The operator train to operate exclusively Developed separately brake signal travels at just in the cab gets much more with ECP. The railway, the by Wabtec and New York 152 meters per second along information than he ever had country’s fourth largest Air Brake Corp., the U.S. a train that can be three kilo- before,” says Wabtec’s Wolf. freight operator, plans to subsidiary of Munich-based meters long. “We think that The ECP cable could also be a equip 400 coal cars and Knorr-Bremse, electronically technology’s been pushed platform for sensors that one 30 locomotives with ECP day might allow the engineer by this spring, with an eye to monitor other systems, toward replacing most of like wheels and bearings. its 20 000 hoppers if the But the technology is also new system proves itself, expensive, and outfi tting the according to railroad vice United States’ 1.6 million rail president Gerhard Thelen. cars and locomotives could Meanwhile, BNSF Railway, cost US $7.6 billion, according the biggest U.S. carrier to an FRA report. The fact by tonnage, plans to start STEPH VENTER/GETTY IMAGES that U.S. railroad companies running a container train swap equipment further with ECP between Chicago complicates matters: the seven and the Port of Los Angeles, major carriers will all have to and an electric utility with BRAKE LINES: A train’s worth of electronically controlled brakes buy in for ECP to fully take its own fl eet of coal cars will ganged together for testing. PHOTO: ROBB MANDELBAUM hold. “ECP has great genes, follow suit. —Robb Mandelbaum

12 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

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14 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008

the big picture

FACE FACTS

One size never ﬁ ts all. Designers use databases of North American and European body measurements to create their products but lack data to adapt the designs to Asians. That will soon change. Roger Ball, an industrial designer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, has digitally scanned the heads of 2000 people from six regions of China in a project called SizeChina.com. From the scans, Ball created computer models of average Chinese heads. He intends to sell the models to companies that make helmets, eyeglasses, and face masks for Asians. PHOTO: LUI SIU WAI/ XINHUA/WPN

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Block out your calendar to avoid meetings when you get back so you can take care of the work that piles up while you’re gone; better yet, tell nobody the exact day of your return careers

TRAVEL TIPS helped me to get ahead. Get more out of Getting permission to business trips by travel is one thing; succeed- applying project- ing on the trip is another. Here are some tips: management skills Plan out the entire trip. usiness travel At the outset, determine often comes as feast or the end dates, the rough B famine, leaving some itinerary, key meetings wanting less and others, and appointments, air more. All of us, however, transportation, hotels, and need ways to make the travel car rentals. I do it all on my itself rewarding, and the best Microsoft Outlook Calendar approach is by giving it the software, creating the trip as same detailed attention you’d a recurring “appointment” devote to one of your techni- and entering my itinerary in cal assignments. the “notes” area. It all syncs If you want to travel with my PalmOne personal more—to win business, forge digital assistant, but even connections with far-fl ung so, I print a copy so I’ll have parts of your organization, a form on which to record or just see the world—you my expenses. I also enter can wangle trips to con- key phone numbers in my ferences. One way is to get cellphone’s address book. Avoid peak travel times. shuttle runs and at what involved in professional For example, savvy travelers time you’ll need to get to the societies and industry com- Reserve your hotel connect through Chicago’s airport, then confi rm the mittees, many of which early, even before you get busy O’Hare International time with the airline. Once hold their regular meetings approved to go, to lock in the Airport according to the I missed a return fl ight at conferences; another discounted conference rate. season—in summertime from Hamburg, Germany, is to respond to requests Program your calendar to you connect early in the after both the hotel and for abstracts for conference remind you to cancel the res- day to avoid afternoon the taxi driver had assured papers. Your company will ervation within 24 hours, in thunderstorms; in winter me I had plenty of time be happy to send you. case you end up not going. months you connect later to make it. However, the You can also target places to give the previous night’s plane boarded extra early that will promote business, Plan for craziness before snow a chance to melt. to ensure it would get a an approach that led me to and after the trip. Block out slot at London’s Heathrow the best business trip of my your calendar to avoid meet- Keep your cool. Resolve Airport. Whose fault was career. After Pan Am went ings when you get back so not to get angry if things go this? Mine, because I hadn’t bankrupt in 1991, I marketed you can take care of the work wrong, as they often will. I checked with the airline! its Kennedy Airport mainte- that piles up while you’re once had to spend a day at Besides teaching you nance facility, in New York gone; better yet, tell nobody a gate at Houston’s Bush patience and fl exibility, travel City. I spotted an aircraft- the exact day of your return. International Airport, but I gives you far more usable maintenance conference in got a lot of work done and experience than you’d gain Germany in connection with Pack light, because you can read most of a book. It wasn’t by sitting in your offi ce. Still, the International Paris Air always buy the odd thing fun, but it wasn’t worth while the most important

JLIMAGES/ALAMY Show and proposed a trip you may need. Keep up on stressing about, either. part of business travel is to both. To my surprise, the the latest security guide- the business part, don’t for- trip was approved. The many lines on what can and can- Plan for the return trip. get to enjoy the travel part. business contacts I made not go in carry-on luggage. Ask how often the airport Bon voyage! —Carl Selinger

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 17

We attracted curious glances from pedestrians, drivers, and bicyclists, who expected a growling hog but instead saw a stealthy tiger

Mini- Proﬁ le tools&toys By Susan Karlin

BOB SAGET: MAC NUT A Plug-in Motorcycle TOO PRICEY? The Enertia Although comedian electric motorcycle goes for Bob Saget came off Brammo’s Enertia puts US $15 000. But don’t worry— as squeaky-clean on bikers on the grid you can always charge it. his television show PHOTO: MADDOX VISUAL “Full House,” his turns in the 2005 cult fi lm s one of us—the heavier The Aristocrats and one—approached the on his HBO special Afi rst major hill on a test showed him swear- ride of Brammo Motorsports’ ing like a sailor. What few know, however, is new Enertia electric motor cycle, that he also swears we were doubtful that this light, by his computer. elegantly designed bike could “I’m a big Mac haul a 109-kilogram (240-pound) freak,” he says (if truth be told, he used a rider up the incline. We shouldn’t coarser word than have worried: it eff ortlessly freak). “I’ve been propelled him to the top of using them since the Portland, Ore.’s West Hills. Mac Plus and Mac SE— Thanks to the central position- you know, the ones that look like diving ing of the batteries and motor, helmets. I do every- the Enertia handled the winding meters (34 foot-pounds). By com- sumer—25 to 44 years old, inter- thing on a Mac. I’m roads with ease, and its wide rear parison, a 250-cubic-centimeter ested in green products, living the tech support for tire kept the wheels on the ground gas-fueled motorcycle typically within 40 km of an urban cen- my daughters—we’re even when accelerating through provides about 28 N·m (20 ft-lbf). ter, and crucially, not necessar- a Mac family—and my friends are always turns. It rode and handled That means the Enertia takes ily a current motorcycle rider. calling me to fi x their predictably and comfortably. The off , accelerates, and rides just Those people will have to computers. All the “Full suspension was somewhat stiff er like a gas-fueled motorcycle. fork over US $15 000 for one of House” guys were Mac than that of most gasoline-fueled Craig Bramscher, a veteran the fi rst preproduction Enertias. boys early on—Dave Coulier, John Stamos, bikes, yet it took bumps, potholes, of several small Web-related (A comparable gasoline-fueled and I would even do and railroad tracks in down- companies, founded Brammo 250-cc sports motorcycle can video conferencing.” town Portland without trouble. in 2002 to pursue his interest in be had for $4000 to $5500.) The The jury’s still out on One thing was missing— specialty vehicles. In 2005, he price is likely to drop as pro- whether he gets a the roar of the engine. The secured a license to build the duction ramps up, and as a little peace on the set of the TV game ride was surprisingly peace- Ariel Atom, a British sports car green machine, it will qualify show “1 vs. 100”: “The ful without it. We attracted notable for having almost no body for tax rebates in some states. folks who work there curious glances from pedestri- panels—just its naked exoskeletal Anyway, what you save in gas are split down the ans, drivers, and bicyclists, who chassis. Soon he began looking to may fi nally off set the extra initial middle between Macs and PCs.” expected a growling hog but build an electric vehicle, but the cost. A 250-cc bike can go about Saget hosts instead saw a stealthy tiger. need to minimize weight brought 300 km on a tank of gas, which “1 vs. 100,” which airs To stretch battery life, the bike a change in plans. He elected to in the United States costs $7 or Friday evenings on is preset to draw only 150 amperes, build a motorcycle—including more, but the Enertia can go as NBC. For upcoming or 60 percent of the maximum the motor, drive train, suspen- far on four charges, totaling just comedy tour dates, check power. That gives it more than sion, and carbon-fi ber body— $1.30. That cuts the energy cost http://www. enough spunk to navigate busy from the ground up. Today most by three-quarters. (Of course, it ____bobsaget. traffi c. The motor develops electric motorcycles are mere won’t be so convenient, because __com. 20 kilowatts (roughly 26 horse- conversions of gas models. each charge takes about 3 hours.) power), but according to Brian Given the bike’s range of The power source is an array Wismann, the Enertia’s design 75 kilometers on a charge and a of six lithium-phosphate cells director, what really mat- top speed of 80 km/h, Brammo from Valence Technologies, ters for an electric vehicle is is positioning the Enertia as of Austin, Texas, which also torque—of which the Enertia’s a commuter vehicle for what supplies the battery-management

motor produces 46 newton it calls the new urban con- system to balance the current SEBREE ROBERT

FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

draw from each of the batteries. Bramscher says Valence’s system is the best he’s seen—and super- safe to boot. “You can cut these batteries in half with a chainsaw, and they will not ignite,” he says. The designers and engineers kept the bike simple and unintimidating for novice rid- Karaoke-bot ers. There is no clutch; the only It lip-syncs as you sing controls are the throttle and the hand and foot brakes. Our favorite new desk toy is the USB-powered Tengu, which moves its LED “lips” in Instead of a gas cap, there’s time with the songs you sing. Made by Solid Alliance Corp., of Tokyo, it sells for US $50. a lid that conceals the charging To see our own Tengu in action, visit us at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/tengu. port, which works off 110-volt household current. Closer to the rider is the power button, and share in the proceeds of mounted above the handlebar is a invention their intellectual endeavors. small fl at-panel display showing MIT, for example, gives its speed, the remaining charge, and professor-inventors a third how much carbon you avoided HIRED TO require that you assign of the revenue coming from pumping into the atmosphere by INVENT to it any patentable ideas their patented inventions. taking the Enertia instead of a car. you may have within a Some companies also Brammo is taking orders for Your company may year after termination, to go beyond what the law delivery by the second quarter of own your brainchild dissuade you from quitting requires to reward their 2008. By then the bike will also your job to perfect an engineers. In 2004, a have a port that will allow owners f you’re an engineer, invention that you’d con- survey by the Intellectual to use their laptops to reprogram you were probably hired ceived on company time. Property Owners the performance characteris- I to invent. That means that Of course, employers Association found that tics of their Enertias, down- if you come up with some- can, if they want, renounce 61 percent of the respond- load ride telemetry, and more. thing that brings heaps of some of their rights in your ing companies paid their “We’re going to let you money to your employer, patents. Universities have employees US $1000 to download to the bike, change you are owed nothing generally found it worth $3000 upon the fi ling the throttle map, and alter the beyond your paycheck. their while to let professors of a patent application, power settings,” Wismann says. That puts you on a “Some hardcore motorcyclists diff erent ground from want every bit of power available that of accountants, truck to them. We’re going to give them drivers, and other people the chance to fi ddle with it.” More who were not hired to power to the motor, of course, invent—they get to keep will come at the expense of range. their patent rights. Even In the second half of 2008, if they did their inventing Brammo will introduce a on the job, using company production version of its fi rst resources, all the company model, priced at $12 000. A gets is a “shop right” to second model will follow, carry- use the patented invention

TOP: RANDI SILBERMAN; BOTTOM: MICK WIGGINS ing both a rider and a passenger. without paying a royalty fee. With greater battery density The courts haven’t and a more muscular motor, been all that clear on what it should have a top speed of “hired to invent” means, and about 120 km/h, fast enough— therefore most companies and powerful enough—for require all new employees highway driving. Sure, the to sign a contract handing Enertia is green and effi - rights to any future inven- cient. But it’s also a fun ride. tions to the company. Your —Brian Santo & Mark Santo company might even

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 19

Taking your employer to court is an all-or-nothing strategy—if you win the case, you get a lot of money, but if you lose it you may lose your job as well

and 37 percent paid from • Have an attorney attend None of these considera- you may lose your job as well. $1000 to $2000 upon the regular meetings to review tions will mollify the engineer You can take heart in issuance of a patent. If all project design and cap- whose invention brings in knowing that despite all you got was a plaque, you ture patentable ideas. billions for the company but these problems, invention can use these fi ndings as • Have patent attorneys con- only beans for the employee— can still do wonders for ammunition the next time duct walkabout visits to maybe just a $1000 check your career. According to you talk to your boss! teams of engineers work- and a brief mention at the that 2004 company survey, You can also relocate to a ing on specifi c projects corporate retreat. Although engineers whose inven- country where the law leans to get them talking about you can try to wring out tions contributed above more toward the inventor. their innovations. more money by taking your and beyond the call of duty In the United Kingdom, • Invite engineers to employer to court, that’s an reported receiving larger for example, the employee- lunches to familiarize all-or-nothing strategy—if monetary awards, stock inventor must be compen- them with patents and you win the case, you get a options, and, of course, sated provided the invention to talk about new ideas. lot of money, but if you lose it promotions. —Kirk Teska is of “outstanding benefi t” to the employer. Germany has a similar law, but alas, the amount of the compensation books KING’S depends on the employee’s GAMBIT: salary, whether or not the A SON, person was hired to invent, GAME OF KINGS A FATHER, and a lot of subjective factors. AND THE A specialist in other people’s WORLD’S But don’t pack your obsessions writes about one MOST bags just yet. A 2006 DANGEROUS of his own—chess GAME study of 1983 German he world By Paul Hoff man; employees found that of chess is fi lled with color- Hyperion; 2007; only 18 had received more ful and obstinate men and women who 433 pp., US $24.95; than their usual income. Thave dedicated much of their lives to ISBN-10: 1401300979; Monetary incentives to a pursuit few outsiders can appreciate. Paul ISBN-13: 978- 1401300975 invent may have perverse Hoff man has a predilection both for the results. They may encourage game and for dedication itself, having employees to fi le so many described an outstanding case of it in his patents that their companies’ biography of the Hungarian mathematician ters to life. They are the highlights of the book. legal departments (and legal Paul Erdös, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Hoff man can be a bit light at times. His budgets) can’t keep up with (Hyperion, 1998). Now he brings these inter- stories, though always entertaining, do on the work. The companies ests together in a wide-ranging tour: King’s occasion stretch the reader’s credulity. I have may then respond by Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most a bit of trouble imagining grandmaster Bent capping the number of Dangerous Game. Larsen mouthing off to a young Paul Hoff man patents staff ers can fi le. Hoff man writes in an enjoyable, fast- while playing scores of amateurs simultane- Employees can also get moving style, focusing on storytelling, ously. Some of the diversions into more tech- into nasty disputes over with brief excursions into more serious nical topics, such as the engineering details who invented what. Two philosophical topics, all designed to lead the of computer chess, are superfi cial and not engineers may conceive of reader seamlessly from episode to episode. properly researched. We are told, for instance, a new idea for a product, The author’s credentials as a tournament that IBM’s chess machine, Deep Blue, had and then several other player and acquaintance of several of 256 processors, that it looked at 3 million engineers and a manager the world’s strongest players are impecca- positions per second, that chess programs or two may assert that they ble, and his preparation is impressive. He are “very materialistic,” and that Kasparov’s also had a hand in it. I have spent years collecting material for fi rst- loss in game six of his 1997 match against even had engineers fi ght hand accounts of top events, including a Deep Blue can be attributed to his “suicidally over whose name was to be World’s Championship in Libya, a presti- choosing a known inferior and passive listed fi rst on the patent. gious inter national tournament in Moscow, line”—all inaccurate, and all in a span of three Companies can avoid a and a women’s training session in New York pages. Also, some of the digressions into the lot of problems by making City. He quotes a wide range of players, from author’s own life are a bit long-winded. the disclosure process former world champions Garry Kasparov However, these are minor fl aws, and they as simple as possible. and Anatoly Karpov on down. These sections should not detract much from a pleasant and Here are a few tips: bring the world of chess and its many charac- interesting reading experience. —Vasik Rajlich

20 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

By PAUL MCFEDRIES Snowclone Is The New Cliché

“If I can claim no other accomplishment when I die, at least I’ll have one neologism to my name!” —Glen Whitman, economics professor

odern folklore I, for one, welcome our holds that Eskimos new X overlords . This M have a huge number snowclone is most often used of words related to snow, ironically to indicate that one but it’s just not true—they really isn’t all that pleased use no more such words that X has so much power than we do. Still, the factoid but is resigned to the fact continues to spin off phrases because nothing can be done on the general format of “If about it. The original state- Eskimos have N words for ment is “I, for one, welcome snow, X have Y words for Z.” our new insect overlords,” For example, a 2003 article the now immortal words of in The Economist declared, a cartoon character in “The “If Eskimos have dozens of Simpsons” from the 1994 words for snow, Germans episode “Deep Space Homer.” have as many words for Here are just a few examples The snowclone X and Y need no stinking manual!” bureaucracy.” On his blog, of this snowclone from recent and Z, oh my! comes from One of the most popu- Agoraphilia, Glen Whitman newspaper and magazine the 1939 fi lm version of The lar snowclones right now coined a snappy name articles: “I, for one, welcome Wizard of Oz, where at one is I’m in ur X, Y-ing ur Z. for the category to which our new robot overlords,” point in the action Dorothy, This comes from a famous this formula belongs: the “I, for one, welcome our Tin Man, and Scarecrow screenshot from a game of snowclone. Of course, he new Microsoft overlords,” chant “Lions and tigers and Starcraft that appeared in was punning on the snow and “I, for one, welcome bears, oh my!” Computer the forums of the Web site cone, which is shaved ice our new Google overlords.” book authors seem to love Something Awful. An inexpe- fl avored with syrup and A perennial favorite among this snowclone, and exam- rienced player was up against carried in a paper cone. both geeks and fashionistas ples aren’t hard to come by: a veteran, and at one point Many snowclones are is X is the new Y, the idea “Collaboration and Wikis and the nOOb (as a gamer would fi rmly entrenched in main- behind which is the belief Blogs, oh my!”; “Lines and call a newbie) lost track of stream culture. For example, that some new thing “X” Transfers and Bits, oh my!” the veteran player and asked I’m not an X, but I play has become more popular If you use the X? We where he was. His reply is one on TV has been around than or has replaced some don’t need no stinking X! the stuff of infamy: “I’m in for more than 20 years. It older thing “Y.” The more snowclone, you’re showing ur base, killing ur doods.” comes from a 1986 ad for specifi c locution X is the utter contempt for X (albeit Endless variations on this Vicks Formula 44 cough new black dominated the usually in a mocking way). theme are to be found, most syrup, in which an actor fashion world in the 1980s. This cliché can be traced back enjoyably on sites with an said, “I’m not a doctor, but Now the structure crops to the 1935 book The Treasure lolcat—a cute picture of a cat I play one on TV.” Another up everywhere (“40 is the of the Sierra Madre, but it to which someone has added example is In X, no one can new 30,” “Knitting is the new didn’t become popular until a caption. The language used hear you Y, which is based yoga,” and on and on). On Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy in these captions is worth an on the tagline of the 1979 the tech side of things, fans Blazing Saddles, in which he entire column. For our pur- movie Alien: “In space, no of the open-source move- included the following lines: poses, it’s enough to know one can hear you scream.” ment will often tell you that “Badges? We don’t need no that many use the I’m in However, some snow- “Open is the new closed,” and stinking badges!” In tech- ur X, Y-ing ur Z format: clones seem to be tailor- Apple marketed the iPod nology writing, probably the “I’m in ur fridge, eating ur made for the technological Shuffl e by declaring that most common is the geek foodz” or “I’m in ur library,

DAN PAGE DAN world. A good example is “Random is the new order.” cry of “Manual? We don’t reading ur bOOks.” ❏

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STUDYING PENGUINS IN ANTARCTICA, WATCHING SHOOTING STARS IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, TRACKING ROBOTS THROUGH THE AMAZON—YES, THIS IS ENGINEERING

or too many engineers, work is drive everything from household interact and interfere with satellite com- the thing you do to fi ll up the time appliances to electric cars. Salinee munications. Sometimes, though, not between college and retirement. Tavaranan is doing her part, too, by attaining your dream can be a good It need not be. Just consider the installing solar panels and microhydro- thing, too. After NASA rejected him F10 technologists we’ve profi led in power turbines in refugee camps along for its astronaut program, James Brown this year’s “Dream Jobs” report. the Thai-Burma border. found an even more thrilling ride, as an Want to see the far corners of the Want to change how people see and engineering test pilot for the F-22. Earth? Roger Hill and Ney Robinson hear the world? Bruno Putzeys is the Want to run with the big dogs? Salvi dos Reis did. Hill had a ho-hum world’s leading designer of class-D Garmin International’s David Downey job as a medical researcher when he amplifi ers, used in high-end audio com- not only designs high-tech fi tness prod- accepted an invitation to Antarctica. ponents to bring crystal-clear authen- ucts, he also field-tests the devices by There he discovered not just his life’s ticity to digital recordings. Mark entering triathlons—and his employer work—building rugged computers for Schubin engineers televised broadcasts couldn’t be happier. studying marine life—but the love of for the Metropolitan Opera, reaching See where we’re going with this? his life. Reis wanders far beyond the new audiences the world over. And Ash Just take a few minutes, read through lab to deploy his environmental moni- Nehru writes software code that drives the 10 profi les that follow, and you too toring robots out at sea and deep in the intricate interactive lighting displays, may be inspired to rethink the mean- Brazilian rain forest. redefi ning the way people view art. ing of “work.” Want to save the planet? Steven Want to live your childhood dream? And if you already have the job of Camilleri does. He’s designing ultra- Sigrid Close’s fi rst love was space, and your dreams, write and tell us about it at efficient motors that could someday now she studies meteors to see how they [email protected].

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JOBS DREAM

24 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Sigrid Close she monitored satellite launches and the 8000 or so operational satellites circling the planet. “Anytime anyone sent anything into space,” she says, “we tracked STAR STRUCK it.” Fortunately, her husband, Greg, had the kind of job—he’s a science-fi ction and fantasy writer—that let him join her on hundred billion,” says meteors themselves. “You think you’re her travels. Sigrid Close. That’s how many tracking a launch,” Close explains, “and In 2000, she was accepted into the meteors collide with the Earth’s actually the radar is just tracking these highly competitive MIT Lincoln Scholars atmosphere every day. Most dense plasma structures.” Program, which allowed her to receive Aare whittled away in the iono- From an early age, Close says, “I wanted her full staff salary while she fi nished her sphere, and Close spends her days studying to work on something in space.” As a child physics Ph.D. For her doctorate, which exactly how they disintegrate. That’s right: growing up in Allentown, Pa., she remem- she completed in 2004, Close figured she gets paid to watch shooting stars. bers her parents taking her out on clear out how to weigh meteors by their radar Close is the resident expert in iono- nights “to see Mr. Moon.” Her father, a signatures, using data she’d collected at spheric and near-Earth phenomena at computer engineer, gave her a telescope Kwajalein. “If we know their weight,” she Los Alamos National Laboratory in New for her eighth birthday. In 1992, her love of says, “we know how much damage they Mexico. Her work regularly takes her to space naturally led to a physics and astron- can do.” places like India, China, Puerto Rico, and omy B.S. at the University of Rochester in Pretty soon, Los Alamos came calling. the Marshall Islands, where she uses the New York state. “I didn’t even want to work here at most advanced space surveillance tele- Close then went to the University of fi rst,” she says. Initial impressions can be scopes and radar to study the uppermost Texas at Austin, intending to intimidating. The national lab, reaches of the atmosphere, some 85 kilo- get a Ph.D. in physics. She fi n- AGE: 37 best known as the home of the meters above the Earth’s surface. ished her master’s but went WHAT SHE atomic bomb, sits on 162 square DOES: Studies no further. “I was burned out,” Close’s, and Los Alamos’s, interest ionospheric kilometers of desert in the in shooting stars isn’t purely academic. she says. It didn’t help that a phenomena middle of Bandelier National It turns out that meteors, as well as the co-worker kept leaving Bible and meteors to Monument. Striated cliffs ionosphere itself, disrupt radio signals. passages on her office chair improve satellite tower above short, scrubby When meteors hit the atmosphere, they exhorting women not to work. communications. trees that dot the land like FOR WHOM: tend to melt into plasma plumes dense Close also wanted to spend Los Alamos green sheep. The lab’s wide with heavy metals, sometimes causing more time on her music. Like National border is flanked by a flimsy- big bubbles that momentarily block the her mother, she is a classically Laboratory looking chain-link fence. But path between a satellite and an Earth- trained pianist. Close moved WHERE SHE closer to the main facility, men- DOES IT: Los based receiver. Similar disturbances, to Boston and recorded an acing army-green vehicles Alamos, N.M. called equatorial plumes, occur nat- album, Mirrored Self, released FUN FACTORS: patrol the grounds, aided by urally in the ionosphere, blossoming in 1997, an improbable blend Travels the Terminator-like soldiers sport- at sunrise and sunset, when the sun’s of classical piano and post- world to study ing camoufl age and mirrored radiation forces lighter plasma to well college angst. shooting stars. sunglasses, weighed down by up as heavier plasma falls. For a satel- Close took a job at MIT’s guns so big they look fake. lite, Close says, the eff ect is as diffi cult to Lincoln Laboratory to study the iono- Despite the lab’s military trappings, see through as ripples in a pond. sphere. Her work involved heavy doses Close says, “I can’t imagine leaving.” The At Los Alamos’s satellite opera- of engineering, especially signal pro- atmosphere among the researchers and tions center, Close works with a team of cessing. Learning to recognize the sig- postdocs is congenial, relaxed, and prone rocket scientists and engineers study- nature of a meteor or some other object to pranks, she says. Last year, an anony- ing these plasmas to determine how and on a radar screen, she says, is a lot like mous artist redrew the men’s room stick- when they will cause problems. By better learning to read Braille. At fi rst she had fi gure icon using Wite-Out to extend its understanding the underlying physics, trouble distinguishing the White Sands round head into a cone. Later, during con- she says, aerospace engineers can bet- missile range, in New Mexico, from an struction work on the ceilings, a rogue ter safeguard their systems. Her main ocean or a forest. Over time, though, she staff er marked dangerous areas with the responsibility is monitoring satellites for became an expert in characterizing the exhortation to “WATCH YOUR CONE.” the U.S. Army’s Air and Missile Defense noise that ionospheric and meteor plas- Beyond the silliness, the job lets Close Command, including one satellite that mas can inject into signals. deeply indulge her love of space. She’s the scans the skies for signs of clandestine In 1998, MIT sent her on a two-year proverbial kid in a candy store when she nuclear tests. She also gets called in dur- stint to Kwajalein Missile Range, a tiny talks about her many ongoing projects. She ing satellite launches, which can be com- strip of land in the middle of the Pacific admits that she has a tendency to take on promised by the meteor plasmas and the Ocean. There, she did space surveillance too much. “There’s so much amazing stuff using the ARPA Long-Range Tracking going on here,” she says, “it makes it hard SIGRID CLOSE, an IEEE member, and Instrumentation Radar, or as Close to choose.” In fact, she’s already plotting tracks meteors and other phenomena puts it, “the big honking telescope.” her next project, funded by the Defense in the ionosphere that can impede satellite communications. She soon found herself traveling to Advanced Research Projects Agency: PHOTO: CHIP SIMONS other telescopes all over the world, where taking on the troposphere. —Sarah Adee

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Bruno Putzeys Instead, he connected each board to an audio analyzer and then rejected it because the results weren’t what he wanted. The 2008 ﬁ fth iteration, though, looked good. Just THE SOUND before Christmas 2001, he brought a pair of the amps home and connected them to the speakers in his living room. He put JOBS OF MUSIC on a CD of Spanish classical music and selected a song by the 18th-century com- poser Juan Francés de Iribarren, “Viendo t the 2006 Audio Electronics This thing can give me a sense of the que Jil, Hizo Raya.” He settled back in a

DREAM Society conference in San music that the other amps can’t.” He chair and listened. It took him just a few Francisco, Bruno Putzeys taught himself how to design electronic seconds to reach a conclusion: “Straight came face-to-face with the odd circuits with tubes, a really odd activity in the bull’s-eye.” Acult of celebrity that surrounds for a teenager in the late 1980s. At a visitor’s request, he re-creates the a select few audio amplifi er designers. After high school, he enrolled at the event, with the very same CD and stereo “A guy came up to me, talking about National Radio and Film Technical components. The music begins to flow me without realizing I was me,” he laughs. Institute in Brussels, from which his from the speakers, and Putzeys’s eyes “Then he saw my name tag, and he said, father had graduated in 1963 (the school seem to unfocus, like he’s lost in thought. ‘Oh, awesome meeting you.’ He shook my has since been merged into the De Nayer There’s a little grin on his face. The hand, and then he hurried off !” Instituut). While there, he sound is extremely transpar- Putzeys is one of the world’s top became intrigued by class-D AGE: 34 ent, neutral, and precise, with designers of a type of audio amplifier audio and did his thesis on WHAT HE a lovely warmth and force in known as class-D. These ultraefficient it. After he graduated in 1995 DOES: Designs the vocals. models are already dominant in multi- with a bachelor’s degree in amplifi ers and In an engineer’s universe, other audio channel sound systems, portable media electrical engineering, Philips, Philips would have embraced electronics. players, cellphones, car stereos, and com- the Dutch electronics giant, FOR WHOM: Putzeys’s UcD module, incor- puters. Lately they’ve made inroads into which had sponsored his the- Hypex Electronics porating it into countless prod- the ostentatious world of high-end audio, sis work, off ered him a job. and Grimm Audio ucts. In the actual universe, the where a component can cost tens of thou- Within a few years, he’d WHERE HE module basically fell through DOES IT: sands of dollars. Their success there is succeeded in “annoying all Belgium and the the cracks. But in April 2003, due mostly to Putzeys. the managers” until one Netherlands a young entrepreneur named In 2001, while working at Philips of them agreed to let him FUN FACTORS: Jan-Peter van Amerongen vis- Applied Technologies in Leuven, Belgium, take charge of the testing Lives and works ited Putzeys at Philips. Some in the same Putzeys designed a compact, versatile of a class-D audio IC being years before, van Amerongen building; listen- class-D amplifi er module that he called designed elsewhere in the ing to music is had started Hypex Electronics, UcD, for “Universal class-D.” Over the company for a television set. part of his job; to supply amplifiers and past few years, dozens of amplifi er mod- He didn’t think much of travels widely to other gear to makers of active els, with prices ranging from US $500 to the chip. “If you give me one conferences and speakers and to recording stu- recording studios. $8500, have been built around Putzeys’s month,” he told his bosses, dios. He had heard great things modules, which are now manufactured “I will make something out about the UcD. by Hypex Electronics of Groningen, of discrete parts that will be much bet- Ironically, the one thing he didn’t Netherlands. The amps have received ter.” He made good on his promise. In want to hear, at least initially, was music mostly ecstatic reviews. three weeks, he built a 25-watt class-D amplifi ed by the module itself. Much like For Putzeys, the success of the UcD amp with better performance than that Putzeys when he was designing the mod- boards has conferred professional free- of the IC amplifi er a four-man team had ules, van Amerongen wanted to look at dom that’s pretty rare for a 34-year-old labored over for two years. the amplifier’s output waveform. “The EE. In May 2005, he followed his mod- In 2001, Philips executive George only thing he wanted to see was the output ules to Hypex, where he is now the chief Aerts secured some research money so signal on an oscilloscope,” Putzeys recalls. tech guru. He lives and works in a two- that Putzeys could further refine his “He looked at it, and in about one minute story building in a picturesque suburb of class-D design. The goal was an amp he said, ‘Okay, I want to buy a license.’ He Leuven. The fi rst fl oor is his laboratory; module that would be versatile and easy had seen so many dreadful outputs, full upstairs are his bedroom, a small kitchen, to manufacture. It had to be compact and of RF hash. He could tell from the signal and a spacious living room with his main have the same output impedance and whether it was well designed.” audio setup dominating one wall. power-supply requirements as a con- Not long after, Putzeys left Philips for Putzeys’s love of audio electronics ventional amp. And it had to be cheaper Hypex, where he has pretty much free began when he was 16. A friend of his and sound better. “The idea was that rein to explore the boundaries of class-D. father’s stopped by the Putzeys home in there would be no excuse for not using Just “for fun,” he recently designed an Herent, Belgium, with an amplifi er built it,” Putzeys recalls. audio amplifi er with 0.0003 percent total around two pairs of EL84 vacuum tubes This time, it took him eight months. He harmonic distortion, at full power, ampli- in push-pull configuration. Its sound went through four generations of circuit fying a 20-kilohertz signal. That fig- bowled over the youngster: “I thought, boards without listening to any of them. ure is more than 1000 times better than

26 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008 ______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

some very good solid-state amps. In fact, Outside of work, he finds time to BRUNO PUTZEYS, an IEEE member, takes it’s an improvement that no human ear maintain a very long-distance relation- a break at Galaxy Studios in Belgium. PHOTO: THOMAS VANHAUTE could detect. But that fi gure is also about ship with a woman who lives in Rwanda. 30 000 times better than that of some tube He lectures at conferences around the duces a musical event,” he says. “The amps—a diff erence that’s not beyond the world. And when he can, he listens to his only thing you can hope for is a credible ability of human ears to detect. own stereo setup, a unique assemblage illusion. But it can be a very nice illusion.” Besides his gig at Hypex, Putzeys is of components he built himself, heavily —Glenn Zorpette also one-fourth of a Netherlands-based tweaked, or received as prototypes. The start-up called Grimm Audio, in Utrecht. system is marvelous, if ungainly. And it TO PROBE FURTHER A longer version It specializes in high-end components for exemplifi es Putzeys’s credo about hi-fi . of this article is available at ____http:// recording studios. “Stereo replay never actually repro- www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/bruno.

David Downey team leader in Garmin’s ﬁ tness products division. Best known for GPS navigation devices that stick on car dashboards, the company also makes tools for aviators, MARATHON MAN hikers, ﬁ shermen, and athletes. Testing Garmin’s running and bik- he midday sun had chased the passed through rows of offi ces. One man ing gear is as much a part of Downey’s last of the morning’s chill from the glanced up from his screen. “Testing job as writing the embedded code that air when David Downey turned again, Dave?” makes them tick. “Usually about 11 a.m., into the Garmin International Downey held up his arms, displaying after coding and debugging and helping Tparking lot, in Olathe, Kan., wind- several watchlike devices strapped onto the guys on my team, I’m like, ‘Oh, man, ing up a 20-kilometer run. He’d been out each. These little Garmin-made comput- time to get ready to go,’ ” Downey says. on the road for nearly 2 hours, a little lon- ers mapped his route, tracked his speed He checks his e-mail to see what kind of ger than usual, but he wanted to enjoy the and heart rate, and calculated his pace. ride his bike-enthusiast colleagues are perfect fall weather while he could. “Of course,” Downey replied. planning, compares it to the plans of his Heading for the company showers, he Downey is the software engineering running colleagues, and decides which

______WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 27

DAVID DOWNEY, an IEEE member, designs products for Garmin International and tests them while training for marathons

PHOTO: COLBY LYSNE 2008 and triathlons.

Downey wouldn’t be discouraged. During the interview, he’d learned that Garmin was about to move its line of JOBS products to ARM processors, 32-bit devices based on a reduced-instruction- set computer (RISC) architecture. He had never written code for RISC devices

DREAM before, but he convinced a small company, World Wireless, to hire him to develop software for ARM-based vend- ing machine payment systems. Six months later he reapplied to Garmin; this time he got the job. He worked fi rst on a cellphone project, then developed a GPS system for Palm PDAs. Then, in 2002, Garmin engineers began developing a fitness product, a souped-up watch for runners. Downey had always been into running and was on the track team in high school and college—never a star athlete, he says; he just liked doing it. He really wanted to work on the new product. Downey hung out with the people working on the runner’s watch. He ran with the developers daily as they tested prototypes and wasn’t shy about making suggestions. “When I run in town, I never remember to stop my stopwatch at a stoplight,” Downey says. “So I said, ‘Hey, it would be really cool to have it just stop the timer at AGE: 46 the light and start it up again WHAT HE DOES: Develops when you go. It’ll know by software for the GPS signal when you’re GPS-based stopped, because the location devices that help doesn’t change.’ ” For that idea runners and bikers train. and others, the team credited FOR WHOM: Downey in patent fi lings. Garmin He officially joined the International fitness group in 2004. His WHERE HE group to join. He changes out of his jeans gy m fees, and pilot lessons, as most recent project is the DOES IT: and cotton shirt into sports gear and well as race entry fees. Olathe, Kan. Edge 605 and 705 bike com- grabs a handful of Garmin products off When he started his career, FUN FACTORS: puters, which began selling his desk; some are already on the market, Downey never expected that Gets to test this year for about US $400 some are works in progress. Then he’s his job requirements would the devices he and $500. These handlebar- designs in bike ready to go “testing.” one day include running and races, marathons, mounted gadgets use a wire- Downey’s outside interests don’t just biking. After getting a B.S. in and triathlons. less network to gather infor- happen to coincide with the projects he’s computer science and mathe- mation from sensors built working on. As the company’s recruit- matics from Baker University in Baldwin into the bike and strapped onto the rider; ment literature puts it: “Garmin seeks can- City, Kan., in 1983, he held software jobs they can track, among other things, the didates who have a passion for the prod- at various companies, all in the southern cadence of the pedals, the force the rider ucts that they’re developing.” That means Kansas City metro area. exerts on the pedals, the bike’s speed, and fi shermen work on marine products, rec- In 1998, when his employer at the the rider’s heart rate. Basic street maps reational pilots work on aviation products, time, a medical device manufacturer, come installed; riders can add memory and exercise enthusiasts work on fi tness announced a move to California, Downey cards with detailed route maps. products. The company encourages these applied for a job at Garmin. Garmin These days, Downey competes in a passions by subsidizing sports teams, turned him down. bike race, a running race, or a triathlon

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at least once a month; that’s as much as aged to keep the not-waterproof proto- ing events. Last year, some 180 Garmin his family will tolerate. Every event pres- type dry by holding his arm in the air. workers participated. Lately, Downey ents another opportunity to test the com- Then the trail crossed another pond with has been focusing on recruiting more pany’s products, though not every test ropes strung above it; competitors had to women to compete, because many events goes well. In 2006, for his fi rst “adven- crawl through the water under the ropes. require coed teams. ture” race, he wore a prototype of the By the end of the race, Downey says, “the Right now, swimming is a weak spot, Forerunner 305, one of Garmin’s watch- prototype was totally fried.” (The com- perhaps because the company does not like computers for runners. The event mercial product is water-resistant.) produce a line of products for swimmers. had three parts: an infl atable canoe race, Since just after being hired by Garmin, “Our strategy ? Hire a swimmer,” Downey a mountain bike ride, and a trail run. Downey has organized the company’s says. With the company adding more The canoe race and bike ride went fi ne, team for the Kansas City Corporate than 400 workers annually, an engineer but the trail run had a few surprises. The Challenge, a six-week festival of Ping- with a passion for swimming may soon trail led through a pond; Downey man- Pong matches, races, and other sport- fi nd her dream job. —Tekla S. Perry

James Brown Brown got his fi rst taste of fl ying from his father, an amateur pilot, and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. After getting a bachelor’s degree in civil engineer- ABOVE & BEYOND ing from Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, he entered the yearlong Air ames “J.B.” Brown had just taken engineer would say, ‘The short-period Force Undergraduate Pilot Training pro- off in an F-22 Raptor on a routine test campaign is adequate.’ As a test pilot, I’m gram in 1977. From 1979 to 1985, he fl ew fl ight when 730 oC air escaping from a able to translate between them.” the F-4 Phantom II in Germany and the loose connection in one engine began Having logged 7600 flight hours in F-5E Tiger II in England. Jmelting wires and hydraulic and fuel 124 types of airplanes, he’s been spe- Pursuing the astronaut dream, he lines. Protocol dictated that he shut down cializing in the US $150 million F-22 enrolled in the competitive Air Force Test the ailing engine and fl y on the healthy for the past six years, routinely travel- Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, one, but he remembered that an F-117 ing 18 000 meters above the ground at a program that requires an engineering had been lost by just such an action—the 2600 kilometers per hour and subject- degree and that all aspiring astronaut aircraft tumbled out of control while the ing his body to 9 g’s. Nothing on Earth pilots must complete. He went on to test- pilot ejected to safety. Brown’s plane was quite compares, he says. “I’ve cruised at fl y experimental military planes, along too close to the ground for him to eject. Mach 2 and 60 000 feet, covering a mile the way rising to the rank of major. Thinking fast, he idled the bad engine and every three seconds, watched the paral- In 1991, Brown interviewed with lowered the landing gear. Then, on fi nal lax from my plane’s shock waves distort approach, the other engine started to fail. the Earth’s features, stared at the black- With just seconds to spare before the jet ness of space and the stars at noon, then JAMES BROWN, an IEEE member, and his ride of choice, the F-22 Raptor, the lost power, he landed the aircraft, shut it looked at the horizon and saw the curva- world’s most advanced stealth fi ghter. down, and ran from it in case there was ture of the Earth.” PHOTO: LOCKHEED MARTIN a fi re. Happily, there wasn’t. “Had I followed the emergency proce- dures verbatim, I could have ended up in a world of hurt,” he says in a jovial Alabama twang. “But, hey, I get to fly one of the most powerful airplanes in the world. I’m a 53-year-old guy doing stuff teens dream about.” AGE: 53 Brown is an experimental WHAT HE test pilot: a special breed of DOES: Flies the F-22 Raptor as aviator trained in engineer- an experimental ing who test-fl ies experimen- test pilot. tal craft and then conveys FOR WHOM: the problems he encoun- Lockheed Martin ters and his suggestions for Corp. WHERE HE improvements in terms that DOES IT: his earthbound counterparts Edwards Air can understand. Each world Force Base has its own language, Brown in California’s Mojave Desert explains. “Someone who’s FUN FACTORS: trained solely as a pilot would Can’t beat the say, ‘Yeah, it flew great.’ An views.

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Lockheed Martin to be a test pilot and software, navigation systems, and weap- an hour of debriefi ng. Then Brown stum- was awaiting an opening when the cold ons, assisting with the pilot interface of bles to his desk to sift through e-mails and war ended and the U.S. defense bud- systems design, and translating between write a fl ight report. He also fi nds time to 2008 get was slashed. He then spent two long the pilots and engineers. speak at local schools, using aviation to years as a United Airlines pilot traversing Despite the planes being far along in illustrate the importance of setting goals, North and Central America. “After fi ghter their development, there’s still a constant working hard, and avoiding distractions. jets, fl ying airliners wasn’t in my blood,” danger that something could go seriously, When he’s not in the air, Brown’s JOBS he laughs. “Let’s just leave it at that.” sometimes fatally, wrong. vehicle of choice is a fairly unsexy 2003 All the while, he kept applying to “Yes, I’ve lost friends, but I look at it maroon Pontiac Grand Am. The ground- the NASA astronaut-training program. pragmatically,” he says. “There are engi- hugging engineering crew may drive But his third rejection proved defi nitive. neering reasons why fate caught up with Corvettes, he says, but the test pilots

DREAM “There was an electrocardiogram they you.” Every accident is extensively stud- “tend to drive sensible cars because we didn’t like, and they told me to go pound ied so as to learn from those mistakes, he have nothing to prove.” sand,” he says. notes. “We all accept that the job is risky, Of course, there are times when In late 1994, Lockheed finally had but if we can’t eliminate the risk, then we it’s useful to pull out the fighter pilot a job for him. He started with the work diligently to reduce it.” chutzpah. Brown managed to avoid a F-117 Nighthawk, the original stealth Twelve-hour days are typical. Flying speeding ticket that way. “The officer fighter, and then switched to the F-22. days can start as early as 5 a.m. with a looked at me and said, ‘What are you, a With the plane’s avionics and capabili- 90-minute premission briefi ng, followed jet pilot?’ And I said, ‘Well, as a matter ties well established, Brown’s work tends by an hour of prefl ight tests, a 3½-hour of fact….’ He was laughing so hard, he toward modifying onboard computers, fl ight with eight midair refuelings, and let me go.” —Susan Karlin

Steven Camilleri mon electric motor—and now he and his ﬁ ve-person research team are poised to see their supereffi cient, environmentally friendly device roll off production lines. MOTOR MANIAC It all started when Camilleri was dozing through his course work as an or a young engineer who used Dandenong, a quiet suburb of Melbourne, undergraduate in electrical engineer- to sleep through math class, Australia, he works on what he considers ing at Northern Territory University in Steven Camilleri has certainly to be some of the most exciting technol- Darwin, Australia. Disappointed that seen his life perk up. From ogy in the world. He’s been rebuilding one the curriculum offered few opportuni- F In Motion Technologies’ offi ces in of the pillars of engineering—the com- ties to be creative, he delved wholeheart- edly into outside projects—he made his own robots and joined the school’s team to build a solar car. Along the way, he met Dean Patterson, a professor of electrical engineering at Northern Territory who was backing the solar car project, and he encountered the motor that would change his life. “We’d built this freak motor, and it turned out everyone liked it,” recalls Patterson, an IEEE Fellow. “We had some trouble with the electronics, and in 1996 Steven said he’d like to work on it and get it ﬁ xed. And he did!” A typical motor relies on brushes to make a mechanical connection between an electrical source and the rotating core. The “freak motor,” designed to be more effi - cient and more reliable than ordinary motors, did away with brushes and instead rotated its permanent magnets and used power electronics to reverse

STEVEN CAMILLERI, an IEEE member, designed and built a unique new motor, eff ectively from scratch. PHOTO: PETER BENNETTS

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the direction of the current’s fl ow. “The onstration projects: an unmanned air- cant way. He and his team have made electronics needed to do a bit more than craft for NASA, a supereffi cient ceiling a device that he says uses less mate- make the motor go. It needed to be a fan, a tidal turbine. rial than a typical induction motor, is whole solar-car drive system,” Camilleri Their luck changed after they one-fifth the size of one, and handles says. “The system they had when I approached Avanti Bikes, based in variable speeds much better. The first started had all sorts of efficiency, reli- Auckland, New Zealand, about incor- applications will be in home appliances. ability, and packaging problems.” porating their motor into an electric Camilleri still hopes to see the motor This brushless dc motor is distinct bicycle. “It took going to a bicycle com- used in electric vehicles someday, but because it produces flux in an axial pany, where they knew nothing about he concedes that the time is not yet ripe. direction, rather than radially, as is motors, for someone to say, ‘Let’s get this For now, he says, “we’re surviving on more common; also, the motor is flat- into production right away,’ ” household pumps and fans.” ter than its ordinary counterparts. Camilleri says. Over the next They’re not quite as sexy as This confi guration is not new, but the six months, he and his col- AGE: 30 cars, he admits, but making WHAT HE engineering behind it is extremely leagues tackled problems DOES: Designs such mundane electric goods tricky because everything—including they hadn’t previously con- and builds highly more effi cient could cumula- improving its mechanical strength and sidered, such as silencing the effi cient brushless tively save a lot of energy and setting its tolerances—must be fi gured motor’s noisy hum. They tried dc motors. cut back on greenhouse-gas FOR WHOM: out from scratch. countless mechanical work- emissions. “The whole point In Motion After getting his bachelor’s degree arounds before finally hit- Technologies is to get these motors in pro- in 1998, Camilleri began working on ting on a solution: they drove WHERE HE duction so that our work can his master’s in electrical engineering at a diff erent current waveform DOES IT: make a diff erence,” he says. Northern Territory. He took a job at the through the engine. Dandenong, Camilleri is so driven by Australia university’s Centre for Energy Research, Although Avanti made FUN FACTORS: the goal of perfecting his and with Patterson and another veteran only 1000 of the bikes, priced Works on the motor that his biggest hurdle solar racer named Byron Kennedy, he at about AU $1500 each, the cutting edge is winding down at the end continued tinkering with the motor. bicycles served as proof that of technology of a day. His solution is to to reinvent the In 2001, the three engineers formed the motors were reliable and do something “180 degrees motor from Northern Territory’s fi rst spin-off com- could be built at an accept- scratch. away from my day job.” pany, In Motion Technologies, or IMT, able cost. This small success For the last 10 years, that in hopes of commercializing their novel made the company much more attractive has meant studying Japanese. He also engine for use in electric vehicles. But to potential investors, and the next steps practices judo and is converting an they discovered that car companies were became clearer. In 2006, Camilleri and engineless 1971 Volkswagen Beetle into reluctant to take a chance with IMT’s his tight-knit team moved to Dandenong an all-electric vehicle. fancy new design. “Everything we are after Fasco, a large motor company based Just as he did in college, Camilleri still doing is new—as in never been done in Michigan, bought IMT. seeks out activities that keep him on his or, sometimes, never even been tried,” Now, as a research-and- development toes. “A lot of engineering positions are Camilleri says. “You get to rethink a lot manager at a large corporation, Camilleri more cookie-cutter, the same old, same of the paradigms, which does cause some finally has the connections and manu- old every day,” he notes. “Give me lead- friction with the old hands.” So the com- facturing capabilities he needs to push ing edge every time. I don’t know how pany instead contented itself with dem- the motor onto the market in a signifi- they stay awake.” —Sandra Upson

Roger Hill change when they dive. He asked Hill if he could build a gizmo that could be attached to the back of a seal and record depth and heart rate and take blood sam- MARCHES WITH ples while the seal dived into the water. That question changed Hill’s life. Six months later, he was in Antarctica, PENGUINS supergluing epoxy-encased circuit boards to the backs of Weddell seals. n a dark winter day in 1981, really wanted to do was build gadgets. Today, Hill is the go-to guy for marine Roger Hill sat in a window- Harvard professor and anesthesiol- animal researchers around the world. He less cubby in the dungeons ogist Warren Zapol stopped by. Zapol has designed computers that calculate the of Massachusetts General was studying patients who survive oxy- migration path of elephant seals by mea- O Hospital, in Boston, design- gen deprivation and was also trying to suring sunrise and sunset; devices that ing a computer model of blood flow understand sudden infant death syn- track walruses across ice and through and pressure inside the lung. He was a drome, in which a baby stops breathing water; and tags that record the travels of Harvard postdoc, with a Ph.D. in engi- for no apparent reason. He thought that great white sharks and the migration of neering from Oxford, researching pul- both situations might be related to the tuna. One of his lightweight dive record- monary artery function. But what he way marine mammals’ bodily functions ers determined that emperor penguins

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seal and inserted a catheter AGE: 52 WHAT HE through an artery and into the DOES: Develops aorta. At the same time, Hill 2008 devices that can glued a neoprene pad onto be attached to the seal’s back and attached ﬁ sh, marine mammals, and birds to the computer (about the size record location, of a paperback book), the bat- JOBS depth, and biolog- tery pack (a little larger than a ical functions. deck of cards), and the blood- FOR WHOM: sampling equipment (slightly Wildlife Computers smaller than a can of soda) by

DREAM WHERE HE screwing them into mounts DOES IT: In on the neoprene. an offi ce in Once the seal woke up, the Redmond, Wash.; on the ice in group brought it over to the Antarctica hole in the ice. The seal dived FUN FACTORS: right in. When it resurfaced He and his wife 20 minutes later, Hill plugged spent their 10th the device’s fiber-optic cable wedding anniversary tag- into his Zenith Z80 desktop ging sharks in computer, downloaded the Belize, their 25th data, retrieved the blood sam- with seals in ple collected mid-dive, set up Antarctica. the parameters for the next dive, and waited for the seal to dive again. The group repeated this process for a few days, then removed the catheter and gear, took the seal back to its original capture point, and picked up a new seal. The research results were astonishing. It turned out that the concentration of red blood cells rose steadily during the fi rst 20 minutes of a seal’s dive; the researchers could only guess where the cells were coming from. A few years later, Zapol confirmed that the seal’s spleen releases oxygenated blood cells as needed, providing new insight into that previously mysterious organ. Meanwhile, Hill was hooked: “It was way more fun than doing work on pul- ROGER HILL, an IEEE member, encounters was encapsulating it in a thick coating of monary arteries of sick patients.” He penguins and seals in Antarctica while epoxy and glass beads (to make it neutrally also loved the work because, he says, developing computers for wildlife research. PHOTO: RICK DAHMS; PENGUIN: EUREKA/ALAMY buoyant), which caused it to overheat and “I like getting my hands dirty. I liked the then explode. There was no time to build technological challenge.” And spend- can dive 600 meters, far deeper than a second prototype before his sched- ing long hours outdoors sure beats sit- anyone ever thought. These days, Hill is uled departure for McMurdo Station, ting in a windowless basement—this is back in Antarctica, testing instruments in Antarctica, so he took circuit boards, a guy who, during high school and col- he designed to study how aging affects epoxy, and bits and pieces of electronics lege, would regularly go off on two-week Weddell seals. with him. At McMurdo, he discovered that hikes through the English countryside Back to 1981: Hill and a technician pouring the epoxy in layers instead of as a or remote areas of Lapland. built their fi rst seal computer around the block eliminated the overheating. He even met the woman who is now his just-introduced NSC800, an early CMOS While Hill assembled his gizmos, wife, Suzanne Braun (now Suzanne Hill), microprocessor. The device controlled a the other members of the research team on that fi rst trip to Antarctica, where she peristaltic blood pump that would func- selected a spot on the ice and set up the was doing doctoral research on the mater- tion down to 1000 meters, and sensors fi eld camp, complete with a seal-size hole. nal bond between Weddell seals and their that measured the animal’s heart rate, Hill, Zapol, and the rest then went out to pups. But she had no interest in the self- core body temperature, and snippets a seal colony, selected a seal, and herded it described nerd. “She took up with a heli- of EKG signals. A fiber-optic cable let onto a sled. (Antarctic seals have no land- copter pilot,” Hill recalls. researchers download recorded data with based predators, so they are not afraid of The next year, though, Hill prepared the package still attached to the seal. people.) They then drove the sled to their to wow her. Despite his limited baggage The fi rst prototype worked—until Hill camp, where doctors anesthetized the allowance, he packed a tuxedo. Then, for

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the big Halloween party at McMurdo dive depths and dive durations for freely it. He still spends most of his day writing Station, Hill added fi ns he had borrowed swimming seals. The researcher, John software or designing circuit boards, and from a dive locker, a black balaclava, gog- Bengtson, was thrilled. he loves the variety. “One morning I’m gles, and a funnel liberated from the biol- Emboldened by this success, Hill quit trying to fi gure out how to make a gizmo ogy lab; with bits of yellow tape in strate- his Harvard post in early 1987, moved to that’s going to cut the line that connects the gic places, he became a penguin. Seattle, and started Wildlife Computers, towed tag to the animal, so that if the ani- The strategy worked. Braun finally in Redmond, Wash., to work on marine mal dives too deep, the tag is released and noticed him, and this past October they devices full-time. In the early days, doesn’t get crushed,” he says. “That after- celebrated their 25th anniversary—in the company worked under contract noon I’m discussing code. And in the mid- Antarctica, of course. to marine researchers; later, it began dle of that I’m laying out the design of a new Hill continued to build gadgets for building off-the-shelf products, like tag.” On occasion, he still joins research Zapol until 1985, when the funding ran US $3500 fi sh tags that record data for a teams in Antarctica or other remote posts. out and Hill reluctantly went back to preprogrammed time period (as long as At this point, Hill can direct his des- his research on the human lung. But a year) before popping up to the surface tiny. “We only make instruments that marine researchers who’d heard about to transmit the collected data via satel- further the understanding of animals to Hill’s seal work began contacting him lite. Times were lean for a while, but now help with their conservation,” he says. to talk about devices that they dreamed Wildlife Computers is a multimillion- “I have a complete absence of guilt about about. For one Seattle-based researcher, dollar business with 28 employees. everything I do,” he says. And he plans he built a data recorder that measured And that’s about as big as Hill wants to keep it that way. —T.S.P

Ney Robinson Salvi dos Reis line to transport natural gas to Manaus, the region’s largest city. The company will need to routinely inspect the line for leaks. That’s where Reis comes in. INTO THE WILD “You can’t just hop in your 4x4 and go see if the pipes are okay,” he says. “You he small motorboat meanders nology division in Rio de Janeiro. The need to cross rivers, igarapés [seasonal through the Amazonian swamp. company’s main oil fi elds reside in deep tributaries], fl ooded forests, and a fl oat- The water is a turbid brown, the waters off the Brazilian coast, so Reis’s ing cushion of aquatic vegetation that jungle a thicket of twisted trees. A lab specializes in developing all sorts of forms near the riverbanks.” Tcricrió bird chirps from the tree- Jules Vernian contraptions—a caterpillar- So Reis’s team is building a pipeline- tops. The Brazilian researchers stop the like robot to unclog underwater pipelines, monitoring robot that can navigate just boat to have a look around. Suddenly a noise a supersized hydraulic wrench that can about any kind of terrain. Shaped like a breaks the calm. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. work down to 2000 meters. dune buggy , it has four spherical wheels Within seconds, an angry swarm of Petrobras also operates some oil the size of overinfl ated beach balls, which cabas, Amazon wasps with a powerful fi elds inland, including Urucu, tucked let the robot fl oat. The outer sides of the sting, envelops the boat and its unlucky deep within the Amazon rain forest. wheels have paddles, and powered sus- occupants. To hear Ney Robinson Salvi Sometime this year the company plans pensions can tilt the paddled sides into dos Reis tell the story, you almost feel to complete a 670-kilometer-long pipe- the water. The machine is called Chico. you’re right there in the rain forest with him, fi ghting off the bellicose bugs. “Jumping into the water is not a good idea,” Reis says. “There are crocodiles, snakes, piranhas, and a bloodsucking little fi sh called candiru that can enter your body orifices. So I covered my head and told the mateiro”—the Amazon native pilot- ing the boat—“to get us out of there fast!” For Reis, a robotics engineer at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, fleeing from wild wasps through treacherous waterways in excruciating heat and humidity is just part of the fun. He heads the robotics laboratory at Petrobras’s underwater tech-

NEY ROBINSON SALVI DOS REIS, an IEEE member, designed this amphibious robot to monitor the Amazon. PHOTO: ERICO GUIZZO

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The robot’s main job will be to run couldn’t rely on divers anymore. It needed the importance of science and engineer- up and down the pipeline using gas- robots. Reis cofounded the robotics lab ing. He’s found it a useful technique for sniffi ng sensors to fi nd leaks. The cur- and helped the company reach some of recruiting new members to his lab, which 2008 rent prototype is remotely operated, but the world’s deepest oil reservoirs. now includes, in addition to his full-time Reis’s group is designing a manned ver- These days, when Reis is not out in staff of four, about half a dozen mas- sion for more complex inspection and the Campos Basin off Rio’s coast or the ter’s and Ph.D. students and high school repair missions. He says the robot will Amazon jungle testing a new system, he’s interns. “Ney encourages the group to be JOBS also help scientists gain unprecedented in the lab, making wooden models with creative, improvise, and above all, have access to the Amazon, letting them fi lm his longtime assistant, José fun,” says Gustavo Medeiros animals, record bird sounds, and collect “Geppetto” Almir Sena, or AGE: 57 Freitas, a master’s student. plants and water samples. “We’re doing brainstorming with the grad- WHAT HE “He wants to look into your DOES: Develops DREAM these engineering projects,” he says, “to uate students he helps advise. eyes and see that you love advanced robotic give people the ability to see, smell, hear On a muggy spring after- systems for what you’re doing.” the jungle—and protect it.” noon, Reis heads out to the environmental Late last year, Reis and Reis’s inspiration to become an engi- lab’s pool to put the robot monitoring and his team were preparing for neer came from his grandmother Irene, through a round of tests. Tall oil exploration. another trip to the Amazon an elementary school teacher. Growing and tan, with green-gray eyes FOR WHOM: (he’s been there more than Petrobras up in Rio, the young boy would marvel at and a mane of brown and sil- WHERE HE 30 times in the past fi ve years). the objects she built for her classes, from ver hair, he strolls gracefully, DOES IT: Rio de He says the project is not just a simple tin-can phone to a dollhouse greeting everyone he sees. Janeiro and the about going there, testing the with numbered windows and doors to “Opa, tá bom, menino?” he Amazon robot, and leaving. He and FUN FACTORS: teach arithmetic. calls out to one acquaintance. Designs and his crew seek to involve local In 1972, Reis earned a degree in “Hey, you good, boy?” builds cutting- communities and hope the mechanical engineering from the Federal In his cramped offi ce, Reis edge robots and locals will eventually assist University of Rio de Janeiro and began keeps a binder labeled “On the then fi eld-tests in operating and maintaining working on the construction of nuclear Anvil,” full of half-baked ideas them in the rain the robot. And what do the forest and out reactors, iron-mining plants, and oil he has scribbled on scraps of at sea. Amazon natives think of their refi neries. He took scuba-diving courses paper or napkins. “You’re at futuristic wheeled visitor? and worked on the construction of home, in the shower, the toilet, or what- “The kids love it; they’re totally Brazil’s fi rst off shore platforms. “It was a ever, and then, boom!—you’re taken by the unafraid,” Reis says. “Once we were beautiful adventure,” he recalls. “I fi nally most wonderful of ideas,” he says. Many operating the robot, and this little boy ran understood the meaning of navy blue.” of those ideas become topics for his stu- toward it. I shouted, ‘Be careful!’ Then we In 1987, he joined Petrobras. At the dents’ doctoral dissertations. stopped the robot. I took the boy in my time, the company was beginning to Reis enjoys giving talks at schools arms and sat him on a wheel. He had the explore deeper and deeper waters and and universities about his projects and biggest smile on his face.” —Erico Guizzo

Ash Nehru people respond—jumping up and down, waving their arms around, walking up and then turning away. It never works quite how you think it’s going to work.” EVERYTHING IS Nehru started coding as a kid, when his father, a mechanical engineer, brought home a microcomputer sold ILLUMINATED by the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Computer Literacy Project. In its day— f you happened to stroll down London’s from people-monitoring video cameras the early to mid-1980s—the BBC Micro tony Regent Street this past Christmas, and environmental sensors to precisely was an incredible machine. “It took one you may have noticed, just above the fes- choreograph the display. second to boot up and booted straight tooned storefronts and package-laden Although the promotional literature into the BASIC interpreter, so you could I shoppers, a series of clusters of glow- identifies the display’s sponsor as cell- program immediately—in fact, that’s ing translucent globes. If you’d taken a phone maker Nokia, the actual design all you could do,” Nehru fondly recalls. closer look, you would have realized that came from a small London-based firm The computer had a faster processor the globes were pulsating with color, the called United Visual Artists, which spe- than any other machine of its time— light-emitting diodes (LEDs) within vary- cializes in such high-tech interactive 4 megahertz—and a then-remark- ing their hue and intensity according to light displays. The computer code that able 32 kilobytes of graphics memory. the number of passersby, the wind speed, generated the display is the handiwork Best of all, he says, “it came with well- and the amount of sunlight. And if you’d of UVA’s software director, Ash Nehru. written user guides that allowed me to looked really close, you would have discov- Designing artwork that the public learn ﬁ rst BASIC and then 6502 assem- ered the quad-core Xeon computers run- can interact with is immensely satisfy- bly language programming.” Built by ning customized software that took inputs ing, Nehru says. “It’s great seeing how Acorn Computers for the BBC and sold

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ASH NEHRU, an IEEE member, takes in the Christmas lights on London’s Regent Street. PHOTO: PETER SEARLE

Compared to coding games, he adds, “it was a much more immediate payoff .” Nehru quit his day job and started doing his live 3-D graphics full-time, creating dancing cartoon characters for nightclubs and pulsating light shows for raves. His work appeared throughout the United Kingdom, and he performed at the Burning Man festival a few times. He even tried his hand at being a DJ—“to no great success, of course. It was just a lot of fun.” Fun—but not lucrative. In late 2002, right around when the money ran out, he got a phone call from Chris Bird and Matt Clark, who had also been designing visu- als for live concerts. They’d been commissioned by the trip-hop band Massive Attack to produce the lighting for an upcoming concert tour. Bird, Clark, and Nehru decided to “create a show that was really of the moment and connected to the people,” Nehru says. The stage backdrop became essentially a computer terminal onto which raw data and messages constantly streamed. From a programming point of view, Nehru treated the concert like a video game, creating a timeline and scripts into which up-to-the- minute information—soccer AGE: 35 match scores, local weather WHAT HE DOES: Designs reports, e-mail messages software for from audience members— creating inter- could be easily dropped. active 3-D light- That work “put us on the ing displays. map,” Nehru says. Although FOR WHOM: United Visual he’d gone into the project Artists thinking it would be a one-off , WHERE HE “we worked together so well, DOES IT: the penny sort of dropped.” London for a few hundred pounds, it spawned likely to be adopted by the FUN FACTORS: Shortly after the tour ended, legions of young programmers. gaming world. He found the Is currently the three formed United Nehru spent hours creating games work technically interesting considering how Visual Artists, with the aim and other programs. “I was 10, I had just but culturally boring. “You to outfi t hundreds of creating sophisticated moved to England from India, and I had basically spend your days fi g- of toy helicopters interactive lighting displays with low-power few friends. But I had this computer.” uring out how to shoot people lasers and fl y that blend equal amounts of Nehru went on to earn a B.A. in and chop off monsters’ heads,” them in formation art and technology . computer science from Trinity College, Nehru says. around central Since then, the company Cambridge, in 1994. For his first job, On the side, though, he London. has grown to a full-time staff he had just three requirements: “It had had been tinkering with gen- of 13, plus a rotating crew to be in London, I didn’t want to erating live three-dimensional graphics— of interns. To reach its second-floor wear a suit, and I wanted to work on dancing robots and virtual go-go danc- offi ces in a weathered brick building in 3-D graphics.” He might have ended ers—that could be displayed at music London’s historic Borough neighbor- up designing avionics interfaces, but clubs and concerts. His debut “perfor- hood, just south of London Bridge, you instead he got hired by computer gam- mance” came at a New Year’s Eve bash can risk the semifunctional freight ele- ing company Domark Software (later at London’s Alexandra Palace, where a vator, but it’s safer and quicker to take acquired by Eidos Interactive). crowd of 50 000 gy rated along with his the stairs. In the main workspace, four As a member of the re search group, animated characters. “People were going young designer/programmers hunch he looked at up-and-coming technology stark staring bonkers,” Nehru recalls. over workstations beneath a silver disco

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ball, while indie rock tunes waft through “we take that to the client. Then they tell LEDs, which flash, pulse, and change the air. Just beyond, in the hardware us how much money they really have,” he color in sync with the music. With some room, the guts of disassembled comput- says, laughing. simple keyboard commands and pull- 2008 ers and other electronics await repair Nehru’s chief contribution is a pro- down menus, Nehru can rotate the stage, and upgrades. The place has a start-up gram called D3, written in C++, that lets change the positions of the lights, vary feel. “We all work overlong hours,” the designers create a detailed and realis- their color and pattern, and then see how Nehru admits. “We haven’t gotten to the tic 3-D simulation of what the installation the illumination and shadows shift. JOBS point where we can just relax.” will look like. The program also controls The program isn’t exactly user- Creating new works, whether for the installation once it’s built. On one of friendly, but it makes the creative pro- a commercial client like Nokia or for a the workstations Nehru calls up a recent cess more effi cient and also opens up new commissioned art exhibition or per- example, a music video for the U.S. rock possibilities for the designers that they

DREAM formance, is a labor- and technology- band Battles shot in an abandoned Welsh can see on the fl y. United Visual Artists intensive undertaking. A typical proj- slate mine. The team knew they’d have at just licensed the program to a company ect starts with a visit to the site, where most a day to shoot the video on-site, so that rents LED equipment and control a team member takes photos and video, they needed to know exactly how the light- systems for exhibit halls and TV ads. which the entire group then reviews and ing would work before they got there. Being the guy who makes the tools discusses. “About a week later, every- Onscreen, a designer has sketched that make the art suits Nehru just fi ne. body comes back with their best idea. It’s the rough outlines of the mine’s walls “Writing code is just as creative as paint- very important that everybody’s part of and floor and positioned the performing a picture,” he says. “You’re fi guring the process,” Nehru says. Once the ideas ers and their instruments within it. The out ways to translate what’s in your head have been distilled into a workable plan, set is surrounded by tall skinny poles of into something real.” —Jean Kumagai

Salinee Tavaranan and more than 20 other refugee camps and villages are no longer entirely cut off from the grid. Over the past two and a half years, BGET, a project of the POWER RANGER Thailand-based nonproﬁ t Palang Thai, has installed solar panels and micro- he monsoon rains have eased, Having fled torture and economic hard- hydro turbines across the region and and Salinee Tavaranan and ship in neighboring Burma, thousands trained hundreds of local residents on several members of her team of refugees now call this place home. how to install and maintain the systems. are piled into the back of a tan Many have lived here for years, in sim- The work of BGET has in turn given Tpickup truck. The vehicle winds ple thatched huts without electricity or the villagers access to some of the most along dirt roads near the Thai-Burma running water. basic amenities: lights, computers, and border, eventually pulling through the But thanks to Tavaranan and her decent health care, to name a few. front gates of the Mae La refugee camp. Border Green Energy Team, Mae La “The most rewarding thing about this job is to be able to use my education to help people and to improve their lives,” Tavaranan says, her face lighting up with a warm, enthusiastic smile. Concern for others and for the envi- ronment was what led Tavaranan to engineering in the first place. She grew up on the beach resort island of Phuket, in southern Thailand, and thoughts about protecting the natural beauty of her hometown inspired her to pursue mechanical engineering with a concentration in energy systems at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. After graduating in 2001, she went on to earn an M.S. in solar energy engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

SALINEE TAVARANAN, an IEEE member, stands next to solar panels that her Border Green Energy Team installed in a refugee camp near the Thai-Burma border. PHOTO: WALT RATTERMAN

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“THE MOST REWARDING THING ABOUT THIS JOB IS TO BE ABLE TO USE MY EDUCATION TO HELP PEOPLE AND TO IMPROVE THEIR LIVES”

Tavaranan was one semester into for storage in the battery shed. School be simple enough for the villagers them- a Ph.D. program at Lowell when she administrators ﬁ re up a backup diesel selves to maintain. learned from a friend that BGET was generator only when the solar panels “The villagers see that this is the most looking for a project director. For her, it aren’t producing enough energy—and appropriate form of energy for them, was a no-brainer; the mission of BGET, thankfully, that’s rare, because the fuel both because of the location and the sit- based in Tak, Thailand, ﬁ t perfectly with is expensive and the genera- uation,” she says. They’re not her training and her sensibilities. She tor, noisy and smelly. AGE: 29 the only ones who could ben- applied, was offered the job, and soon This coming year, BGET WHAT SHE efit from using more renew- DOES: Installs found herself working in the jungles and plans to install a solar- able sources, she adds. “Big renewable energy mountains of northwestern Thailand. powered water pump at Mae sources in “off - cities might consider inte- Back at Mae La, Tavaranan and her La that will be used for agri- the-grid” com- grating these methods with team hike up a steep hill, scrambling culture. In addition to its munities and more traditional sources of over fallen trees and across streams, work in the refugee camps, trains locals to energy , to reduce their depen- maintain them. before arriving at a one-room school the team assists Thailand’s FOR WHOM: dence on fossil fuels.” surrounded by lofty cliff s. Inside, stu- ethnic minorities, who live Border Green As Tavaranan and her dents work at a dozen desktop and lap- in communities that are Energy Team team prepare to leave the top computers. They’re enrolled in a similarly impoverished, as WHERE SHE refugee camp, sunlight DOES IT: In program that teaches them graphic well as backpack medics bounces off a solar panel mountain villages design and programming skills that embarking on humanitar- and refugee outside one of the houses. might prove marketable once they ian missions inside Burma. camps near the The homeowner paid for receive immigration visas and can leave It trains the medics to Thai-Burma and installed the panel the camp. The computers and classroom install the solar panels and border himself, Tavaranan points FUN FACTORS: lights, as well as some power tools, can microhydro turbines, and Brings electricity out. “That’s a good thing,” run all day and night now—this, due the medics can then train and opportunity she says. “The more peo- to a row of Japanese-made amorphous- Burmese villagers to operate to people who ple learn to harness natural silicon solar panels sitting outside and the equip ment themselves. have very little. energy , the better their lives a shed full of lead-acid batteries. Tavaranan eventually become.” —Dean Adams BGET engineers designed the solar envisions linking up villages setup so that the panels’ output is chan- throughout the region into a series of TO PROBE FURTHER For a video on neled to a controller that then feeds interconnected minigrids, all powered the Border Green Energy Team and a the appropriate amount of juice to the by solar panels and microhydro gener- description of one of its microhydropower computers, lights, and tools. Any left- ators. She explains that all the technol- projects, go to http://www.spectrum.ieee. over energy is converted from ac to dc ogy BGET installs has been designed to org/feb08/rangergreen.

Mark Schubin world. Video cameras and microphones in the opera house are capturing the singers’ every move and note, and satellites are beaming those signals, in high defi nition NIGHTS AT and 5.1-channel digital surround sound, to more than 600 motion-picture theaters in 11 countries on four continents. THE OPERA Pulling together the Met’s second season of high-defi nition cinemacasts is as n stage, the dashing tenor toring a huge bank of monitors and audio/ much a technical triumph as an artistic Roberto Alagna pours out video equipment, checking that the voices one, and for the last year and a half, the his love for the dark-eyed and instruments are all within range, that project has been consuming Schubin’s soprano Anna Netrebko, the audio and video feeds are open, and life. He jokes that his job is “to make sure O and she responds in kind. As that everything technological about the nothing goes wrong,” but it’s a lot more the star-crossed lovers in the Metropolitan otherwise gloriously overwrought per- complicated, and interesting, than that. Opera’s Roméo et Juliette, the pair sing with formance is calm, quiet, and normal. After more than 34 years of engineer- a fi ery passion that would melt a stone. Most performances at the Met are done ing TV and radio broadcasts at the Met, But a few hundred meters away, sit- for the benefi t of the few thousand ticket Schubin is the opera’s tech guru on a ting in a truck parked outside the Met’s holders who fi ll the gilded auditorium. But whole host of issues. Much like televising a loading dock, television engineer Mark today’s show is being seen live by nearly professional football game or an Olympics Schubin isn’t moved. He’s intently moni- a hundred thousand people all over the event, engineering the Met’s broadcasts

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MARK SCHUBIN, an IEEE member, engineers televised broadcasts for the Metropolitan Opera. PHOTO: OFER WOLBERGER 2008

were no TiVos or VCRs. Schubin’s boss, Paul Klein, saw that by marrying computer and video technology, you could JOBS watch any show whenever you chose. As the only engineer on the three- man staff , Schubin got the task of learning everything about video and com-

DREAM puters that he could. In 1971, he helped launch the company’s suc-

AGE: 57 cessful pay-per-view movie WHAT HE service for hotels. The fol- DOES: Engineers lowing year, he founded his televised broad- own company, Electronic casts of the per- Solutions, and in 1973 he forming arts. FOR WHOM: was hired to help Lincoln The Metropolitan Center engineer its fi rst tele- Opera and other vised series, which eventu- organizations ally became known as “Live WHERE HE DOES IT: New From Lincoln Center.” York City and The first production they raises countless technical issues, and lenses fed through fi ber optics. stages and fi lmed was Tales of Hoff mann, Schubin weighs in on all of them—how When he’s not engineering theaters all over the opera by Jacques to upload audio and video feeds to seven a shoot at the Met or else- the world Offenbach, starring Joan FUN FACTORS: telecommunications satellites and ensure where in Lincoln Center, the Tromsø, Norway, Sutherland in all the female they arrive in good shape at the other end; performing arts complex on 400 meters north leads. For the fi rst time, peo- what to do if cloud cover disrupts a sat- Manhattan’s West Side in New of the Arctic ple watching the close-ups ellite’s signal or if power anywhere along York City, he’s on the road con- Circle, recently of the Australian diva’s face held an opera the transmission path is lost; how to shoot sulting at other theaters. Or he festival in his could see her emotive ability. in light levels that often dip below 10 lux; might be providing expert tes- honor. “People kept saying, ‘I knew how to frame shots that are as pleasing timony on a broadcast-related she was a great singer, but I on a 20-meter-wide cinema screen as on lawsuit or writing his monthly technol- had no idea she was also such a wonderful a tiny TV set. The list goes on. ogy column for Videography magazine. At actress,’ ” Schubin recalls. He still counts A big concern this past summer was this point, Schubin knows more about the that show as one of the high points in his how to handle the translated subtitles inter section of opera and broadcast tech- career, because it drove home the power that go out with the cinemacasts. During nology than anybody else in the world. of television to enhance the performing the initial season, they did it by “brute But when he started his career, he arts and reach audiences in new ways. force,” Schubin says, sending separate knew nothing about either. Even before The Met’s cinemacasts are further audio and video channels for the German- earning a B.S. in chemical engineering proof of that power. Sixty kilometers from and English-subtitled feeds. This season, from Stevens Institute of Technology , in Lincoln Center, at a suburban multi plex they’re embedding bitmapped subtitles Hoboken, N.J., in 1971, he’d decided that in northern New Jersey, the live broad- for five different languages within the a traditional engineering job wasn’t for cast of Roméo et Juliette is showing on transport stream itself, so that the sub- him. He took a fl eeting turn as publisher three screens and is nearly sold out. The titles travel along with the audio and of a high-spirited but short-lived news- audience seems enraptured. Between video signals. paper called the Hoboken Herald. After scenes, the cameras go backstage and Schubin has defi ned some of the tech- the paper folded, he spent a few happy show singers warming up and changing nical standards that now govern such months out of work before landing a costumes; other cameras take the audi- broadcasts, and he’s overseen the tran- job at a small company called Computer ence down into the orchestra pit. sition through several generations of Television, which aimed to change the Harold Nakayama, a retired Air TV equipment, from 1970s-era man- way people watched TV. Force technician and longtime opera fan, ually operated tube cameras running It may be hard to recall, but there was relished the privileged view. “We got to over multicore cable to today’s remote- a time when catching your favorite TV see things that even the audience at the controlled, high-definition charge- show meant parking yourself in front of Met didn’t get to see,” he says. “That was coupled-device cameras with 101x zoom the tube on a set night at a set time. There really special.” —J.K.

PULLING TOGETHER THE MET’S CINEMACASTS IS AS MUCH A TECHNICAL TRIUMPH AS AN ARTISTIC ONE, AND FOR THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF, THE PROJECT HAS BEEN CONSUMING MARK SCHUBIN’S LIFE

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______

Gadgets Gab at GHz Cheap silicon transceivers broadcasting in this still-unlicensed band may usher in the hi-def wireless home 60 By Behzad Razavi

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WWW.SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2008 • IEEE SPECTRUM • INT 41

IEEE 802.15 IEEE 802.11g ULTRAWIDEBAND 1–2 Mb/s 54 Mb/s 480 Mb/s

MAY THE POWER BE WITH YOU: A useful measuring stick for wireless transmission may be found in Star Wars: Episode IV (1977), the ﬁ rst in the Star Wars series. The six frames shown above are taken at equal time intervals from the movie’s beginning to its end and are marked to show the portion that could be downloaded in the space of 2 minutes. Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15), at 2 megabits per second, would get a few seconds of the movie; the IEEE 802.11g standard would make it to the middle of the introductory narrative; and ultrawideband would get about a tenth of the way into the movie. Meanwhile, IEEE 802.15.3—the proposed standard for 60 GHz—would make it all the way to the ﬁ nal credit [far right]. PHOTOS: LUCASFILM/20TH CENTURY FOX/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

eople not only talk on the airwaves, they increas- ingly expect their gadgets to do the same. The trend began in the late 1990s with Bluetooth, P which provided 1 megabit of data per second. Then Wi-Fi and the IEEE 802.11 standard pushed the rate to 100 Mb/s. Now ultrawideband systems are going ﬁ ve times as fast as that.

In principle, such radio links, operating over anyway, RF makes more sense, and the best prospects short ranges, could replace the cables that now to be found there reside in 7 GHz of unlicensed spec- clutter our homes and offices, eliminate the speed trum near 60 GHz. Those frequencies are 10 times as penalty of going wireless, and even allow portable high as anything in common use today, and with the devices to off-load computing work to a nearby base bandwidth they provide they can carry a lot more data. station. The devices could thus shed hardware to Until now, engineers designing products for the con- become smaller, lighter, and cheaper. sumer market have shied away from 60 GHz because But it won’t happen until engineers lay their hands of various technical diffi culties, but bandwidth hun- on more bandwidth. The various 2.4- and 5.8- gigahertz ger is fi nally awakening their interest. systems now in common use are rapidly running out of Developments in chip design have also played a spectrum, and the infl exible 100-microwatt constraint part. Today’s 60-GHz technology depends on rela- on ultrawideband power will likely limit it to about tively expensive and power-hungry gallium-arsenide 1 gigabit per second. Where do we go next? semiconductors, but various researchers—including engineers at IBM, the University of California, learly, we must look upward, but just how Berkeley, and those in my group at University of far up isn’t so obvious. One tempting thought California, Los Angeles—have shown that silicon Cis to use really high frequencies—infrared light. chips can do the job with much less power and at a Although that tactic works fi ne if all you want to do fraction of the cost. The silicon option is what makes is switch TV channels with your remote or operate a 60-GHz communications attractive. wireless mouse, it turns out that it’s hard to modulate The allure is so strong that a special task force is the output of infrared light-emitting diodes fast enough now working on an extension of the IEEE 802.15.3

for more demanding applications. So for the moment standard for wireless personal area networks in CAMPBELL HARRY PAGE: ON PREVIOUS ILLUSTRATION

42 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008

IEEE 802.15.3 2–4 Gb/s

the 57- to 64-GHz band, and in 2006 a number of companies—including Matsushita, NEC, and Sony— came together to define a specification for trans- mitting high-definition video in this slice of the radio spectrum. Their group, called Wireless HD, of Sunnyvale, Calif., wants to link TV sets to disc players, video cameras, game consoles, laptops, and other devices at rates as high as 5 Gb/s—fast enough to transmit an HD feature movie in about a minute [see “May the Power Be With You”]. There are other advantages besides extra bandwidth and faster data rates. Because the wavelengths are so short, the antenna needn’t be much bigger than the head of a pin, small enough to go on the transceiver chip. Indeed, it is feasible to integrate many antennas and transceivers into a single chip so that together they can, with proper phasing, form a beam to steer DESIGN TRICKS transmissions in a particular direction [see illus- allow transceivers to accom mo- tration, “Adaptive Antennas”]. Such phased-array date bulky antennas can also be used to boost reception. These components— operations can be conducted automatically so that the for instance, by sender and the receiver can fi nd each other without nesting square human intervention, constituting an adaptive-array and octagonal induction coils one (or “smart”) antenna system. inside the other. The integration of the antenna avoids the need for PHOTO: BEHZAD RAZAVI/UCLA wires to carry signals to and from the chip, reducing the cost of packaging by one to two orders of distance from the transmitter. On top of that, the size magnitude. Further, the absence of exposed inputs of the antenna scales with the wavelength, so its eff ec- and outputs makes the transceiver less vulnera- tive area—and so the power it can capture—varies in ble to electrostatic discharge during fabrication direct proportion to the square of the wavelength and assembly. Manufacturers could thus dispense (and therefore in inverse proportion to the square of with antistatic devices, which add capacitance and the frequency). Hence a signal broadcast at 60 GHz degrade performance. will convey to the typical receiving antenna just 1 percent as much power as it would have done had it been hese benefits do not come for free, however. broadcast at 6 GHz. Making matters worse, 60-GHz Communication at 60 GHz involves signifi cant rays are blocked by solid objects. Tchallenges at the system, circuit, and device levels— Some possible solutions are to transmit at very challenges that account for why this bandwidth has high power and to use adaptive-array antennas lain fallow for so long. Designers can, however, get to send signals to their target by indirect routes, around these obstacles by taking advantage of the capa- through refl ection and refraction. It’s better, though, bilities available at one level to relax the requirements to rely on lots of transceivers. If enough were strewn imposed at another. through an offi ce—and even worn by the people who The diffi culties begin with the propagation of the work there—any two devices would always be able to 60-GHz wave itself. As with any electromagnetic sig- talk to each other directly or through a third node. nal, the number of watts passing through each square For this strategy to work, a transceiver must meter diminishes in proportion to the square of the be made cheap enough, small enough, and fru-

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Delayed Constructive addition phases

(a)

Delayed Emitters phases

Constructive (b) addition

ADAPTIVE ANTENNAS can form absorbed by air. In a conventional with delayed phases that make up (a) or down (b) electronically. a beam and direct it to a target, antenna [left], the received the waves’ peaks and troughs Advances in 60-GHz transceiver greatly reducing the attenuation power declines with the square of add constructively [insert]. This design now make it possible to ﬁ t of power, a serious problem in the the distance. Adaptive antennas trick focuses the power into a an adaptive array on a single chip. 60-GHz band, which is strongly [right] use an array of emitters beam, which can then be steered ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN

gal enough to run a long time on a small bat- semiconductor industry is littered with examples of tery. These requirements are complicated by the products that were first built with bipolar technol- 10-fold speedup in operating frequency. (Transistors ogies but were soon replaced with CMOS counter- have gotten faster, but not that much faster.) A major parts, suggesting that 60-GHz CMOS chips will in design overhaul will thus be needed. What’s more, the end win out. the connections between transistors have resistance, capacitance, and inductance, which tend to sap perfor- esigners clearly face high technical hurdles mance at these frequencies. And the high-speed, high- in fashioning CMOS circuits that can handle resolution, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog D various RF-signal manipulations at 60 GHz. converters needed to process gigabit-per-second data Many of these operations depend on heterodyning, in rates are real energy hogs. which the circuitry mixes two signals at diff erent fre- The seriousness of these issues depends on just quencies to produce an output that contains compo- which integrated-circuit technology is used. Bipolar nents at both the sum and the diff erence frequencies. transistors made of silicon- germanium offer high A standard AM transmitter would, for example, mul- speeds, and this technology makes it possible to fab- tiply the relatively low-frequency audio signal to be ricate high- quality passive devices, such as induc- broadcast (say, a 1-kilohertz tone) with the output of tors, right on the chip, simplifying design and boost- an oscillator running at a much higher radio frequency ing performance. IBM has reported making 60-GHz (say, 1000 kHz). The sum and diff erence of these two silicon -germanium transceivers that can shoot data at frequencies (999 kHz and 1001 kHz) fall just slightly 1 Gb/s for as far as 8 meters. But with multiple trans- above and below that of the RF oscillator. That’s why ceivers, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog con- the original audio signal is said to be “up-converted” verters, and ever more complex signal processing, the to RF. The receiver for such an AM broadcast would cost of silicon-germanium becomes prohibitive. typically use a similar oscillator to “down-convert” the CMOS chips are much less expensive, but the RF signal back to audio, using exactly the same hetero- lower speed of the transistors and poorer quality dyning principle. of the passive devices make designing the circuits For high-speed data communications at 60 GHz, exceedingly tough. Nonetheless, the history of the such operations can be a nightmare to implement.

44 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008

For one thing, the oscillator would have to produce A bigger concern is how to fabricate transmitter two 60-GHz outputs that are exactly 90 degrees out circuits that can deliver a lot of oomph to the antenna. of phase. This is because the fi nal modulated signal For communication across a range of 10 meters at data is produced by combining a sine and cosine. The gen- rates of several gigabits per second, some tens of milli- eration and routing of these two phases, while main- watts are necessary. Performed by a power amplifi er, taining a 90-degree diff erence between them, is hard the task requires large transistors, which are typi- at 60 GHz. cally slow. The good news is that the upcoming gen- Also, controlling the precise frequency of a eration of CMOS chips, which boast 45-nanometer 60-GHz oscillator is tricky because it’s running too gate lengths, may be up to the job of producing this fast to measure directly, as crystal-controlled fre- much power at 60 GHz. quency standards are limited to about 100 mega- But that’s not the whole story, because not all the hertz. The 60-GHz signal must first be fed into a power that goes into an on-chip antenna gets broad- frequency-divider circuit that reduces the frequency cast. The silicon substrate—just 10 micrometers by a large factor (say, 600). Only then can the output below—absorbs (and hence wastes) some energy , so be compared with a frequency standard, which indi- such antennas radiate only a fourth to a half of the cates whether the rate of oscillation is faster or slower power supplied to them. than desired, so that it can be corrected accordingly. Perhaps more research will lead to more energy - The tactic is simple enough, but the limits on transis- effi cient antennas. Meanwhile, engineers can resort tor speed make it diffi cult to fashion such frequency- to off -chip antennas that operate at these tiny wave- divider circuits that work at 60 GHz. lengths. Another, cheaper, solution is to incorporate Fortunately, with a little cunning, you can make a enough transmitters and on-chip antennas to com- receiver work using a 40-GHz oscillator instead. The pensate for the power lost to the silicon substrate. fi rst step is to mix the output of the 40-GHz oscillator The future will tell whether we need to resort to this with the 60-GHz received signal. That operation rather ineffi cient solution. down-converts the signal to the diff erence frequency: 20 GHz. To down-convert the signal the rest of the t will take time for designers to master all this new way, the receiver circuitry need not incorporate a sep- technology, because the models that we use to simulate arate 20-GHz oscillator; it can simply use the output I circuits can’t easily handle 60 GHz. Today’s transis- of a divide-by-two frequency divider attached to its tor models are constructed as though all their capaci- 40-GHz oscillator. Because it operates on 40 GHz tance and resistance came from small capacitors and rather than 60 GHz, such a frequency divider is resistors connected here and there. In reality, of course, comparatively easy to implement. What’s more, it is the capacitance and resistance in these transistors are less vexing to route signals around a chip at 40 GHz distributed over appreciable dimensions. So lumping than at 60 GHz. And happily enough for designers, things in this way fails to capture some important eff ects the transmission path can follow the receiver opera- that manifest themselves most obviously at these high tions in the reverse order to avoid 60-GHz oscillators frequencies. Also, the electric and magnetic interactions and frequency dividers. That is, the data stream to be between the passive devices and the silicon substrate are transmitted is fi rst up-converted to 20 GHz and only diffi cult to calculate from basic physical principles. For then raised to 60 GHz. these reasons, modeling must rely on both the theoreti- Using 40 GHz for the oscillator frequency is just one cal understanding of the behavior of the devices and on way to dodge some of the thorny problems posed by a large number of experimental measurements (which 60 GHz. The IBM transceiver takes a slightly diff erent in turn can help refi ne the models). tack: it incorporates a 17-GHz oscillator followed by a The industry’s vision is that we can solve these frequency tripler to obtain 51 GHz, which is roughly problems and that all the electronic devices in our 8.5 GHz below the target frequency. The 51 GHz homes and offi ces will be chattering furiously and thus can serve to down-convert the received signal wirelessly in another fi ve to 10 years. Cables will go to 8.5 GHz. And a divide-by-two frequency divider the way of the buggy whip. Now if the engineers at attached to the 17-GHz oscillator generates the 8.5 GHz MIT can fi nally perfect their idea of using magneti- needed for the second stage of down-conversion. cally coupled resonators to charge batteries through Although such designs avoid the need for a 60-GHz the air, we’ll eliminate those pesky power cords, too. oscillator, they still require low-noise amplifi ers and Only then will we enter the real wireless age. ❏ down-converters. These circuits typically use passive devices like inductors or transmission lines on the TO PROBE FURTHER The IBM 60-GHz silicon- chip to overcome the speed limitations of the transis- germanium transceiver is described in the Digest of tors. Alas, such passive components have large foot- Technical Papers for the 2006 IEEE International Solid- prints, which normally forces them to be placed awk- State Circuits Conference (ISCC). wardly far apart, their long interconnections creating Two CMOS transceivers for the 60-GHz band are lots of parasitic resistance, capacitance, and induc- described in the Digest of Technical Papers for the tance. To alleviate this problem, designers can nest 2007 ISCC. the inductor loops used to build these passive com- Detailed information concerning the IEEE 802.15.3 ponents so that the connections between them can be standard for the 60-GHz band is available at http://www. kept short [see illustration, “Design Tricks”]. ieee802.org/15/pub/TG3c.html.

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ACROSS THE OUTBACK With Australia’s desert as its raceway, the World Solar Challenge illuminates

RAY RUNNER: Blessed with a crystal-clear sky, the Nuna 4 solar car soaks up energy as it drives. PHOTO: HANS-PETER VAN VELTHOVEN

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ON PHOTONS ALONE some of the best electric-vehicle technology By Sandra Upson

legion of 38 solar cars gathers in State Square in Darwin, on the northern coast of Australia. The fl at, rectangular bodies hug the ground like three-wheeled UFOs, their etherealness accentuated by their motors’ eerie, barely perceptible Ahum. Anxious racers neurotically swab their perfectly clean solar cells with feather dusters. Helmeted drivers peer out through polycarbonate bubbles, waiting for their cue to lock down and dash across the continent. The vehicles are odd-looking and yet stately, not at all the giant cockroaches they have been mockingly described as in the past. Better to be a UFO, some are saying, than a cockroach. The solar racers—a mix of university students and hobbyist-engineers—have converged in this remote tropical city for the ninth World Solar Challenge, the biennial transcontinental race that tests some of the world’s most innovative ideas in energy - effi cient transportation on some of the planet’s most punishing terrain. On this humid October morning, ultra- competitive teams are polishing vehicles that easily cost more than US $2 million each, while others tin- ker with their homegrown labors of love. At this Panasonic-sponsored event, the foremost eco-race on the planet, there’s tech intrigue and plenty of peculiarity. One team famously delivers its vehicle to each race in suitcases, and another team consists entirely of Japanese hairdressers. The University of Michigan contingent is here, as always, but this year it includes 100 support people, weather balloons, and an unpiloted aerial vehicle. Michigan and another group, Solar Team Twente, from the Netherlands, have each outfi tted their vehicle with a system of mirrors that tracks the sun to concentrate light on some of the solar cells. Even in this race, no one’s ever put a solar concentrator on a car before, and its presence on these two has earned the teams cachet in the unoffi cial jostling for technical one-upmanship. Gossip swirls around Umicore Solar Team, from Group T, an engineering university in Leuven, Belgium, whose Umicar Infi nity supposedly uses the most expensive—and powerful— triple-junction gallium-arsenide solar cells this side of low Earth orbit. Solar racers have been eyeing the Belgian vehicle even more warily since yesterday afternoon, when Umicar grabbed pole position in the qualifying heat at a nearby racetrack. But it is the legacy of the Nuon Solar Team, from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, that dominates the prerace chatter. Its Nuna cars have

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STOP AND GO: won the last three races, going back to 2001. On the sultation, a dozen Dutch students in the team’s blaz- Nuna 4 breaks other hand, no member of this year’s crew, other than ing orange shirts strip off the tape that holds the top down on the its ex-astronaut advisor, Wubbo Ockels, has ever built shell, with the solar array, to the car’s carbon-fi ber starting line and the team a car before. And this past week hasn’t been kind to body. Solar cars navigate around them, drift up to the members Nuna 4’s harried engineers, who have battled a tem- starting line, and disappear into Darwin. Six Nunans inspect their peramental motor controller and short-circuiting solar heave the top over van der Meer’s head. motor controller; cells. It didn’t help when Ockels announced that no It’s that pesky motor controller, which regulates the later, the solar motor’s rotational speed and direction. Its Hall-eff ect car maneuvers previous Nuna had faced so many prerace problems. through traffi c in Standing there as spectators mill around the sensors are producing a bizarre reading—the lights for Darwin, on the parked solar cars, Ivo Hagemans, of the Nuna team, both “drive” and “reverse” are lit on the console. In a fi rst stretch of notes: “Everyone says, you’ve already won three brushless dc electric motor, which is what most high- Stuart Highway. times, you have nothing to worry about. Well, no, no, end solar cars use, these highly specialized sensors PHOTOS: HANS-PETER VAN VELTHOVEN I haven’t. Other people have. I have not.” He surveys track the position of the motor’s permanent magnet the car moodily, his hands shoved in his pockets. rotor. The team has seen this glitch before, but only in hot weather. It’s cool this morning, so what the heck? he rules are simple. Race across 3000 kilo- Someone runs to a support vehicle to fetch a spare— meters of the outback, driving from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and less efficient—controller. “Anyone have a small Tuntil you get to Adelaide, on the southern coast. Your screwdriver?” yells Vincent de Geus, the race strategist, car’s only power source is a 6-square-meter solar array, over the spirited bleats of a local brass band. which under bright sun puts out less than 2 kilowatts. If Out comes the troubled controller and in goes the your idea of an effi cient vehicle is a Toyota Prius, you’ve replacement. Some crew members reattach the top shell got to wrap your mind around an entirely diff erent level of and swiftly tape over the edges, while the rest of the energy parsimony. Solar racers like to say that their cars crew, visibly shaken, scurry to their chase vehicles. run on as much energy as a hair dryer. By the time the With 27 solar cars now in front of it, Nuna 4 plunges winning car gets to Adelaide, it will have covered those into the race—straight into the chaos on leafy Mitchell 3000 km using roughly the same energy that an ordi- Street and out to the first few kilometers of Stuart nary car gets by burning 7 liters of gasoline. The best cars Highway, which it will ride all the way to Adelaide. travel about 90 km/h, though they are capable of going Here the highway’s shoulder is a site of solar carnage, faster. “It’s performance racing,” says Michael Garland, as a dozen teams facing early emergencies have pulled a British university student freelancing as a member of to the side of the road and ripped off the tops of their Melbourne’s Aurora Vehicle Association team, another vehicles to poke and prod at misfiring components. perennial contender. “It may be quirky and weird, but The worst off is Michigan’s solar car, whose driver had it’s top-notch engineering.” braked late in the bumper-to-bumper traffi c and hit a A race official looks at his wristwatch—8:00— team vehicle, crumpling the car’s nose and damaging and waves Umicar Infinity off the starting line. It the steering system. Two rows of solar cells have been glides down the street and out of sight. Then comes destroyed, and the driver is in tears. Aurora 101, the local favorite, accompanied by exuber- The rest of the pack navigates through heavy ant hoots from the crowd. And then Nuna 4, the weight traffi c down the busiest stretch of Stuart Highway. of its celebrated predecessors pressing down on it. Nuna 4 weaves easily between vehicles, overtaking Inside the Nuna, a panicked Oliver van der Meer solar racers and chase cars alike. Within 3 hours it’s gestures furiously at his tiny dashboard. He taps the in second place, ahead of Aurora 101 but behind the pedal, but the car doesn’t budge. After a quick con- leading Umicar Infi nity.

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WORLD SOLAR CHALLENGE RACE

Length of race: 3000 kilometers Start: Darwin, Australia Finish: Adelaide, Australia Number of entrants: 38 First race: 1987 Course hazards: dust storms, strong winds, intense heat Power source: 6 square meters of solar cells Power output: 1 to 2 kilowatts Gasoline equivalent: 7 liters over the course of the race Driving time: 9 hours a day Average weight By midday, the highway thins to one lane, and signs The load on the battery is related to the drag on the car, of car: about of civilization dwindle to the odd roadhouse amid and that drag increases with the square of the speed. 200 kilograms spotty clumps of spinifex grass. On either side, spindly Put another way, driving too fast for the conditions Average speed of winning car: 91 km/h eucalyptus trees poke out of the hard red earth. Every can do a team great harm. The strategists spend their Speed limit: 20 minutes or so, a road train pulling three trailers time calculating, at 2-minute intervals, the optimal Northern Territory, bombs past, blasting the cars with strong side winds. speed, taking into account variables such as how 130 km/h; Southern Australia, 110 km/h One of those trucks’ blasts dislodges the latch on much driving they anticipate for the rest of the day MAP: BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN Nuna 4’s canopy. The bubble top fl ies open, and van der and the near-term weather forecast. Meer barely manages to grab it and pull it down. With Luckily for the Nuna team, the race rules and the one hand on the wheel and the other holding the can- staggered start let them recoup the time they squan- opy down, he can’t reach the regenerative brake any- dered replacing the motor controller. As other cars more (which is a hand-operated toggle, unlike the foot pull off the road to mark the end of the fi rst racing pedal for the mechanical brake). The next 200 km day, Nuna’s scouts speed ahead to find a suitable become a battle between not braking, so as to not waste campsite—one with unobstructed western exposure energy , and not cracking up. A cold sliver of air cuts at that will let them use the remaining sunlight to top his neck while he drives. off the battery for tomorrow’s start. So it is that the Nuna team makes its entrance into Soon the convoy turns into a little clearing sur- the outback. Around its convoy, dirty tendrils of smoke rounded by brittle grasses. The sun starts to set, rise from patches of iron-tinged earth singed by recent and desert flies emerge in swarms. As day one fi res. Where earlier local residents had lined the road to ends, the Nunans are behind the Belgian Umicar cheer them on, now only statuesque termite mounds— Infinity team, which has set up a bare-bones camp- man-size piles of orange dirt—stand like mute sentries. site 13 km ahead, butted up against tall grass a few The crippled racer rattles down the highway, its hollow meters off the shoulder. A few kilometers behind body amplifying the reverberations to a deafening clat- Nuna, Aurora 101 is doing the same. Flies clinging ter. As another Nuna driver later describes it, “It was to their faces and shirts, the racers pitch their tents like riding inside a giant guitar.” on the red gravel, tilt their solar arrays to catch a last few photons, and set up lights to examine their eanwhile, around midday, the Nuna cars before bedtime. team’s strategists realize they’ve got a problem. M In their “mission control” vehicle, the three of ay 2 dawns, at 5:30 a.m., with the Dutch ex- them are monitoring the state of the racer’s lithium- astronaut sitting alone in the middle of Nuna’s polymer battery through the voltage and current read- D dark campsite, strumming a few bars of “House ings sent over a wireless link from the solar car’s motor of the Rising Sun” on his guitar. Sleepy, orange-clad fi g- controller. They’ve tailored their strategy software to ures emerge from the colony of canvas tents. They prop calculate speeds for a day that lasts from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., up the top half of the car’s body, with the solar array, but with the half-hour delay in the start and the cor- as the fi rst rays of the sun peek over the horizon. They responding shift in light conditions, their algorithm is roll up their sleeping bags, make Nutella sandwiches, off . De Geus, the chief strategist, manually calculates and dust the insides of the car. “This is the day of truth,” the speeds, scribbling on a pad of paper as the sun’s says Ockels. “With an empty road and much less over- intensity wanes. taking, we’ll see which team really is the best.” Short of crashing, the biggest disaster that can One car from the convoy departs an hour early to befall a solar team is draining the battery prematurely. collect weather data and report on road conditions—

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ALL FOR ONE: a euphemism for kangaroo roadkill. As 8 a.m. left so much that the left tire bursts. The unthink- Members of the approaches, the day’s first driver, Joep Steenbeek, able almost happens: Nuna nearly empties its bat- Delft University steps into the solar car and tightens his helmet strap. tery while racing the setting sun to Alice Springs. racing team hold up their solar With less than 10 minutes left, the crew attaches the It is forced to stop just 12 km north of the city. But panel to capture top, fastens cables, and tapes over the edges to smooth when it gets there, the following morning, it is 1 hour the few rays of them against air resistance. The race offi cial calls time, 22 minutes ahead of the Belgian car. light creeping and the team waits for a looming road train to pass. over the horizon. he teams PHOTO: HANS-PETER The solar car slides onto the road, the motor singing its trickle into this odd oasis, corralled VAN VELTHOVEN weird whine over the road train’s fading rumble. by race offi cials who had decided that the half- The morning drive is smooth and sunny. Umicar Tday lag between cars was bad for press coverage. Infi nity coasts into the next of the race’s mandatory Wearing a fl oppy hat and wraparound sunglasses, vet- control stops, at Tennant Creek, 7 minutes before eran solar racer Alain Chuzel examines a few vehicles Nuna 4. (The control stops give reporters a chance to in the blinding sun. Chuzel, from Phoenix, has a com- catch up with the solar cars and the teams an oppor- pany, SunCat Solar, that encapsulates solar arrays for tunity to check vehicles for wear and tear.) racers. Encapsulation protects the arrays from airborne But all is not well in Infi nityland. An aluminum pebbles and debris, which can crack cells. Because a bolt holding the steering system in place has snapped, string of cells performs only as well as the weakest in causing the rack-and-pinion gears to wear down and the sequence, protecting an array from damage is of making steering nearly impossible. With no other utmost importance. option, the Belgians pull aside to repair their steer- Usually, solar cells have minor defects, Chuzel ing system and replace the bolt with a simple clamp, explains. Depending on what’s needed, “one man’s junk and Nuna 4 slips past them. “Yeah…aluminum was is another man’s gold.” Once cells are selected, they are maybe not the best choice of material for that bolt,” arranged in strings and coated in special materials to says Niels Burez, who oversaw Umicar’s mechanics, make them sturdy enough to bend over a car body and with a gloomy smile. “If it wasn’t for these problems, withstand fl ying pebbles. we’d be passing Nuna, I’m sure.” Hans Gochermann, who has a solar-technology But then the weather takes a turn for the worse, company in Germany, adds another step to each encap- as the vehicles speed into a storm brewing over Alice sulation. The fanciest solar cells—mostly rejects from Springs—the midpoint of the race, and of Australia. the International Space Station, he says—are no more Nuna’s suspension, strained by a persistent cross- than 31 percent effi cient, and there’s an art to squeez- wind, finally gives in. The team stops to replace a ing as much energy as possible out of those brittle collapsed shock absorber, surrendering 15 precious semiconductor slices. He encapsulated the top three minutes. Then 80 km/h winds cause the car to yaw teams’ arrays by texturing the cell surface with matte

50 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008

LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: Umicar Inﬁ nity [top] had top-of-the-line gallium-arsenide solar cells. The University of Michigan’s Continuum [middle] sported a solar concentrator and a host of cooling fans to protect the car’s interior. In spite of its much cheaper silicon array, Aurora 101 [bottom] came in third. PHOTOS, FROM TOP: UMICORE SOLAR TEAM; UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SOLAR CAR TEAM; AURORA VEHICLE ASSOCIATION

5-micrometer-wide pyramids. When light hits the sur- 1990s, later designed the Honda Insight, the first face, some of it is refl ected. But instead of allowing light mass-produced hybrid car. General Motors’ solar car, to bounce away, the pyramids defl ect some of the rays also from that era, morphed into the company’s fi rst back onto other pyramids, giving the photons a sec- electric eff ort, the EV 1. True, it was pulled from the ond chance to be soaked up and increasing the array’s market peremptorily, prompting conspiracy theories power by 4 percent. The technique is particularly eff ec- and a major motion picture. And mass-market suc- tive with the oblique rays of morning and evening. cess has also so far eluded New Generation Motors, Cell encapsulation is but one of several cutting-edge an American company licensing Australian tech- microindustries that have emerged to cater to solar rac- nology , whose astoundingly effi cient wheel motors— ing. Looking for the most effi cient motor controllers on at best 95 percent—are used by most solar racers. the planet? You’ll fi nd them here, most of them made by “These are literally the engineers of the future, as Tritium, of Woolloongabba, Australia. Tritium’s motor in, they’re ahead of their time,” says Steven Camilleri controller—a lightweight three-phase 20-kW inverter of In Motion Technologies, another race alumnus with supposedly unprecedented power density—came now trying to sell uniquely efficient, lightweight from the company employees’ own solar car experi- motors born during his solar racing days. “The world ence, at the University of Queensland. The controller isn’t ready for us,” Camilleri concludes. [See “Motor has a cruising effi ciency of 98.3 percent, so very few of Maniac,” in this issue, for a profi le of Camilleri.] the car’s scanty supply of watts get wasted. Tritium is hoping that, having locked up the solar car market, arly the next morning, the cars are released it can now branch out into electric vehicles and grid- back onto the road. Some thin clouds scuttle connected photovoltaics. E across the sky, and an east-blowing crosswind This wouldn’t be the first solar-car spin-off to continues to badger the teams. become something bigger. The builders of Honda’s “You have to look carefully at a cloudy sky,” says solar cars, which dominated the races in the early Hagemans, the Nunans’ logistics guru. Teams may

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a few scraps of wood they scavenge from the blank landscape. A half-dozen skeletal trees stand out in silhouette against the purple sky, improbable sign- posts of a greener time. The students string colored lights around the campsite and blast dance music into the deaf, endless desert.

outhbound road train, this is Nuna solar car team, can you hear us?” a voice crackles over CB Sradio channel 40. “We’re from the Netherlands. What’s your speed?” “Oh, hi, solar car! Are you the front-runners?” comes the brittle reply. “Yes, and we’d like to pass you after the next hill.” “Oh, right, no worries.” It’s Thursday afternoon. The landscape is quickly turning hilly. In the Nuna chase car, strategist de Geus can’t believe how the battery is holding up. “I’d set the speed at 90 and check,” he later recalls. “The battery FINISH LINE: adjust their speed to go faster through the cloudy seemed fi ne, so I increased it to 95. It was still fi ne, so we The Dutch parts and slow down in sunny patches, to give the went up to 100, then 105—wow! So we just kept going.” support battery pack more time to charge. It’s as auspicious a start as they could have hoped for. crew greeted their racer in Dust storms periodically shatter the monotony of A few hours later, Stuart Highway cuts through Adelaide with a the drive. Sticks dance in the middle of the road, and Port Augusta, population 14 000, at the head of champagne toast seconds later a shroud of dust slams Nuna 4, throw- Spencer Gulf. The wispy car darts into gaps in over- to the vehicle. ing it off its course. A harrowing second later, the taking lanes and tears past dense lines of traffi c. At Immediately after, the driver regains control. 4:15 p.m., Nuna is speeding along at exactly the speed teammates and The heat, the dust, and the battering force solar car limit, 110 km/h, pushing through rolling farmland their supporters designers to balance robustness and weight against toward Adelaide. The race is now against time: Umicar jumped into low drag and rolling resistance. This year, the race’s is nowhere in sight, but 5 p.m. is alarmingly near. a fountain to organizers required the cars to be a shade more prac- They make it. At 4:55 p.m. Nuna 4 slides across the celebrate. PHOTO: HANS-PETER tical. As a result, the vehicles now have smaller arrays, fi nish line fi rst. It averaged 91 km/h over the whole VAN VELTHOVEN normal upright seats, and ordinary steering wheels. race, slower than the previous three Nunas but still A German entrant, Bochum University of Applied remarkable considering the new vehicle restrictions Science’s SolarWorld No. 1, with three wheels and a these team members had to contend with. As the racer platypus front end, almost looks like something you’d comes to a stop, the students tumble out of the sup- take to pick up a few groceries. But its commodious port vehicles. They look around, whoop, and hug each form makes it seem bloated next to the sleek, anorexic other awkwardly. Then they start cheering for real as top performers, and during the race it dawdles the truth hits home: they’ve won. They’ve saved their behind the lead cars, averaging 73 km/h. By contrast, legacy. With champagne erupting from bottles, they the team proudly reports that Nuna 4 was the most drench their solar array, but no one cares. aerodynamic vehicle ever tested at the wind tunnels Neither this car, nor anything like it, will blend run by DNW, a German-Dutch aerodynamics-testing into everyday life anytime soon. But these young facility. The Aurora 101 car also excelled aerodynami- engineers have pulled off a wonderful and improb- cally, with a record of its own at Monash University’s able feat. They’ve built something outlandish and wind tunnel, near Melbourne. complex with little more than their own hands, some The Nuna convoy fl ies through Coober Pedy, an opal- fairly simple tools, and some institutional blessings. mining town with a spectacularly lunar landscape. The “The concept of a commercial solar car is completely wind never lets up, and that afternoon they pop the left ridiculous,” refl ects Sidd Bikkannavar, a race offi cial. tire four times. Each change takes less than 3 minutes “But seeing them gives some people hope that a diff er- for the well-practiced team, but it is clear the suspension ent future might exist, that there might be an alterna- is in peril. That night, they rebuild the left suspension, tive way of doing things.” On this parched landscape, change tires, and vacuum everything in sight. in a place where mammals have pouches and eucalyp- It is to be the Nuna crew’s last night under the out- tus trees are known to explode, perhaps the idea of a back’s starry skies. The next day they push—hard— diff erent future is not so crazy after all. ❏ to reach the outskirts of Adelaide by the 5 p.m. official cutoff . The Belgians are about 40 minutes behind TO PROBE FURTHER Watch video footage of the race them. It is a solid lead, but not an unbreakable one, and at http://spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/auswsc. The two books Infi nity is technically a faster car. Just one small break- considered the bibles of solar racing are Speed of Light: down, or one miscalculation, could blow the race. The 1996 World Solar Challenge by David M. Roche et al. The sunset fi lls the enormous sky with radiant col- (1997) and The Winning Solar Car: A Design Guide for ors. The air is chilly, and the team builds a fi re with Solar Race Car Teams by Douglas R. Carroll (2003).

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ieee spectrum classiﬁ eds The Department of Electronic Engineering at Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (UTFSM, Valparaiso, Chile): invites applications for full-time faculty positions in any of the following areas: Multimedia systems, Network security, Network management, and Integration of Information and Communications Technology services. For further information, please visit www.elo.utfsm.cl/positions .

York University, Toronto: The Department of Computer Science and Engineering invites applications in Biomedical Engineering with specialization in medical devices and instrumentation at the Assistant or Associate Professor level in the tenure track stream. Details are available at http://yorku.ca/acadjobs. York University is an Affi rmative Action Employer.

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By SANDRA UPSON

words of Gary Schmitz, a spokesman the materials and encapsulating Greenhouse gases (grams per kilowatt-hour How Free Is for the National Renewable Energy the modules. Vasilis Fthenakis, a Laboratory, in Golden, Colo. scientist at Brookhaven National of CO2 equivalent) Solar Energy? A key variable is how solar cells Laboratory, estimated the environ- 900 Renewable-energy technologies perform once installed. The energy mental footprint of solar systems, promise to liberate us from fossil available to them could be close to using assumptions about the trans- fuels. But this implies that their energy 7 kilowatt-hours per square meter portation distances for materials and 850 payback periods—the time it takes for per day in Phoenix or 2 kWh/m2/d the amounts of energy needed to a system to recover the energy used in Moscow [map]. For the most produce the cells, the modules, and to produce it—is just as important common type of module, which uses their electrical and electronic subsys- as fi nancial payback. If you install multicrystalline silicon, the energy tems [chart, bottom left]. solar cells on your roof, you want the payback times can be between one Of course, the attractiveness of system to pay for itself eventually, but and four years [chart, bottom right]. renewable technologies depends you also want to help your country Thin-fi lm solar cells, which not only on their energy paybacks. get a grip on global warming and stop eventually will be much cheaper But too often, energy technologies depending on foreign fossil supplies. than multicrystalline-silicon cells, are discussed solely in terms of their “Most people who take the initia- have shorter energy payback periods. direct cost to end users without tive to put photovoltaics on their Cadmium-telluride cells recover their taking into account surrounding homes and businesses are looking at energy inputs in 10 to 22 months. factors, Fthenakis says. “Taken the economics, certainly, but they’re Most of the energy spent on together, they defi ne the total cost looking beyond that, too,” in the solar modules goes into purifying of a renewable energy.” ❏

5 3 1 8

Winning Back 400 The Watts

The eff ectiveness of solar 6 modules is highly dependent 2 on the amount of sunlight 10 Average daily solar radiation 4 that they can soak up, which in kilowatt-hours per square meter per day 1.0–1.9 2.0–2.9 3.0–3.9 SOURCE: NATIONAL RENEWABLE varies by region. 4.0–4.9 5.0–5.9 6.0–6.9 ENERGY LABORATORY (NREL)

When Solar Cells Break Even A multicrystalline-silicon photovoltaic system needs to operate for Global Warming more than a year to recover the energy invested in its manufacture. The values for 10 cities [map, above; chart, below] apply to modules Potential Of tilted at an optimal angle to the sun. Energy Options 1. Phoenix SOURCES: VASILIS FTHENAKIS AND There’s no free lunch, but HYUNG CHUL KIM, BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY; WILLIAM several alternatives to fossil 2. Johannesburg BECKMAN, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON fuels come close. 3. Madrid

SOURCES: EXTERNE PROJECT, 2003; KIM 4. Adelaide, Australia AND DALE, 2005; FTHENAKIS AND KIM, 2006; FTHENAKIS AND KIM, 2007; FTHENAKIS AND ALSEMA, 2006 5. New York City 6. São Paolo, Brazil Photovoltaics 7. Freiburg, Germany 45 8. Tokyo 37 24 9. Moscow 18 11 10. Santiago, Chile

Coal Oil Gas Biomass Nuclear Wind Multi- Cadmium 0 1 234 combined- crystalline telluride (U.S.) cycle silicon (thin ﬁlm) Energypayback time, years BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN CHRISTIE BRYAN

56 INT • IEEE SPECTRUM • FEBRUARY 2008

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