Tech Talk

Three years from now, television transmission in the United States and many other developed countries will switch from analog to digital. This will create a massive overhaul at the retail level as consumers scramble to upgrade to sets able to take advantage of the new service. In this month's feature "Goodbye, CRT", author Paul O'Donovan looks at the technologies competing to win your dollars in the race to replace the aging warhorse that is the cathode ray tube TV.

O'Donovan is a principal research analyst for Gartner Dataquest, in Egham, U.K., who covers semiconductors and consumer electronics. He begins by looking at the two early frontrunners in the race: plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) televisions. Plasma TVs are what consumers want these days, but they are expensive, making LCD sets the more popular of the two now. O'Donovan notes that a 42-inch-diagonal plasma set with a tuner sells for about US $2000 today, while a 37-inch LCD set goes for about $1200. This year, nearly 8 million plasma TVs will be manufactured worldwide, contrasted to 42 million LCD units.

Each technology, though, has its shortcomings in the long run to TV technology dominance, O'Donovan explains. Because of their gas-based imaging technology, plasma sets have limited longevity, they're power hungry, and they're heavy, for starters. Plus, they suffer from issues such as burn-in and, of all things, problems at high altitude. LCD displays, unfortunately, use a technology that intrinsically produces images with a relatively poor contrast ratio, the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black on screen. Moreover, their fluorescent tubes age over time. After about five years of normal home use, the tubes start to dim and their colors begin to drift.

This is the point where a third horse enters the race. O'Donovan points to the emergence of the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) over the next few years. He writes:

In an SED, every single pixel of the display is, effectively, a cathode-ray tube. The cathode is a thin film of palladium oxide, chosen because it is electrically conductive and also extremely durable, resisting oxidation and corrosion even at high temperatures. As in a CRT, electrons emitted from the cathode hit phosphors—tiny dots of metals or rare-earth compounds that glow red, green, or blue when energized.... The result is a flat-panel display that uses less energy than a plasma screen does and yet has image quality close to that of the CRT, still the benchmark of all displays. Power consumption is low, relative to that of plasma, for the same reason as it is for the CRT: it takes a lot less energy to create an electron beam than it does to excite photons in a gas.

Manufacturers such as Toshiba and Canon have begun trial production of SED TVs in the 40- to 50-inch range. When the first units ship in about a year, they are expected to cost about 50 percent more at retail than comparable plasma sets. O'Donovan says that it is too early to tell if SEDs will suffer from problems similar to the long-term reliability or performance issues of plasmas and LCDs.

So which TV technology will take the prize in the aftermath of the 2009 switchover? O'Donovan foresees two types of winners in two different categories. At the smaller end, for sets with displays less than 50 inches, LCDs and SEDs should dominate, with plasma technology gradually dying off, killed by economics rather than technical faults. At the bigger end, for sets larger than 50 inches, the ultimate champ, in his analysis, will be a dark horse, a new generation of projection TVs. Yes, that's right, a technology from the past that it is even now being digitally re-engineered to provide the big screen experience of your dream home entertainment system of the future. To find out how this dramatic turnaround is shifting the television landscape, you'll have to read his article.

>Three years from now, television transmission in the United States and many other developed countries will switch from analog to digital. This will create a massive overhaul at the retail level as consumers scramble to upgrade to sets able to take advantage of the new service. In this month's feature "Goodbye, CRT", author Paul O'Donovan looks at the technologies competing to win your dollars in the race to replace the aging warhorse that is the cathode ray tube TV.

O'Donovan is a principal research analyst for Gartner Dataquest, in Egham, U.K., who covers semiconductors and consumer electronics. He begins by looking at the two early frontrunners in the race: plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) televisions. Plasma TVs are what consumers want these days, but they are expensive, making LCD sets the more popular of the two now. O'Donovan notes that a 42-inch-diagonal plasma set with a tuner sells for about US $2000 today, while a 37-inch LCD set goes for about $1200. This year, nearly 8 million plasma TVs will be manufactured worldwide, contrasted to 42 million LCD units.

Each technology, though, has its shortcomings in the long run to TV technology dominance, O'Donovan explains. Because of their gas-based imaging technology, plasma sets have limited longevity, they're power hungry, and they're heavy, for starters. Plus, they suffer from issues such as burn-in and, of all things, problems at high altitude. LCD displays, unfortunately, use a technology that intrinsically produces images with a relatively poor contrast ratio, the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black on screen. Moreover, their fluorescent tubes age over time. After about five years of normal home use, the tubes start to dim and their colors begin to drift.

This is the point where a third horse enters the race. O'Donovan points to the emergence of the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) over the next few years. He writes:

In an SED, every single pixel of the display is, effectively, a cathode-ray tube. The cathode is a thin film of palladium oxide, chosen because it is electrically conductive and also extremely durable, resisting oxidation and corrosion even at high temperatures. As in a CRT, electrons emitted from the cathode hit phosphors—tiny dots of metals or rare-earth compounds that glow red, green, or blue when energized.... The result is a flat-panel display that uses less energy than a plasma screen does and yet has image quality close to that of the CRT, still the benchmark of all displays. Power consumption is low, relative to that of plasma, for the same reason as it is for the CRT: it takes a lot less energy to create an electron beam than it does to excite photons in a gas.

Manufacturers such as Toshiba and Canon have begun trial production of SED TVs in the 40- to 50-inch range. When the first units ship in about a year, they are expected to cost about 50 percent more at retail than comparable plasma sets. O'Donovan says that it is too early to tell if SEDs will suffer from problems similar to the long-term reliability or performance issues of plasmas and LCDs.

So which TV technology will take the prize in the aftermath of the 2009 switchover? O'Donovan foresees two types of winners in two different categories. At the smaller end, for sets with displays less than 50 inches, LCDs and SEDs should dominate, with plasma technology gradually dying off, killed by economics rather than technical faults. At the bigger end, for sets larger than 50 inches, the ultimate champ, in his analysis, will be a dark horse, a new generation of projection TVs. Yes, that's right, a technology from the past that it is even now being digitally re-engineered to provide the big screen experience of your dream home entertainment system of the future. To find out how this dramatic turnaround is shifting the television landscape, you'll have to read his article.

Technology patents are big business. So much so that some firms these days exist only to leverage their patents. Yesterday, the most famous of these, Virginia-based NTP Inc., filed suit against PDA-maker Palm Inc. for infringing on its wireless patents. To keep you briefed on the realm of high-technology patents, we've inaugurated a new annual ranking of the leaders in intellectual innovation. In this month's feature "Patent Power", Senior Editor Harry Goldstein guides us through the results of IEEE Spectrum's first patent portfolio survey. And you'll be surprised to find out who came out on top.

We hired research firm 1790 Analytics, of Mount Laurel, N.J., whose specialty is analyzing patent citations, to review the portfolios of over 1000 enterprises and weigh their significance. Their data, broken into technology industry sectors, is listed in our Patent Portfolio Survey table. In determining the overall strength of an organization's portfolio, 1790 Analytics' methodology went beyond just counting patents granted in the past year to examine how frequently a company's patents are cited by other patents and what they have in the pipeline. The analysts used their findings to create a bottom-line Pipeline Power score to determine the leaders.

The Pipeline Power determination was based on the following criteria:

• Pipeline Growth: shows the trend in an organization's patent activity by dividing the number of patents obtained in 2005 by the annual average for the years 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Impact: shows how frequently patents issued in 2005 cite a company's patents issued from 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Generality: measures the variety of technologies that build upon an organization's patents.

• Pipeline Originality: measures the variety of technologies upon which an organization's patents build.

So, without further ado, here are the all-sector Top Ten finishers in our first ranking of patent portfolios:

1. Micron Technology Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1569; Pipeline Power: 3396.

2. IBM Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 2972; Pipeline Power: 3084.

3. Hewlett-Packard Co. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1810; Pipeline Power: 2756.

4. Intel Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1553; Pipeline Power: 2364.

5. Broadcom Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 419; Pipeline Power: 1856.

6. Applied Materials Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 371; Pipeline Power: 1832.

7. Microsoft Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 780; Pipeline Power: 1699.

8. Delphi Technologies Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 413; Pipeline Power: 1603.

9. ASM International NV. 2005 U.S. Patents: 109; Pipeline Power: 1492.

10. Hitachi Ltd. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1941; Pipeline Power: 1369.

We said you'd be surprised to see which enterprise finished first.

As nationwide voting began yesterday in the United States, the early reports in the media mostly concerned problems with electronic voting machines—with glitches affecting early balloting from Florida to New Mexico. Yet by the time most of the votes had been tallied, the consensus seemed to be that e-voting had not caused much of a bother with national and local elections.

"Overall, it looks like all the predictions of disaster turned out wrong," Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a nonpartisan organization of state election officials, told the Associated Press.

Others cautioned that the extent of e-voting misbehavior may not be known until the results of the various elections and ballot initiatives could be examined and thoroughly studied. "I don't think we're in the clear," Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technology, said yesterday. "Even 24 months from now, many of these states and counties will continue struggling with these issues."

Some notable electronic glitches did cause a stir. For example:

• In Denver, hundreds of voters waited long past the 7 p.m. deadline at polling centers straining to overcome problems with new voting machines.

• In Texas, officials recounted ballots after a computer showed a long-shot Constitution Party candidate ahead by a big margin in a race for Congress.

• In Cook County, Ill., cartridges with the tabulated vote totals had to be taken to the county clerk's office in Chicago, because officials could not digitally transmit them.

So the specter of corrupted techno-balloting on a large scale seems, for the time being at least, to have passed into the night as Election Day concluded—and democracy effectively prevailed against yet another challenge.

Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry reports on her experience at a California election precinct on how new electronic voting machines are personally affecting average Americans seeking to exercise the franchise—and it's not a pretty picture.

Tekla S. Perry

You'd think if e-voting would work anywhere, that place would be in the heart of Silicon Valley. Not this year. I voted "touchscreen" Tuesday night, and it was anything but easy. I got in line at my polling place near downtown Palo Alto at 7 p.m. Okay, I probably should have voted earlier, but I've never seen more than three or four people in line no matter what time I'd voted; so I didn't worry too much about squeezing a trip to the polls into an already busy day. Big mistake.

About 40 people stood in a line that circled a large conference room and straggled out the door and down the sidewalk; the line was growing quickly. Explanations and rumors spread down the line.

"There were seven machines, all are down except two."

"If you ask for paper ballots, you can move up."

"They're out of paper ballots."

"No, they're out of English language ballots. If you want to vote in Chinese or Tagalog, you can use a paper ballot."

"Anybody know what's yes and no in Tagalog?"

"Forget it, now they're out of ballot envelopes."

At 7:25, the poll supervisor came out and said that, at this point, the wait would be at least an hour and that anyone still in line at 8 p.m. was legally entitled to vote. However, he continued, we might consider getting in line somewhere else, because he expected the last two electronic voting machines to fail at any minute and wasn't sure at that point what he could do.

The two senior citizens waiting patiently in front of me left. I offered to hold their places while they sat down somewhere, but they declined. "We just don't have the stamina," one said.

More paper ballots and envelopes arrived. People broke from the line and started filling them out. Some stuffed their ballots directly into the ballot box without getting back in line to sign in. The poll supervisor warned that such votes wouldn't be counted; given there didn't seem to be markings on the ballot envelopes indicating whether or not the voter had signed in, those of us in line weren't sure what he meant. What will happen when the number of ballots in the box is higher than the number of official voters? At this point, those with paper ballots didn't seem to be moving any faster in the chaos, so I decided to fill out a paper ballot but hope a touchscreen machine would free up.

In the center of the table, an old stylus, previously used in punch-card voting, still anchored one of the how-to-vote displays. Those of us in line talked wistfully of the short lines back in the days of punch-card voting and reasoned that, in hindsight, hanging chads weren't so bad after all. The poll supervisor watched the two remaining voting machines nervously. He said that around 5 p.m. the printers on the seven original machines had run out of paper. Since the devices are locked, the paper can't be changed. He had two back-up printers he had been able to swap in, hence the two functioning machines. But after those printers ran out of paper, there was nothing left to do. The line continued to grow.

Shortly before 8:00 p.m., the line longer than ever, an election worker arrived with a carload of printers. He installed two; the others were needed elsewhere. Now, four of the seven machines functioned.

At 8:00 p.m., the election supervisor asked the dozens of people standing in the relatively orderly line to crowd into the room. He locked the door. There were only five or six people ahead of me.

At 8:20 p.m., I voted touchscreen.

>Was Virginia Senator James Allen being disingenuous in his concession speech yesterday? The New York Times reported that Allen, the losing candidate in one of the tightest of the tight Senate races this week, chose not to ask for a recount, because "the owners of government have spoken and I respect their decision." But the U.K.'s Guardian, and many others, report Allen as also saying, "I do not wish to cause more litigation that would not alter the results." There's the disingenuous part: Allen doesn't say why we should be confident the results wouldn't change.

For that we have to go to the technologists. As Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin notes on his blog, 93 percent of Virginia's votes were made on electronic voting machines that have no paper ballots or paper backups—simply put, there's nothing to recount. "A meaningful recount in Virginia is not possible," Rubin writes.

The Virginia machines can, after the fact, print out paper ballots that simulate the votes that are electronically recorded, but, Rubin says, "Of course they are going to match what was on the machine.... The so-called recounts ... are really just print and count, not RE-count. It is a waste of time." What's needed is a paper ballot, or a paper backup, that the voter looks at, approves, and then is stored at the time of the voting.

Rubin also calls attention to a House race that sorely needs real paper-based voting. In Florida's 13th district, the Republican candidate is ahead by fewer than 400 votes out of more than 200 000—in other words, a miniscule one-fifth of one percent margin. The experts are puzzled by the votes in one county within the district: 18 000 of the 138 000 voters in Sarasota County failed to vote for either candidate. That's a 13 percent undervote, as it's called, more than twice that of one neighboring county, and more than five times larger than another, according to an article in today's New York Times (free registration required). A number of voters apparently asked to re-enter their votes before they were recorded correctly; many more voters may have failed to notice a problem.

The Times cites a calculation made by the Sarasota Herald Tribune that showed that if the undervotes were simply unrecorded, and not uncast, the Democratic candidate might have been the winner. "If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368."

It wouldn't come as any great surprise. According to TPM Café's poll tracking, the Democratic candidate led in all five of the head-to-head polls taken in the race, going back to 19 September.

Sadly, there's just nothing to recount.

p>A leading American think tank today released a technical report on the impact of increasing renewable energy use in the United States over the next two decades. The study's conclusion is that, by the year 2025, renewable energy supplies could account for nearly a quarter of conventional energy consumption in the U.S. It also stated that as renewable energy supplants fossil fuels the prices of petroleum and natural gas should decline and that the decreasing use of these non-renewable forms of energy should provide increasing relief to the problem of carbon dioxide emissions, which adversely impact the global environment.

In a prepared statement, Rand's researchers said that meeting a goal known as the 25x'25 initiative, in which 25 percent of the energy used for electricity and motor vehicle fuel in the U.S. is supplied by renewable energy sources by the year 2025, would not increase total national energy spending if renewable energy production costs decline by at least 20 percent in the next 20 years, which is consistent with recent historical trends, as estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The Rand group used computer modeling, based on EIA standards, to assess 1500 scenarios in which supplies and prices of the various fuel sources rose and fell under a variety of technological and economic pressures, starting from the current standpoint in which renewable energy accounts for about 6 percent of domestic energy consumption.

"When talking about the impact of increasing use of renewable energy sources in our energy future, it's important to be clear about the assumptions being made about future energy prices and technological developments, not just for renewables but also for competing fossil energy sources," commented Michael Toman, director of the Rand Environment, Energy, and Economic Development program, which conducted the study for the Energy Future Coalition.

The Rand researchers said they assumed that implementation of increased renewable energy use would be carried out at a national level in the least costly manner, versus a more piecemeal approach. U.S. President George W. Bush has called for such a national approach to the nation's energy policy, and the incoming Democratic Party majority in the Congress is expected to support such long-range economic planning.

"We hope [this report] will help policy planners rethink the context," Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition, a bipartisan foundation, told the Wall Street Journal.

The Rand study, entitled "Impacts on U.S. Energy Expenditures of Increasing Renewable Energy Use", also points to the beneficial environmental results that such a sustained transition to cleaner fuels could provide. Increased use of resources such as wind, solar, and biomass power should result in significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, amounting to 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2025 (or 15 percent of projected U.S. emissions), according to the study.

It is an impressive roadmap to the future, from one of America's most highly respected technology research organizations. We applaud its direction.

The folks over at the TOP500 supercomputers ranking project officially released the latest edition of their findings today at the SC06 high-performance computing conference in sunny Tampa, Fla. The release of the new TOP500 list, which comes out twice a year, has become a highly anticipated event—if you happen to be part of the high-performance computing community, that is. The biggest news this time is a major shakeup in the top 10 machines, which shows "how the field remains both constant and constantly changing," the TOP500 organizers said. Here are some highlights.

The No. 1 system, the mighty IBM Blue Gene/L at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif., retained the top spot. With a performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second), it should remain there for a while. (Just consider that the No. 2 machine is only half as powerful.) The IBM monster has been the No. 1 system since early last year (see "IBM Reclaims Supercomputer Lead"), when it took the top spot from Japan's famed Earth Simulator, which had reigned supreme for two and a half years and now has slid down to the No. 14 position. The Blue Gene system relies on custom building blocks, with two PowerPC processors, memory, communications functions, and extra circuitry to speed up floating-point operations. IBM's competitors, meanwhile, are making good progress using conventional AMD and Intel processors and industry-standard networking systems like gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet, and InfiniBand. So will Blue Gene stay at the top? Time will tell. Or as Jack Dongarra, one of the Top500 organizers, told Spectrum last year, the number of teraflops of a machine is just "a trophy" and that "we all know that that trophy won't last forever."

The No. 2 machine, Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm, seems to prove that upgrades can sometimes pay off handsomely. The upgrade was from single- to dual-core processors. The machine ranked at the No. 9 spot six months ago, at 36.19 teraflops, using 10 880 2.0-GHz AMD Opteron processors. Now, with 26 544 2.4-GHz dual-core Opteron processors, its performance skyrocketed to 101.4 teraflops, the second machine ever to break the 100 teraflop barrier. The feat also shows that veteran supercomputer maker Cray is in the game with some serious computing offerings. The Red Storm was an important machine for Cray, because the company based its next-generation systems—the Cray XT3 and XT4—on that machine's architecture. That means using mostly off-the-shelf parts like commodity processors, in combination with some custom systems like its SeaStar networking chips and high-speed 3-D interconnect systems. With that architecture, Cray has recently embarked on a new strategy, which it calls "adaptive supercomputing"—the combination of different processing architectures (scalar, vector, multithreaded, hardware accelerators) into a single system. Cray's mantra is adapt the system to the application, not the application to the system. "We're following the vision we laid out a year ago and it's becoming real, so we're pretty excited about it," Steve Scott, Cray's CTO told me this week during a briefing.

The interesting thing about the No. 5 machine, MareNostrum at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center in Spain, is not just that it resides inside what was once a church in Barcelona. (Okay, that is interesting too.) But perhaps more important is that this machine is a cluster of blades, a server technology that has been responsible for what some experts call a "quiet revolution in the server room" (see "Blades Have The Edge"). This massive computer cluster uses 2560 IBM blade servers in 44 racks, which take up about a 120 square meters inside the old church (call it a "mass" of blades). At 62.63 teraflops, MareNostrum is now the largest system in Europe.

In the No. 9 position comes the fast and furious Tsubame supercomputer of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Another upgrade here. But this machine got some fancy additions: ClearSpeed number-crunching acceleration boards. Developed by English chip-design firm ClearSpeed Technology, in Bristol, these computer boards have two massively parallel floating-point coprocessors designed to accelerate math-intensive applications. The board fits the PCI-X slot available in many PCs, servers, and workstations, and it sustains 50 billion floating-point operations per second (50 gigaflops) while dissipating only 25 watts. The idea is that you would put one or more boards in a server and then hook up many servers to get a cheaper supercomputer. A while ago when I asked a prominent supercomputing expert about this idea, he was skeptical: "I have heard this story before. The proof is in the performance." Now, ClearSpeed is showing the numbers. The company brags that its boards boosted Tsubame's performance to 47 teraflops from the non-accelerated performance of 38 teraflops, a 24 percent boost with only a 1 percent increase in energy consumption. The supercomputer, assembled by NEC using Sun Microsystems servers equipped with AMD Opteron processors, is now the fastest in Japan. About the machine, ClearSpeed's CEO Tom Beese told me this past June: "Given the challenge I have of putting a PC at home, I was amazed that they could bring up such a powerful system so fast."