Tuesday, 18 July 2006

HP Develops Mini Wireless Chip

HP has developed a miniature wireless data chip that could provide broad access to digital content in the physical world. The company said the tiny chip could be stuck on or embedded in almost any object and make available information and content now found mostly on electronic devices or the Internet.

About the size of a rice grain the experimental chip is memory device based on CMOS, with a built-in antenna. The chips could be embedded in a sheet of paper or stuck to any surface, and could eventually be available in a booklet as self-adhesive dots.

HP said some of the potential applications include storing medical records on a hospital patient’s wristband; providing audio-visual supplements to postcards and photos; helping fight counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry; adding security to identity cards and passports; and supplying additional information for printed documents.

"The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world," said Ed McDonnell, Memory Spot project manager, HP Labs.

The chip has a 10 megabits-per-second data transfer rate – 10 times faster than Bluetooth wireless technology and comparable to Wi-Fi speeds – effectively giving users instant retrieval of information in audio, video, photo or document form. With a storage capacity ranging from 256 kilobits to 4 megabits in working prototypes, it could store a very short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. Future versions could have larger capacities.

Information can be accessed by a read-write device that could be incorporated into a cell phone, PDA, camera, printer or other implement.