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Google’s Project Ara to Have Its Own Component Store
Much like the Google Play Store, which also sells Android devices besides millions of apps, the Project Ara component store will offer people plenty of options when building a modular smartphone.
Since Google did not launch separate websites for its Android devices, you might wonder what could determine the company to create a dedicated component store for Project Ara. The Play Store already offers a great experience when it comes to buying Nexus smartphones and tablets, but it doesn’t include a review system. On top of that, the Project Ara component store will feature recommendations on how to mix and match various smartphone modules in order to get the best performance for specific tasks.
Team leader Paul Eremenko explained in an interview at a Purdue University event that the Project Ara component store will resemble the Google Play Store, not just in the design, but also in the overall shopping experience.”By following the Android model, we are creating a free and open platform… The Ara MDK (Module Developers Kit) is free and open and available to everybody, so everybody could create a module per the specifications of the developer’s kit and put it in the Ara module marketplace, which is analogous to the Google Play store, and sell directly to consumers.”
The idea of basing the component store on an already successful recipe is not bad at all. If it’s not broken, why not use it again? There are still a few questions to be answered by Google, such as the approximate number of modules will be available in the component store at the time of the launch. Also, the world has yet to find out who Google’s partners are in terms of smartphone module manufacturing. Is it the usual suspects all over again? Surely Samsung, LG, Motorola, Asus and HTC have plenty of experience in making Nexus devices, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some new players besides them.
In the interview, which is available above in its entirety, Eremenko didn’t say anything about the current status of Project Ara, so we don’t know when the modular smartphone will become a reality. Considering that Google has only organized one of the three Ara Developers’ Conferences announced for this year, we might be in for a surprise this holiday season.
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Researchers build optical transistor out of silicon, provide path to all-optical computing
The speed of light is the universal speed limit, so naturally, optical technologies appeal when trying to construct speedy computational devices. Fiber optics let us shoot data to and fro at top speed, but for the time being our CPUs still make their calculations using electronic transistors. Good news is, researchers from Purdue University have built an optical transistor out of silicon that can propagate logic signals -- meaning it can serve as an optical switch and push enough photons to drive two other transistors. It's constructed of a microring resonator situated next to one optical line that transmits the signal, and a second that heats the microring to change its resonant frequency. The microring then resonates at a specific frequency to interact with the light in the signal line in such a way that its output is drastically reduced and essentially shut off. Presto, an optical transistor is born. Before dreams of superfast photonic computers start dancing in your head, however, just know they won't be showing up anytime soon -- the power consumption of such transistors is far beyond their electronic counterparts due to the energy inefficient lasers that power them.
Researchers build optical transistor out of silicon, provide path to all-optical computing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 03:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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