Samsung may manufacture Qualcomm’s 10nm Snapdragon 830

Samsung LSI currently manufactures Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 on its second-gen 14nm LPP FinFET node, and it looks like the South Korean company has bagged a contract for next year’s 10nm Snapdragon 830 as well. That’s according to Korea’s ET News, which states that the SoC will be used in the Galaxy S8. Samsung will likely retain the same strategy it followed for the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, wherein U.S. models are powered by the Snapdragon 830, while the global version runs its upcoming Exynos 8895.

Like the Snapdragon 830, Samsung’s in-house Exynos 8895 will also be based on the 10nm manufacturing process. ET News also writes that Qualcomm and Samsung are working in developing a FoPLP (Fan-out Panel Level Package) technology that eliminates the need for a printed circuit board for the package substrate that will be used in the Snapdragon 830 and Exynos 8895.

We don’t know much about either SoC, but it looks like Samsung is looking to hit vastly higher frequencies by moving to 10nm. An Exynos 8895 leak from August suggests Samsung is hitting 4GHz on its custom Mongoose core, and reaching 2.7GHz on the Cortex A53 core. It’ll be interesting to see the kind of performance gains Qualcomm achieves with its Kryo CPU implementation.

ICYMI: The NYPL’s book train and better-bouncing ‘bots

Today on In Case You Missed It: The New York Public Library will unveil a brand new “book train” at its Bryant Park branch that will ferry research materials up 11 floors from a subterranean storage vault to a newly refurbished reading room. Also, MIT’s CSAIL lab has developed a 3d-printed, “tuneable” shock absorber that can protect anything from autonomous drones to cellular phones from violent impacts.

Finally, we bring you the mesmerizing aerial ballet that is the world indoor skydiving championships. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

IBM gives its Watson IoT headquarters a $200 million boost

IBM is betting big on internet of things and setting aside $200 million for its Watson IoT division’s headquarters in Munich. The company says this investment, one of the biggest it’s ever made in Europe, is a response to the growing demand for AI technologies and the capability to connect everything to the internet. Part of the money will go to setting up hands-on labs where its clients can work with a thousand researchers, engineers, developers and business experts in the city. In fact, the tech corp has already secured new partnerships with German automotive parts supplier Schaeffler, Netherlands-based dronemaker Aerialtronics and three facilities at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia.

Schaeffler will use the Watson-powered IoT platform to give the various products it manufactures for the wind turbine, train, auto and other industries a way to monitor their own conditions. The platform will also lend Aerialtronics’ drones the power to monitor traffic patterns and inspect towering structures, such as wind turbines, oil rigs and cell towers. Finally, the platform will allow patients at Thomas Jefferson to control the lights, windows and other objects in their rooms by issuing commands through a speaker.

Besides the $200 million investment, IBM has also announced that its Watson-powered blockchain service is now available for enterprise clients. Like the Bitcoin blockchain, Watson’s version will allow users to monitor the activities of connected devices. A Finnish company called Kinno, for instance, is using it to develop a way to track container status and location.

Since the tech titan plans to sink as much as $3 billion into its IoT business, this $200 million investment is but a small part of its overall plans. You can read more about the Watson IoT platform on its website if you’re interested, since you’ll likely hear about it often going forward.

Via: Venturebeat

Source: IBM (1), (2)

Mercedes grabs a spot on the Formula E grid from 2018

Mercedes is set to become the latest in a long line of traditional car makers entering the world of Formula E. The company confirmed today that it’s signed an agreement to reserve a spot on the grid of the electric racing championship from the 2018/19 season. With the all-electric series set to expand from 10 teams to 12 in season five, Mercedes can now decide whether it will take one of the two new available openings.

Formula E is gaining in popularity each year and manufacturers like Jaguar, BMW and Audi have decided to take stakes in the racing series. The E.Dams-Renault team clinched the first-ever team title, beating Dragon Racing, which recently teamed up with Faraday Future, to the top spot.

In 2018, the series will drop its current format of requiring racers to swap cars during the race, limiting it to just one. All 12 cars will also feature a new chassis, which has been redesigned to improve aerodynamics and house a more powerful battery.

Mercedes-Benz is, of course, competing in Formula One with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team. The auto giant believes it can use advancements in electric racing to further the development of its futuristic zero-emission road cars: “Electrification will play a major role in the future of the automotive industry – racing has always been a technology R&D platform for the motor industry,” says Toto Wolff, Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport. “This will make Formula E very relevant in the future.”

Source: Formula E

Pushing the limits of exoskeleton technology at the Cybathlon

Andre van Rüschen has no memory of the day he lost all feeling in his legs. After a car accident in Germany, he had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. When he woke up from a coma in a hospital in Hamburg, the doctors told him he would never walk again.

But now, thirteen years later, van Rüschen is back on his feet, and he is training to compete as a pilot in the Powered Exoskeleton race at the Cybathlon in Zurich this month.

In a high-rise office building on Leipziger Platz in Berlin, he slides out of his wheelchair onto a black leather pouf where a ReWalk exoskeleton sits folded. The black metal frame of the robotic machine, which has two powered legs and a control box that sits above the hip, mimics the lower half of the human body.

Van Rüschen positions himself between the legs of the exoskeleton. He straps on the sensor-laden motors at three points along his own legs: below the knees, above the knees and around his upper thighs. He then secures the control box on his lower back with velcro belts. With the machine clasped around the key joints needing support, he slowly slips his hands into a couple of black crutches and hits the “stand” button on the round remote strapped around his left wrist. A couple of beeps later, he leans his upper body forward as the machine makes a whirring sound as it pushes him into a standing position.

Moments later, when van Rüschen hits another button on his watch-like remote, his right foot moves forward, followed by the left. He uses his upper body strength to shift his weight between his feet as he walks out of the building onto the streets of Berlin.

Van Rüschen was one of the first European testers of the exoskeleton from ReWalk, a company that builds robotic systems to enable people with spinal cord injuries to stand, walk and even climb stairs again. He applied to receive a personal ReWalk machine three and a half years ago and has tested every iteration of the exoskeleton since then.

He uses the ReWalk every day in Oldenburg, Germany, where he lives with his wife and 13-year-old son who was born five months after his accident. “When I had my first system at home, my wife immediately burst into tears,” says van Rüschen. “Of course, my son had only ever seen me in a wheelchair…He looked up at me and the first thing he said was: “Daddy, you’re so tall!”

Before his accident, van Rüschen worked as a car painter in his family-run business, but now he works for ReWalk and is often invited to demonstrate the strengths of the company’s exoskeleton technology at corporate conventions and fairs.

The history of the company that van Rüschen now represents echoes his own experience. Founded in 2001, the ReWalk exoskeleton was invented by Dr. Amit Goffer, an Israeli scientist who became a quadriplegic after an ATV accident in the late ’90s. The machine that he devised not only allowed him to step away from a wheelchair but is now actively used by 264 people across the world. While a number of studies that gauge the overall health benefits of the technology are now slowly taking shape, the company has already set up operations in the U.S. and Germany in addition to Israel, where the exoskeleton is developed and manufactured.

The company’s sixth-generation exoskeleton, which is on the market and will be used for the Cybathlon race, has the battery life for about eight hours in an office setting, where a user might sit, stand or walk at various intervals, or it can be worn for up to four continuous hours of walking.

While the technology got van Rüschen out of his wheelchair, it does not work the same way for all spinal cord injuries. To qualify as a ReWalk user, each individual has to undergo medical screenings that determine the extent of the injuries. One of the main requirements to become a “ReWalker” is to have enough upper body functionality and control to be able to use the arms and shoulders to maneuver the crutches that accompany the exoskeleton.

Beyond the impact of the injury, factors like age, height and weight help ReWalk’s physical therapists determine the right fit for the exoskeleton. At present, the machine can assist a user who is between 5’3″ and 6’3″ in height and weighs a maximum of 220 pounds.

At about 6’3″, van Rüschen was a perfect match even for the very early, bulkier iterations of ReWalk. And now, years later, as one of their most experienced users, he is the clear choice for the exoskeleton race at the Cybathlon. The obstacle course that he will tackle will have pilots sit on and stand up from a couch, walk on stones immersed in water, go over and down a ramp, and walk on an inclined slope before climbing stairs at the end.

The course is designed to push the limitations of existing exoskeletons. While van Rüschen uses the exoskeleton on stairs and a variety of surfaces on a daily basis, tasks like walking on a slope and on slippery stones are expected to be challenging not just for him but for the exoskeleton as well. The algorithms required to keep the machine stable on varying surfaces are complicated and far from perfect. But, the technical team at ReWalk is working to optimize the existing software in their commercially available exoskeletons. In preparation for the race, they are testing and tweaking the settings to switch up the pace, the leg extensions and the time gaps between steps so that the exoskeleton can take on all the challenges of the Cybathlon.

Outside, on the streets of Berlin, van Rüschen slowly makes his way up and down the stairs at a S-Bahn stop. “I have to get used to different surfaces,” he says. “When I want to go a bit further, I try to walk over cobblestones or a gravel track. You have to constantly try to go one better. It’s the same with the Cybathlon as well because you have to walk on different surfaces and try to get as far as you can. It’s just all about going beyond your boundaries.”

This is the fourth episode in a five-part video series called Superhumans, which follows the Cybathlon from start to finish. Watch out for the finale on Tuesday, Oct. 18th, right here on Engadget.

New Apple Patent Describes Fingerprint Sensor That Could Work Through Display

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today granted Apple a patent that describes a Touch ID sensor which could effectively detect and read a user’s fingerprints through other components of the smartphone, “such as display stacks and touch screens” (via AppleInsider). While going unspecified, the technology aligns with the current rumors for the iPhone 8, which is expected to eliminate the Home Button for good and integrate various pieces of the smartphone directly into the display, including Touch ID.

Described in the new patent, there are many reasons Apple is looking to integrate Touch ID into the iPhone’s screen, “not the least of which is an interest in avoiding assigning valuable surface space exclusively to an component that may only be used briefly during the process of identifying the user.” But the company still had to face multiple issues when building the new technology, namely a “blurring of the electric field” that brought about a loss of resolution of the fingerprint images as they were being transferred through the space between the Touch ID sensor and the iPhone’s screen.

To combat the gap between where the user places their finger, and the technology reading the fingerprint data under the display, Apple’s patent proposes the use of electrostatic lenses, which are described as including “one or more patterned conductive layer(s).” In an example laid out by the patent, the position, relative voltage, and shapes of the patterned conductive layer or layers can be altered to shape the electric field specifically associated with the user’s fingerprint, and the information can be held “in the region between the contact surface of the capacitive fingerprint sensor and the array of capacitive sensing elements.”

Apple’s patent aims to reduce the spread of a fingerprint’s electric field using electrostatic lenses
The collected data would help improve the resolution of the user’s fingerprint, despite the distance between the Touch ID sensing module and the place on the iPhone display where they place their finger. In the patent, Apple notes that the specific setting and location for these electrostatic lenses depend on the “geometry of the consumer electronics device and the effects of any intervening components,” but touchscreens and display stacks are mentioned by name multiple times.

As is usual with patents, it is unclear whether the electrostatic lens technology will show up in any future Apple device at all, much less one set to debut in less than a year, but its descriptive ability to fuel one of the iPhone 8’s biggest rumors is interesting all the same. Apple appears to have been working on the patent for a few years now, since it was originally filed on September 9, 2014, with inventor credit going to Jean-Marie Bussat.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8 (2017)
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