Tired of trying to tap icons on small smartwatch screens? Some day you could just swipe right through the air above them thanks to miniaturized radar technology and its accompanying gesture recognition technology in development at imec, the Belgium-based R&D center.
Imec's radar chips operate at around 145 GHz, well above the bands used for car radar. That high up in the electromagnetic spectrum, the chip can take advantage of a full 10 gigahertz of bandwidth, which leads to millimeter-scale resolution, its inventors say.
"Gestures allow a lot of capabilities where screens are becoming too small for fine movements," says Kathleen Philips, program director for IoT at imec. "Radar is great for measuring movement; this particular radar is great for measuring micromovements."
If they combine this technology with a wand that must be swept in precise patterns, they will be richer than God.
Related Stories
Imec Develops Efficient Processor In Memory Technique for GloFo
Imec and GlobalFoundries have demonstrated a processor-in-memory chip that can achieve energy efficiency up to 2900 TOPS/W, approximately two orders of magnitude above today's commercial processor-in-memory chips. The chip uses an established idea, analog computing, implemented in SRAM in GlobalFoundries' 22nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process technology. Imec's analog in-memory compute (AiMC) will be available to GlobalFoundries customers as a feature that can be implemented on the company's 22FDX platform.
Since a neural network model may have tens or hundreds of millions of weights, sending data back and forth between the memory and the processor is inefficient. Analog computing uses a memory array to store the weights and also perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, so there is no memory-to-processor transfer needed. Each memristor element (perhaps a ReRAM cell) has its conductance programmed to an analog level which is proportional to the required weight.
[...] Imec has built a test chip, called analog inference accelerator (AnIA), based on GlobalFoundries' 22nm FD-SOI process. AnIA's 512k array of SRAM cells plus digital infrastructure including 1024 DACs and 512 ADCs takes up 4mm2. It can perform around half a million computations per operation cycle based on 6-bit (plus sign bit) input activations, ternary weights (-1, 0, +1) and 6-bit outputs.
[...] Imec showed accuracy results for object recognition inference on the CIFAR 10 dataset which dropped only one percentage point compared to a similarly quantised baseline. With a supply voltage of 0.8 V, AnIA's energy efficiency is between 1050 and 1500 TOPS/W at 23.5 TOPS. For 0.6 V supply voltage, AnIA achieved 5.8 TOPS at around 1800-2900 TOPS/W.
Promising application: edge computing facial recognition cameras for the surveillance state.
Also at Wccftech.
See also: Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing
Previously: IBM Reduces Neural Network Energy Consumption Using Analog Memory and Non-Von Neumann Architecture
Related: "3nm" Test Chip Taped Out by Imec and Cadence
GlobalFoundries Abandons "7nm LP" Node, TSMC and Samsung to Pick Up the Slack - "The manufacturer will continue to cooperate with IMEC, which works on a broader set of technologies that will be useful for GF's upcoming specialized fabrication processes..."
Radar for Your Wrist
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday May 20 2019, @09:29PM
8mm right for "stun"
9mm left for "kill"
Better be careful when firing this thing.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @09:36PM (1 child)
Have you no decency?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @10:32PM
You know that was only in Prudish America don't you? In the rest of the world the "Rory" is the award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Fuck in a Serious Screenplay.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday May 20 2019, @10:24PM
at least they learned something from the Wii, making it like a watch.
Remember to take it off, if you don't want to draw sine waves on a monitor..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 20 2019, @10:27PM (4 children)
Why would radar be better than lidar, especially at infra-red wave lengths? And IR should miniaturize more readily.
There might, however, be other use cases, where radar would be more appropriate.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @10:38PM (3 children)
Imagine how this thing will drain your battery since it will be running all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @11:04PM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday May 21 2019, @12:57AM
Amputees, degenerative diseases, quadraplegics ... there's a decent number of applications for fine motion tracking, which seem useless/cumbersome/tiring to the people with ten fingers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday May 21 2019, @01:27PM
Amputate both arms. Replace with robot arms. Embed smartwatch into robot arm with big battery.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday May 21 2019, @02:14PM
Without a holographic screen or projection, it still sucks. Give it a virtual 10-inch screen instead of 1.5 inch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:53AM
Oh great, more changes in web UI frameworks. Just when I get used to Bootstrap, Wristrap comes along.