[H]ardNews - Blair Tech Ed

Robot Soccer:

The competition has become more intense, the passes and shots faster and more accurate, and the players — well, they no longer catch fire. Carnegie Mellon University will play host to the first American Open of robot soccer next week, a regional competition leading up to the international RoboCup 2003 in Padua, Italy, this summer. Robotics experts say technology has advanced greatly since the first RoboCup in 1997, when a handful of teams from the United States, Australia and Japan competed for the first time.

Hyper Transport Tech:

An industry study to be released next week estimates that the global port count for Hyper Transport switch fabric will exceed 30 million ports this year. International Date Corp. (IDC) said the forecast comes as other alternatives such as Infiniband are still struggling to produce the silicon they need to support the demand for a high-speed interconnects. By 2006, the IDC projects the number of ports will reach 200 million.

Fast Turnaround ASIC:

Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. unveiled a new fast-turnaround ASIC architecture designed to head off encroaching gate array and FPGA vendors in the high-performance, mid-volume market segment. AccelArray, introduced this week at the Embedded Systems Conference here, uses 0.11-micron process technology to support 333MHz core operating speed and density up to 3.8 million ASIC gates, while pre-diffused embedded blocks cut design cycles from six months to two months.

Robot Swarm Technology:

A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects. The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators.