What's the next big application

Here's a list of the 10 technology applications you should watch for in 2010. They range from e-book readers reportedly being snapped up by consumers during the current holiday season to flashy but formative technologies not ready for prime time like 3D TVs.

We examine the features that make these apps so compelling as well unresolved issues that might keep them from breaking out in 2010.

MediaIdeas estimates that 1.1 million e-readers were sold in 2008 and that the number will swell to 6 million next year.

Writing the e-book story

E-book readers gained longer battery life, color touchscreens and market traction this year. Less certain is whether the still-pricey platforms will turn a page on volume growth and, in the process, present lucrative opportunities for chip suppliers in 2010.

Amazon and Sony have taken an early lead in e-book readers that could be tough to narrow, but traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble, Cambridge University spinoff Plastic Logic and a host of Taiwanese vendors （including BenQ and Foxconn） aim to try. There's been speculation about whether Apple might join the fray.

MediaIdeas estimates that 1.1 million e-readers were sold in 2008 and that the number will swell to 6 million next year. In-Stat projects that e-book shipment growth will result in a semiconductor market of $1.1 billion by 2013.

In November, Amazon upped the ante by unveiling two enhancements to the Kindle platform; the newest generation offers 85 percent longer battery life and a native PDF reader. The online retail giant also said November was the best sales month ever for the Kindle.

The story has been different at Barnes & Noble, which announced early this month that it was deferring in-store availability of its e-book reader, dubbed the nook, until it had fulfilled the preorders for the system. Higher-than-anticipated production costs have prompted Barnes & Noble to lower its forecast for the nook, which, unlike the Kindle, tucks a 3.5-inch color touchscreen display below its 6-inch black-and-white e-paper display （EPD）。

E Ink, a subsidiary of Taiwan's Prime View International （PVI）， supplies the EPD for both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble readers. EPD supply constraints have kept both display and reader prices high, which in turn has kept some cost-conscious consumers on the fence.

In this environment, Barnes & Noble may be paying for its decision to equip the nook with a touchscreen assembly that jacks up an already high bill of materials by $20 to $25. The touchsreen itself might not be worth the premium, since Gartner analyst Amy Teng noted that the nook “still can't fulfill consumer demand for bookmark insertion or note-taking intuitively and directly from the touchscreen.”

Meanwhile, consumers aren't expected to be satisfied with black-and-white EPDs for long. “In another year we should see color EPDs in the market, though it will remain unsuitable for playing motion video due to slow response times,” Teng predicted.

In a recent report, Teng wrote that “supply constraints around E Ink/PVI's EPD will be alleviated” soon and that costs would come down “as demand continues to rise and the number of suppliers increases.”

Taiwanese vendors hope to hurry that process along, to some observers' concern. Though Taiwan is good at cost containment, quality sometimes takes a hit. If that holds true for e-books, dissatisfied consumers could decide to stick with their tried-and-true paperbacks and hardcovers, writing a sad ending for the young e-book market and its OEM and chip participants.

Building smart grids

After years of debate, shovels went into the ground in 2009 to create standards and starter projects for upgrading today's aging power grid to a smart electric network. Veteran venture capitalist John Doerr said recently that an open, digital and networked grid “will be the last great network we build in our lifetimes.”

“Today the Internet represents a $1 trillion economy, and there are some 1.2 billion people on the Net. But energy is a $6 trillion economy, 4 billion people use it, and there hasn't been innovation here, for a variety of reasons,” said Doerr, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner, who helped fund Google and Amazon.com but now focuses on green technology. Doerr has invested in Silver Springs Networks, a smart meter maker that hopes to go public soon.

The smart grid will open the door to the broad use of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources while raising energy efficiency, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said in a recent Silicon Valley talk.

The U.S. recently committed about $8 billion to smart grid projects, about half of that in federal economic stimulus grants. But that investment amounts to only about 5 percent what experts believe it will cost to upgrade the national network.

Smart grid projects are sprouting up in China, India and Africa, where a major wind turbine deployment aims to serve Europe's needs. “China expects to complete its supergrid by 2020 because they see it will give them an enormous competitive advantage,” Gore told his Silicon Valley audience.

Plenty of regulatory, business and technical hurdles lie ahead. A hornet's nest of state and local agencies regulates utilities today. Legislation that would promote use of alternative energy sources and accelerate smart grids has been stymied in Congress.

Gore cautioned that “in order to act effectively [to address government policy issues around the smart grid], we have to straighten out the regulatory and state legal morass, and we have to put a price on carbon emissions. A federal initiative is absolutely necessary.”

It's unclear how or when utilities, their regulators, vendors and consumers will come together to tackle the challenges. But engineers have already defined multiple paths to writing smart grid standards, including the smart grid Interoperability Panel, launched by a government agency, and a separate IEEE 2030 effort.

Such efforts will tackle dozens of nagging technology questions, including finding a low-cost way to plug home appliances into the grid. On a grander scale, planners must figure out how to connect solar and wind farms to the grid so that the energy they generate can be stored and accessed.

One other nagging problem: Government planners estimate there will be a shortfall-measured in the thousands-of engineers and technicians with the skills to build and run tomorrow's digital power network.

Roll-to-roll: ready to rock?

Picture an old movie clip of a printing press churning out the city edition, and you've got the gist of roll-to-roll manufacturing. Applied to electronics, the technique pairs a familiar concept with novel materials, promising a new class of paper-thin products-batteries, LEDs, memories, RFID tags, solar cells and more-mass-produced at low cost.

That, at least, is the vision. The reality is that roll-to-roll is a tricky process, and many have tried it and failed. One early failure was FlexICs, which, with partial funding from Intel, sought to develop semiconductors on plastic substrates for flat-panel displays. It went out of business in 2005.

Among those that remain unbowed is Germany's PolyIC GmbH & Co., which recently disclosed a 20bit plastic memory device being developed via a roll-to-roll process. The technology is from Norway's ThinFilm Electronics ASA, which is working to unlock the electrical switching properties of polythiophenes. But ThinFilm has been working for a long time-since 1994, with former parent Opticom ASA-and there are no real products yet to show for it.

There's more work to be done as well in roll-to-roll-produced solar cells. Startup Solarmer Energy Inc. recently reported that its plastic solar cells had hit 7.9 percent efficiency. Solar-cell provider Konarka Technologies Inc. has partnered with Arch Aluminum & Glass Co. to test so-called solar curtains for buildings: The aim is to cover a structure with solar panels based on Konarka's plastic film, with the cells expected to generate 1.5 kW for the facility. But the solar cells themselves achieve just 3 percent efficiency, according to reports. Those numbers pale beside the 22 percent efficiency of today's silicon-based solar cells.

Japan's Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. is developing roll-produced OLEDs. In November, the company announced construction of a pilot roll-to-roll coating line for OLED lighting products at its Hino facility in Tokyo. Production is slated for 2010.

Back in 2007, Konica Minolta signed an agreement with General Electric in a bid to accelerate OLED development. GE itself intends to begin volume production next year on flexible, paper-thin lighting panels using roll-to-roll.

The downside of this activity is that OLED panels are not yet bright enough to replace high-intensity bulbs.

All of these developments are intriguing. But roll-to-roll doesn't seem quite ready to rock the house.

By 2010 MEMS gyroscopes will be added to GPS navigational devices and to a new breed of 3D peripherals.

Spinning MEMS gyros

Three-axis MEMS-based gyroscopes will soon enable a new generation of even smarter smart phones, as well as smarter, more intuitive, more responsive game controllers and remotes. Today MEMS gyroscopes are used to stabilize digital images taken by cameras and high-end cell phones, but starting in 2010 they will be added to GPS navigational devices （for dead reckoning when the signal is lost indoors） and to a new breed of 3D peripherals, such as in-air mice.

The MEMS accelerometers used in such consumer platforms as the iPhone, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii opened a door to user interface enhancements that are now moving to full-fledged gyroscopes. An accelerometer, like the one that switches the iPhone's display from portrait to landscape mode, depends on your motion working against gravity to establish its orientation. Instead of waiting for user to move, MEMS gyroscopes generate their own, internal motion, invoking the Coriolis effect to track angular momentum. Gyroscopes provide a real-time readout of their orientation-pitch, roll and yaw-which can be used to control the motion of a cursor with pinpoint accuracy, and to recognize human gestures such as pointing, tapping and scrolling.

MEMS gyros promise to revolutionize human gesture recognition as well as make remote-control menu selection and navigation a viable alternative to the traditional keyboard and mouse. Of course, we have heard such claims before; other in-air mice, and even more complex 3D peripherals, have been floated but have failed to catch on.

Other technologies will also vie with MEMS gyroscopes for user acceptance. For example, 3D image sensors already enable some computers to read complex hand gestures. Imagine the possibilities for TVs equipped with the technology; there's no danger of losing the remote when you can scroll, point and select with a wave of your bare hand. Likewise, GPS units could perform dead reckoning by using triangulation of indoor Wi-Fi antennas, without requiring a MEMS chip. And the venerable keyboard will likely remain the most convenient approach for computer-based text input.

In gaming controllers, however, it's hard to see a disadvantage to the gyroscope. Look for MEMS gyros to debut in the forthcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory.

Pocket picoprojector

Would you be tempted to buy a new mobile handset if it packed a picoprojector? Most consumers probably wouldn't bite, because they don't know what they don't know. But those who closely follow display technologies suspect 2010 will be the breakout year for picoprojectors, especially those embedded in phones.

The premise is simple. As the name suggests, the technology projects a small screen's display image onto a larger viewing area, such as a wall. That can turn a smart phone, with its tiny screen, into a platform for comfortably viewing a downloaded movie or an updated PowerPoint presentation. No more lugging your laptop and a full-size projector to business meetings. No more squinting at your hand to watch the latest viral video.

Companies vying for share in the nascent market include Texas Instruments, with its DLP; Microvision, with its Integrated Photonics Module, comprising lasers and MEMS on a tiny board with batteries; Micron Technology, offering ferroelectric liquid-crystal-on-silicon （FLCOS） microdisplay technology that it acquired when it purchased DisplayTech earlier this year; Syndiant, using its small pixel-filed sequential color LCOS; and 3M, with a second-generation projector using an LCOS imager and polarizing beam splitter.

Samsung cell phones with projectors based on TI's DLP shipped in South Korea earlier this year. LG Electronics' eXpo handset, introduced this month, became the first device in North America to offer an optional picoprojector, also based on TI's DLP. The projector snaps onto the device to support slideshows and video straight from the phone, according to service provider AT&T.

There are already 100 picoprojector products （mostly standalone projectors roughly the size of a garage-door opener） on the market.

Sounds good so far. The rub is that the picoprojector was also touted as one of the hot products of 2009. By now, according to analysts' earlier projections, some 2 million to 3 million picoprojectors in all, a fraction of them embedded, should have shipped. In reality, the 2009 total for picoprojectors of all kinds is around 300,000 units, according to Bruce Spenner, microdisplay senior director at Micron Technology Inc.

The obstacles to embedding picoprojectors are greater than the industry led us to believe. Spenner said the power consumption of many existing picoprojectors must be brought down significantly. “This is not just a battery/talk-time issue,” he said. “Your handset could easily get too hot in your hand.”

The display engine must also overcome production issues, and its cost remains prohibitive, he said.

Selling the concept might be the biggest battle. Consumers are not yet convinced they need a projector in their pocket.

Proponents foresee home sensor networks that automatically report on an individual's weight, vital signs and sleeping patterns to detect early signs of trouble.

Bringing hospital home

With as much as $2.5 trillion-18 percent of the GDP-spent on health care in the United States alone last year, everyone is looking for ways to lower costs. One promising avenue is to lessen the need for expensive doctor visits and hospital care by enabling home-based health monitoring, especially for chronic conditions and two of their underlying causes: stress and obesity.

Indeed, Jonathan Collins of ABI Research predicts today's market of some 11.65 million wearable devices （almost all of them for sports and fitness） will explode to a market of 420 million wearable health monitors-59 million of them used at home-in 2014. The rise of personal and home network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will enable these home health monitors to connect to the Net with ease, Collins says.

Intel Corp. moved into the market this year with home-based monitoring devices and services built around its PC processors. The chip giant is following in the footsteps of such other titans as General Electric and Honeywell.

Proponents foresee home sensor networks that automatically report on an individual's weight, vital signs and sleeping patterns to detect early signs of trouble. They believe such monitors will help an aging population live longer-and safer-at home. The trick will be getting someone to pay for home care systems and services. Long-term studies on their effectiveness are still in the early stages.

Standards are also in a nascent phase. The Continua Health Alliance, an ad hoc industry group, has set some initial standards for home devices, but the medical community is still defining guidelines for digital health records. Making sure those records-which can include MRI scans-can be read by any system in a way that's secure and conserves bandwidth is “a monumental task involving many disciplines, and it's going to take 10 years to resolve,” said one observer.

Wearable devices are likely to face some of the same business issues confronting today's implants. By the end of 2008, as many as 600,000 of the estimated 2.5 million implanted devices （such as pacemakers） in use were linked to home devices that transmitted data automatically to clinics for remote monitoring. But none of the companies providing those remote services are being adequately compensated for them, according to one pacemaker company executive.

To make wearable systems easy to use, engineers need to develop more refined sensors that pick up vital signs without the need for conductive gels. They also must negotiate the thicket of specialty networks now in development, including the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for body area nets and a proposal from GE Healthcare for a Wi-Fi variant for body area nets in the 2,360MHz to 2,400MHz band.

Ready for Android?

This was the year Android-based handsets hit the mobile phone market. Next year, the Google-developed operating system will show up just about everywhere else.

Although some question Google's commitment to spreading Android beyond mobile phones, it might be impossible to prevent the broader consumer electronics community from exploiting the Google brand and Android's momentum, applying the open-source platform to consumer devices ranging from large-screen TVs and set-tops to GPS handhelds and MP3 players.

Semiconductor intellectual property vendors such as ARM and MIPS are already on the bandwagon, and contract design firms are climbing aboard: Aricent Inc., for one, has spun a dedicated Android development team. Tool vendors such as Mentor Graphics, for their part, have been working to port Android to a variety of chip sets.

Japan's Open Embedded Software Foundation, established earlier this year to promote Android's use in embedded systems, reports that the list of corporate entities participating in OESF activities now exceeds 50. In November, ArcherMind Technology unveiled what it says is the first available Android-based car navigation system. And Singapore-based Creative Technology is targeting its Zii platform-a system module that runs on both optimized Android and Creative's native operating systems-at the so-called shanzhai OEMs, Chinese companies that churn out knock-offs of name-brand digital consumer devices.

Big-name cellphone vendors such as HTC, Motorola and Samsung, along with a host of no-brand-name Asian OEMs and ODMs, are determined to exploit Android for consumer gadgets. But endorsements from traditional consumer giants like Panasonic and Sony have yet to materialize. Whether their silence on Android amounts to a no-confidence vote or simple cautiousness is unclear, but the latter seems more likely.

Indeed, for now, there's reason to be cautious about extending Android's reach into the larger CE device world. Reflecting its smart phone origins, the OS supports only a limited number of processors and doesn't support applications written in C languages. Tool companies, chip vendors and design firms are only now stepping up to address those limitations.

At the same time, Android's rapid penetration of the smart phone market suggests that those who ignore the OS do so at their peril.

Nerve or brain stimulators are in the works to handle ailments ranging from Alzheimer's and epilepsy to addiction, depression, obesity and incontinence.

Creating bionic human

As many as 2.5 million people today have medical implants, primarily pacemakers and defibrillators. The maturity of the technology and medicine behind these devices has inspired doctors and developers to look beyond the heart to the nervous system and a widening range of conditions that will be addressed by a broad array of future implants.

Nerve or brain stimulators are in the works to handle ailments ranging from Alzheimer's and epilepsy to addiction, depression, obesity and incontinence. Some implants will deliver drugs to targeted organs, reducing side effects compared with drugs delivered into the stomach or blood stream.

Long-term work continues on electronic versions of organs such as an artificial pancreas for diabetes sufferers. Multiple projects are making advances in artificial retinas, including one now in clinical trials.

“I'm thinking about clinical problems and optimizing solutions for them, leveraging electronics heavily, whether for drug delivery or new kinds of implants, or putting sensors where they have never been, for example in a hip or knee replacement,” said serial entrepreneur Mir Imran.

Imran developed one of the first implantable cardiac defibrillators in the mid-1980s and is now working on at least four new kinds of implants. One of his companies, Modulus, has positioned itself as a foundry that will make implants for what Imran believes will be a growing community of medical electronics companies.

Many regulatory, business and technical hurdles are still ahead. Any new implant must undergo years of animal and human trials before it is approved for use. In today's climate of spiraling costs, health care providers insist that any new device prove itself to save money as well as add to the quality of a patient's life before it is approved for coverage. And device makers have yet to find ways to link implants to remote monitoring networks in a cost-effective way.

On the technology front, developers still lack good interfaces to link electronics to human tissues and organs in ways that deliver clear signals and avoid infection.

Meanwhile, implants are in a race with a future generation of less invasive molecular techniques that will use lessons from studies of DNA and proteins to attack ailments at the microscopic level.

Touchscreen portables, anyone?

Since the iPhone's debut, every smart phone maker hoping to one-up the iPhone's wow factor has put a touchscreen at the top of its must-have list.

Touchscreens have been around since the 1960s, but until the iPhone's debut consumers associated the screens largely with self-serve kiosks and ATMs. Now every smart phone maker hoping to one-up the iPhone's wow factor has put a touchscreen at the top of its must-have list.

Touchscreens let users directly interact with the displayed. Varied touchscreen technologies, from resistive to infrared to capacitive to surface acoustic wave, can detect the location of a finger touch on a screen. Only projected capacitive touch technology, however, permits multitouch applications.

Projected capacitive touchscreens create a grid of invisible on-screen capacitors, each of which can independently detect a finger. The screens thus support multitouch commands, such as pinching to zoom. Projected capacitive touchscreens are used in the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch; HTC G1 Hero; Motorola Droid; Palm Pre and Pixi; LG KM900 Arena; Microsoft Zune HD; Sony Walkman X series; Sony Ericsson Aino; and Vidalco Edge, D1 and Jewel. Nintendo's DS uses a resistive touchscreen. The total market for touchscreens in portable devices topped $5 billion this year, according to ABI Research.

The main disadvantage of touchscreens is fingerprints on the display. Several new coatings are claimed to mitigate the problem, but the only surefire way to prevent prints today is to use a stylus instead of your finger.

A related disadvantage is that your finger covers up the part of the screen as you touch it, making it difficult to fine-tune selections. Apple mitigates the problem by animating its keyboards when you touch them, which helps to identify the exact screen object being touched. Other solutions provide aural or tactile feedback to identify the information selected. But making finely spaced selections is still difficult on touchscreens, unless you use a stylus.

Touchscreens for computers were nixed in the 1980s when “gorilla arm” complaints surfaced among users, whose arms quickly became fatigued when held poised in the air for too long. Today smart phone users can lay the phone display flat to prevent gorilla arm. But apps that use larger, vertically oriented screens will probably never make routine use of touchscreens （ATMs get away with it because the interactions last only a few minutes）。

3D in the living room

3D for the home, courtesy of a new-generation Blu-ray players and 3D TV sets, is coming soon to a store near you. Panasonic, Sony and their content-producing partners are hell-bent on providing it. The question is whether you'll want it.

Panasonic is betting you'll be dazzled by the 3D clips from James Cameron's “Avatar” that it will air at its Consumer Electronics Show booth next month. Sony hopes to score with sports fans when its professional-grade 3D video cameras capture the action at the 2010 World Cup soccer classic for delivery on Blu-ray disk.

Seemingly not since the dawn of the DVD have consumer electronics vendors devoted so much marketing attention and so many dollars to an app.

Given 3D's blemished record, it's fair to ask why the consumer electronics world is so fired up. Proponents assert that this time around, the technology has a tailwind.

Koji Hase, a former Toshiba executive who was instrumental in getting the industry to coalesce around a single DVD format, noted that when the consumer electronics industry launched DVD in the mid-1990s, CE vendors had to go to Hollywood hat in hand get movies released on disk. Now, he said, “it's the studios who are asking CE companies to launch 3D Blu-rays and 3D TVs.”

The difference, he said, is that 3D is a stunning departure from the status quo. “I was impressed when I first saw DVD. But when it comes to my first encounter with 3D, honestly, the 'wow factor' [was] four times bigger,” said Hase, now president of worldwide consumer electronics for 3D technology company Real D.

What hasn't changed is that the goofy glasses are still required. That's a potential hurdle to consumer acceptance, because home viewers who are accustomed to multitasking might no longer be able to hit the treadmill or tackle paperwork while watching a 3D film or sporting event on the tube.

Formats are another sticking point. While there will be a single standard for 3D Blu-ray disks and players, the market is likely to see fragmented 3D display technologies for TVs. And broadcasters, looking to maximize their audience reach for the minimum infrastructure investment, hope to offer 3D programs in a format different from the 120Hz, full-HD frame sequential method adopted by the Blu-ray Disc Association.

Speculation abounds in Japan over whether flat-panel TV makers will be willing to offer multiformat 3D sets. It might make technological sense to do so, but it's a costly proposition that could inflate final pricing.

And that could blow the home 3D market off course, tailwind notwithstanding.