Lifeboat Foundation

The buzz in the wireless industry is all about space, or what is referred to as non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). The wireless 3GPP Release 17 specification includes two new standards for satellite communications from smartphones, mobile electronics, and IoT devices directly to satellites. While satellites have always been part of the wireless communications infrastructure, they have traditionally provided backhaul network communications, not direct communications to mobile devices other than clunky satellite phones and emergency equipment. Direct satellite communications with individual mobile devices will help overcome gaps in terrestrial cellular networks, providing a truly global infrastructure that can be leveraged by a variety of industries, and bridge the digital divide by bringing wireless communications to rural areas that often lack the infrastructure even with the rollout of 5G cellular networks.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project or 3GPP is a global standards body consisting of a wide variety of wireless ecosystem members, such as intellectual property (IP) providers, semiconductor companies, networking companies, device OEMs, and wireless operators. Since 1998 and 2G cellular technology, members of the 3GPP have worked together to develop standards for new wireless technologies continuously. While the industry is now well past 3G and new generations of cellular technology are still introduced approximately every 10 years, new releases of the 3GPP standards are released approximately every two years within a generation in an on-going effort to increase the efficient use of a limited natural resource – radio spectrum. The standards also encourage the freeing up of additional spectrum, the development of new radio access networks (RANs), new encryption technology, higher network performance, aggregation of spectrum from different carriers and wireless technologies, support for additional use cases, and new network configurations. In other words, the 3GPP group is tasked with improving wireless technology with each generation and providing a global network that can be accessed from anywhere and by any device. With the inclusion of satellite networks, or non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), a global network will finally be possible.

The latest 3GPP standard that was finalized in 2023 is Release 17, the 3^rd Release within the 5G cellular generation. Among other enhancements and additions, Release 17 includes two new standards for satellite networks, IoT-NTN and New Radio NTN or NR-NTN. The IoT-NTN standard defines narrow band using a 200KHz channel for two-way messaging and other low-bandwidth consumer and embedded/IoT applications, such as location tracking, asset tracking, and sensor monitoring. The data rates for IoT-NTN are similar to the data rates that were experienced in 2G. It will provide basic data connectivity.

Armed with tools and repair guides from hardware repair advocacy firm iFixit, a user can remove and replace the phone’s back cover, battery, screen and charging port.

Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing at HMD Global, said that this process would cost on average 30% less than replacing an old phone with a new one.

Smartphone companies are increasingly working to make phones last for longer amid pressure from regulators to make electronics devices more sustainable.

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3 model despite being “10x smaller.” Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It’s part of a new family of language models called “Large Language Model Meta AI,” or LLAMA for short.

“Unlike Chinchilla, PaLM, or GPT-3, we only use datasets publicly available, making our work compatible with open-sourcing and reproducible, while most existing models rely on data which is either not publicly available or undocumented,” tweeted project member Guillaume Lample.

Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns and new stars and planets form out of old gas and dust, these elements eventually make their way to Earth and other worlds. After 3.7 billion years of evolution on our planet, humans and many other species have come to rely on them in our bodies and our lives. Iodine, for instance, is a component of hormones we need to control our brain development and regulate our metabolism. Ocean microplankton called Acantharea use the element strontium to create intricate mineral skeletons. Gallium is critical for the chips in our smartphones and our laptop screens. And the mirrors of the JWST are gilded with gold, an element useful for its unreactive nature and ability to reflect infrared light (not to mention its popularity in jewelry).

Scientists have long had a basic idea of how these elements come to be, but for many years the details were hazy and fiercely debated. That changed recently when astronomers observed, for the first time, heavy-element synthesis in action. The process, the evidence suggests, went something like this.

Continue reading “How Star Collisions Forge the Universe’s Heaviest Elements” »

Earlier today, Samsung announced its own solution for satellite communication on smartphones. The company unveiled the 5G non-terrestrial networks (NTN) modem so phones can communicate with satellites in locations where there is no cellular network connectivity.

The company said that it aims to integrate this tech into its own Exynos chip, which is used in a lot of Samsung smartphones — but not the current flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S23. The Korean tech giant describes this tech as using “satellites and other non-terrestrial vehicles” to provide connectivity in remote areas.

The move follows Apple, which launched satellite connectivity with iPhone 14 and 14 Pro for off-grid connectivity. The company first made this tech available in the U.S. and Canada, later expanding it to France, Germany, Ireland and the U.K. Apple relies on Globalstar’s satellite network.

The devices would not need batteries because they can harvest power from LTE signals instead.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. This is a feature that would allow you to, for instance, know everything that is in your fridge and when it expires.

A new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego can allow that possibility, according to a press release published by the institution on Tuesday.

Continue reading “New tech could transform phones into RFID readers” »

Apple has reportedly secured all available orders for N3, TSMC’s first-generation 3-nanometer process that is likely to be used in the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro lineup as well as new MacBooks scheduled for launch in the second half of 2023.

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, Apple has procured 100% of the initial N3 supply, which is said to have a high yield, despite the higher costs involved and the decline in the foundry’s utilization rate in the first half of 2023. Mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process began in late December, and the foundry has scaled up process capacity at a gradual pace with monthly output set to reach 45,000 wafers in March, according to the report’s sources.

When forming an image of an object, such as a photograph taken by a cell phone, light that has interacted with the object and either passed through or bounced off it is captured by the detector in the phone.

Some 25 years ago, scientists devised another, less direct way to do this. In the conventional form, information gathered from two detectors are instead used, by combining information from one capturing the light that has interacted with the object and one that has not interacted with the object at all. It is the light that has never interacted with the object that is used to obtain the image, though, resulting the technique taking on the name “ghost imaging.”

When entangled light is used, the quantum properties can be exploited to do this at very low light levels which can be a large advantage when looking at light-sensitive samples in biological imaging where too much light can damage or change the sample and thus destroying what one wishes to look at—this being quite a conundrum in the field.

In modern electronics, a large amount of heat is produced as waste during usage—this is why devices such as laptops and mobile phones become warm during use, and require cooling solutions. In the last decade, the concept of managing this heat using electricity has been tested, leading to the development of electrochemical thermal transistors—devices that can be used to control heat flow with electrical signals.

Currently, liquid-state thermal transistors are in use, but have critical limitations: chiefly, any leakage causes the device to stop working.

A research team at Hokkaido University lead by Professor Hiromichi Ohta at the Research Institute for Electronic science has developed the first solid-state electrochemical thermal transistor. Their invention, described in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, is much more stable than and just as effective as current liquid-state thermal transistors.