I received it today by email and would like to share it with you! Interesting and REWARDING!
"Forward BRAZIL, save the real BRAZILIAN TEAM", these are the professionals who REALLY should be paid MILLIONS A MONTH for their work! I hope our spoiled culture of "To the people of bread and circuses" (for the people, bread and Circus. Give them food and fun and they will never rebel), can change and give value to people in this country who DESERVE TO BE VALUED for their Social work, Human and Scientific.
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Researchers from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) began to enter an area hitherto dominated in Brazil by scientists located in the states of São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul.
In early January they completed the development of the first chip (integrated circuit) designed and implemented in Mato Grosso do Sul.
Analog-to-digital converter
Designed for use on any electronic device, like computers, cell phones and digital music players, the device presents a new technology in the electronic equipment market.
While current chips have two logical electrical voltage levels, that convert analog energy signals received directly from a conventional socket into digital signals, the new device is an analog-to-digital converter that works with multiple logic levels.
Due to this, the chip is much smaller and can add more functionality than a conventional integrated circuit.
"This technology can be an alternative for reducing size and adding more functionality to chips, which are two of the main trends in the microelectronics industry today", said Ricardo Ribeiro dos Santos, professor at the Faculty of Computing at UFMS.
No factory
To develop the new device, UFMS researchers have started research projects in universities and research institutions in São Paulo in recent years, looking for training in microelectronics and chip design.
After the exchange with the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and with the Renato Archer Information Technology Center (CTI), they started the device development project at the Technological Center for Informatics and Electronics (CTI) from Mato Grosso do Sul.
But, as Brazil still does not have a chip factory that masters the technology for producing transistors with 350 nanometers (billionth part of the meter), when you finish designing the device, the researchers decided to send it to France, to be manufactured by the company Circuits Multi-Projets (CMP), that performs prototyping and produces processors in small batches.
In early January, the French company sent researchers a batch of eight units of the device, which are being tested in the UFMS laboratories.
"The proposal with this first processor is more focused on demonstrating the feasibility of developing an analog-to-digital converter that acts at multiple levels. But we have a batch of other chips that we intend to prototype based on multi-level logic technology", Santos said..
Multilevel logic
According to the researcher, this technology, originated in the 1990s 1960, It is still not widely researched in Brazil and to date has not managed to gain a foothold in the electronics market., since electronic circuits based on binary logic, adopted by equipment manufacturers, worked great until recently.
But, in the last ten years, It began to be seen that binary logic presents limitations to miniaturize processors, which have the demand to become increasingly tiny and imperceptible in electronic devices.
"Researchers working in this area began to look at various alternatives to achieve this goal., as other types of materials instead of silicon or for other areas, like quantum physics. Multilevel logic would be another way to design increasingly smaller chips with different functions", said Santos..
With information from Agência Fapesp - 03/03/2011