News Blog

CORK, Ireland--Researchers for years have devised cooling systems that sit next to or on top of chips and other hot components. Now, researchers in Ireland are trying to make one for inside these components.

The University of Limerick in Ireland, in conjunction with Cork's Tyndall Institute and other research organizations in the country, is working on a liquid cooling system for inside chip packages. Chip packages are those blue/brown plastic sleeves that surround semiconductors and let them plug into a board. When you look at a chip, you're really looking at the package.

In this system, a chilling liquid would circulate in silicon channels and absorb heat as it passes over hot spots. A rotating component (pictured) would circulate the liquid so that it could absorb heat, release the heat away from the component, and re-enter the channels.

The larger rotary impeller you see here is 5 millimeters in diameter, while the smaller one is 2 millimeters. They are made of silicon. (An impeller, by the way, is a propeller for fluids.) The University of Limerick came up with the idea and the intellectual property. Tyndall, which is a national hardware research institute that works with other universities, fabricated the components. Brendan O'Neill, who runs Tyndall's fabrication center, showed it to me on a recent visit.

If they can pull it off, it could mark a distinct improvement in liquid cooling. The closer you can get to the source of the heat, the better a liquid can cool it off. Right now, companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell servers with liquid cooling, but the cooling systems wrap around components. Internal heat, of course, has been one of the big challenges for computer and chip designers.

DUBLIN, Ireland--There isn't quite an inch of dust on top of Institutione Catholica, a two-volume theological set of books dating back a few centuries. But it looks close.

The entire top of the volumes is coated in a thick, brown mass. Some of the dust has formed into balls about the size of beetles. When a graduate student picks up one of the volumes, part of the frayed binding falls off. It will be glued back on later.

The Long Room in the Old Library at Dublin's Trinity College houses one of the most extensive collections of antique books in the world: it contains about 300,000 volumes as well as a trove of historical documents. (The college's library collection, begun in 1592, contains 4.5 million books in all.) Items range from 34 volumes of handwritten depositions taken in 1641 after an uprising against English rule to such gems as Wives, Mothers and Sisters in the Olden Time by Lady Herbert from 1871.

The vaulted chamber of the Long Room also draws about 600,000 tourists a year, said Susan Bioletti, who serves as the keeper of preservation and conservation.

The oldest Irish harp ever found sits on the main floor. Directly below the Long Room sits the Book of Kells, the 9th century illustrated manuscript, and other ancient books. In a way, the Old Library is the Grand Canyon for bibliophiles.

Unfortunately, a 400-year-old room with lots of large bay windows is not the ideal place to store old books. If she had her choice, Bioletti jokes that she'd put all the books into gray boxes. "But you can't turn it into a gray library. People have an emotional attachment to it," she said.

Thus, the university has kicked off an effort to balance the competing interests of preservation and tourism. It is cleaning the books and also trying to figure out ways to prevent environmental degradation in the future.

"I've researched it, and I haven't found evidence of a systematic clean-up. Maybe there was one in 19th century," she said.

A 2 million euro ($3 million) fundraising campaign has so far netted 900,000 euros.

The clean-up effort is a scientific project with several strands. A geologist, for instance, is analyzing the dust inside the building to figure out where it comes from. Some of it comes from coal dust. Back in the early 1990s, Trinity librarians say the room was often filled with a haze of smoke. Although use of coal is being faded out in the country, the dust is still there. Carbon can get ingrained in paper and dissolve it.

The dust also comes from decaying leather book covers, floating paper fibers, the building itself, and clothing worn by visitors. Some comes in from outside through the decaying window frames.

Bioletti is additionally trying to get funding for more environmental sensors and for a doctoral student to study air flow and air quality. Currently, Trinity has only four sensors in place. Data from the sensors will be inserted into computer simulations to plan any remodeling. And simulations to determine the effect of different types of windows will be examined.

One group is working on ways to control the environmental damage created by visitors. When visitors come into the room, particularly in large numbers, the levels of moisture, dust, and heat can rise. Some of the ideas include an air wash that would eliminate many fibers or a cooling chamber, which would slightly lower the temperature of visitors. (Cooling visitors, however, would probably be most effective in contained rooms, such as the one housing the Book of Kells.)

Scientists from the University of Cardiff in Wales, meanwhile, are examining the top corners of the pages of the books to determine the damage caused only by dust.

By contrast, the actual business of repairing and restoring the individual volumes is somewhat low tech. Graduate students largely use glue, adhesive strips, and brushes to get rid of the dust and keep the pages together. One book in the restoration lab is being held together with an ordinary Ace bandage. An Italian company makes a machine that can automatically clean books, but it can't be used on older volumes.

So far, academics have catalogued the repairs and cleaning needed for about two-thirds of the books, said Bioletti.

"Some of the work has been necessarily slow," she said. Nonetheless, "my biggest problem is crunching data."

GALWAY, Ireland--Think of the Multis Group as sort of the Antiques Roadshow of the server world.

The Galway, Ireland-based company specializes in refurbishing, and then selling, used servers. Refurbished PCs and servers are increasingly in vogue because remanufacturing represents a more environmentally efficient way to recycle old electronics than harvesting components from these old machines or melting them down for raw materials.

Multis, in fact, plans to open a 70,000-square-foot facility in Union City, Calif., later this month to refurbish and sell servers for North American customers. That marks a reversal in the usual U.S.-Ireland tech relationship.

Unlike refurbished PCs and cell phones, servers maintain a high resale value that can equal or even exceed the cost of new equipment, said Multis CEO and founder Sean Keenan. Why? Manufacturers might produce only a single server model for 18 months to two years. Corporate customers, however, often don't want to migrate to new hardware that quickly. Instead, they move at a three- to seven-year pace. As a result, they often have a need for discontinued equipment.

"Ten to 15 percent of the server market is remanufactured," Keenan said. "Because of the cost of migration, top-end customers will pay a premium for refurbished product."

In the first few years after the release of a new server, refurbished servers might sell for 15 percent less than the servers cost originally, he added. During this time, manufacturers might continue to produce a trickle of the machines and distributors and others might have remaining stock.

But once a server hits the magical "end of life" point, the situation reverses and remanufactured stuff sells for more than it did years before. Multis enjoyed a nice bump a few years ago when the air traffic control bureau in the U.K. needed a bunch of computers to supplement its radar control system. The computers it needed, however, dated back to the 1960s.

Similarly, a medical equipment company needed a bunch of discontinued servers because new servers would have meant going through FDA approval again.

Another run on old hardware occurred when Hewlett-Packard decided to discontinue the VAX minicomputer line it inherited in its Compaq acquisition. Compaq picked up the line when it bought Digital Equipment.

"There was a lot of screaming about that one," said Eamonn Reay, Multis' vice president of business development.

Unlike a lot of refurbishing companies, Multis works tightly with manufacturers like HP and Sun Microsystems. HP, for example, directs its customers that need older servers to Multis. Multis even manufactures some new Alpha servers on behalf of HP. If you go to HP's Web site and buy Alpha servers, you're actually speaking to the Irish company.

"We try to take as much of the quirky business as we can from them," Reay said. Part of the reason for opening the U.S. facility will lay in recruiting more server makers to work with them. The company does not try to contact end-users initially. That tends to antagonize the server makers, who want to try to sell something new first.

Both Keenan and Reay came out of Digital, which inadvertently is one of the primary wellsprings of Irish start-ups. The once-mighty Massachusetts hardware company was one of the original tech immigrants to Ireland. The company, though, started cutting back in the early 1990s. (Reay actually headed up the effort to get redundant employees new positions). The layoffs in turn drove many local entrepreneurs to start their own companies.

DUBLIN--Ireland might be one of Europe's more active technology hubs, but blogging still isn't big there.

That's the opinion of Tom Raftery, a longtime member of the tech community here and author of a blog on social media. (He's one of the bigger ones, and he starts his day by getting on Twitter.)

Part of the reason is that broadband penetration stinks. A survey published last June by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development pegged Ireland at No. 22 in terms of national broadband penetration by inhabitants, sandwiched between Italy and Portugal, but below the Scandinavian countries, the U.S., and Japan. In all, 15.4 people per 100 had broadband, and it's a small population on top of that. In all, the OECD counted 653,000 subscribers. That puts Ireland 27th overall, between New Zealand and the Slovak Republic.

Getting broadband to your house requires a lot of phone calls and appointment scheduling, one person told me. All those factors make it tough to start your own site.

A lot of people in the Irish tech community also tend to be somewhat reserved, Raftery said. You don't see execs or companies publishing their own blogs like Sun's Jonathan Schwartz does. That should change over time, however.

On the positive side for publishing, newspapers continue to do better than in the States, it seems. Dublin is still served by two major dailies, the Irish Independent and the Irish Times, as well as a bunch of smaller papers. Not bad for a city with 1.6 million residents in the urban hub and surrounding region.

And even though the country doesn't have many bloggers, and hence few arguments over the differences between journalists and bloggers, there is a dichotomy between journalists and reporters, a reporter called Derek Foley from the Irish Daily Star told me. Journalists specialize in writing well-crafted analysis pieces. Reporters might not be able to string two sentences together, but they are the ones who find out first about which soccer star was seen getting a lap dance.

DUBLIN, Ireland--Some of the papers are calling it the 1,200 euro phone.

Apple will bring its iPhone to Ireland on March 14, but the price the company will charge for the phone--particularly when the monthly service contract is added in--is raising eyebrows.

The 8GB iPhone sells for 399 euros (including value-added taxes) while the 16GB version goes for 499 euros. Plus, users need to sign up for service from cellular carrier O2 for 45 euros a month for a minimum of 18 months. The 45 euros per month fee, by the way, is the minimum. After 175 minutes of call time and 100 text messages, the price starts to climb.

Thus, the 8GB phone goes for 1,209 euros, while the 16GB version goes for 1,309 euros. The phones also run on slower, older networks than many other phones.

To put the price in newly devalued U.S. dollars, the 8GB equals about $600 while the 16GB version goes for nearly $760. With service fees, the 8GB sells for $1,834. In England, the 16GB iPhone, when only hardware is considered, sells for about $100 less than in Ireland.

While the price may be steep, there does seem to be a lot of interest swirling around. Chris Armstrong, CEO of PortoMedia, a Galway-based company coming out with a movie download services, loves his iPod Touch, which has the same keyboard. The same goes for Ray Nolan, CEO of Hostelworld, a portal for booking rooms in hostels. I saw a few other people with the iPod Touch at the Irish Software Association's annual conference this week.

CORK, Ireland--Here's a combination you don't see every day: wireless networking and performance art.

Todd Winkler, a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, and Mikael Fernstrom, a lecturer at the University of Limerick in Ireland, have choreographed performance pieces in which the dancers are rigged up with small wireless sensors that can alter the music and the images on screens. When the dancers move, changes occur in response. In other words, it's an arty version of the Wii. (Here is an academic paper (PDF) on the experiment.)

It's one of the more novel applications for a Lego-like sensor platform developed by Brendan O'Flynn, who works in the Ambient Electronic Systems Integration group at the Tyndall National Institute here. The sensors are similar to wireless motes from companies like Dust Networks and Crossbow Technology. The difference lies in the ability to mix and match the components and capabilities of any given sensor, he says.

The boards for creating sensors are modular and can be stacked and combined in a variety of ways. Want a pressure sensor with Wi-Fi communication combined with a vibration sensor that communicates via Zigbee? Snap two boards together and you have it. Want another one with Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi? Easy.

The chips embedded in the boards don't change. But because you have a wide variety of boards that can be configured by hand into a module, manufactures can experiment with different combinations before committing to a particular technology. In a sense, O'Flynn has invented a prototyping tool that reduces some of the anxiety and cost for manufacturers that want to experiment with the concept first.

It's pretty easy to do, too. I snapped a few together without breaking anything.

The initial boards produced by the group measured 20mm on a side, but they now can make boards that measure only 10mm per side. The sensors used by the choreographers are actually cubes: six squares connected together like a cross are folded up into the familiar shape of a sugar cube. The shape and the position of the motion sensors on the board allow the cube to detect six directions of motion: up, down, left, right, forward, and back.

Like many researchers, O'Flynn asserts that wireless sensor networks will become a big business--once the components get cheaper and potential customers home in on the applications. It's already been a next-big-thing market for a few years. Tyndall, like Intel, has been deploying wireless sensors to monitor environmental data, such as river pollutants and animal migration. These sensors could also play a big role in elder care in the future. If your grandmother's motion sensor isn't relaying much new data, it could send a message that perhaps you need to call an ambulance.

The first commercial application of O'Flynn's sensors could be in parking garages, which want to examine how efficiently their parking spaces are being used. (O'Flynn thought they would want the sensors to tell customers where they could find open spaces, but apparently that's a secondary interest.)

The group also is experimenting with a sensor pill that patients could swallow and that would then relay information to a doctor. An Israeli company called Given Imaging already has a similar product on the market.

CORK, Ireland--A radiation detector initially created to protect orbiting satellites has found a new purpose inside cancer patients.

The Tyndall National Institute--a scientific research institute and graduate school in Cork, Ireland--has come up with a radiation detector that fits inside an implantable medical device that measures how well radiation therapy is working. The FDA approved the use of the DVS (Dose Verification System) from North Carolina's Sicel Technologies last August for breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, said Brendan O'Neill, head of the central fabrication facility at Tyndall.

The DVS collects information about patients and then transmits the data to an outside system. It also gets its power externally via its antenna. The device is designed to last as long as the treatment. Two detectors go into each DVS, said O'Neill. Sicel also makes an external version that is applied to the skin, called OneDose, that measures radiation from the most immediate dose of radiation.

The radiation detector module was originally created for the European Space Agency (ESA) to protect satellites from radiation, said O'Neill. The aerospace market, however, consists of only a few big customers so Tyndall decided to refashion its chips, reduce the size, and cut the costs to fit into another market.

It's part of an effort by the Irish government to create a homegrown tech industry. For the past few decades, multinational companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have come to the country to take advantage of a low 12.5 percent corporate percent tax rate. That's far lower than the usual E.U. tax rate, which can range in the 30 percent range, according to Gerard O'Brien, senior development adviser for Enterprise Ireland, a government organization charged with building local industries.

Initially, the multinationals primarily built fabrication and assembly facilities, but over the years have begun to increasingly locate design centers, research labs, European headquarters, and other so-called higher value facilities.

But the rapid evolution of the tech industry in Asia prompted a change in tech policy about five years ago. Now, the government is actively trying to get entrepreneurs to form indigenous start-ups and is priming the process by funding research, investing in venture funds that will invest in Irish companies, and trying to encourage more tech education. Tyndall, for instance, was created in 2004 out of an earlier organization, and one of its primary goals revolves around commercializing laboratory research locked inside the nation's universities and technical institutes. (The other major goal revolves around producing more PhDs, who the government hopes will stay in the country.)

The effort is in the early stages and the results of these programs likely won't be known for a while. "We haven't seen a high level of activity yet, but it has only been five years that we have been pumping money into research at this scale," said Michael Grufferty, the director of industry and innovation at Tyndall.

Still, there have been a few interesting things cropping up. Last year, Motorola invested in Anam, which has created an application for conducting money transfers via cell phones over international borders. It is targeted at the growing immigrant community here. Galway's Porto Media, meanwhile, is coming out with a kiosk that lets you download movies onto a flash memory key. (In the biggest tech deal here in a while, Ireland's Airtricity, which specializes in wind power, got bought by a Scottish utility for over $1 billion earlier this year.)

Other interesting projects at Tyndall:

• Paul Galvin is working on a handheld microelectricalmechanical system that can rapidly scan a person's DNA for susceptibility to different diseases.

• An array of silicon micro-needles that can penetrate a person's skin, but not hit the nerves. The result is, ideally, painless shots.

• High frequency diodes that will be used on the ESA's mission to study the planet Mercury in 2013. It may be possible to integrate cheaper, similar versions of these diodes into solar panels, according to Donagh O'Mahony, a research scientist at Tyndall.

Alternative energy is great for the environment, but it's certainly not cheap in most cases right now. Germany, Canada and California, among other places, have to subsidize solar power so that it can compete with electricity from coal-fired or gas plants.

But in some cases alternatives are already cheap enough to compete with conventional power. In Ireland, for instance, wind power can be supported with minimal subsidies, said Jason Bak, CEO of Finavera Renewables, which specializes in wind-powered utilities and wave power equipment. The wind blows hard on the island and its on the edge of Europe's power grid. Recent studies sponsored by the government show that wind power in many instances will be cheaper than electricity from natural gas plants.

"It's a pretty unusual market," he said in an interview in our offices this week. Sweden, Denmark and Scotland may also be able to achieve wind power parity, he speculated.

Concentrated solar power, which harvests the heat of the sun, can also compete with conventional electricity, but t, say proponents. To date, none are large enough.