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Fiber optic Thunderbolt cables coming soon
Sumitomo Electric Industries has announced that it's the first company to receive certification from Intel to produce optical Thunderbolt cables. Currently all Thunderbolt cables have metal components, which limit the maximum length of those cables to around 10 feet. Optical Thunderbolt cables will allow lengths of up to 100 feet, which will be helpful in professional post-production studios, especially as noisy hard drives or other accessories can be kept away from sensitive audio recording equipment. Sumitomo Electric says the new cables will provide the full 10 Gbps of the metal cables, and can become tangled or pinched up to 180 degrees without seeing any kind of signal degradation. The optical cables will be as thin as the current metal Thunderbolt cables, but their connection heads will be slightly longer at 38mm versus the metal cable's 28mm connection. One other difference is that optical cables are not capable of powering devices, like external hard drives. Any bus-powered devices will need a separate power supply to run when connected via an optical Thunderbolt cable. The new optical Thunderbolt cables will be compatible with all Macs and devices shipped with Thunderbolt ports to date. Sumitomo Electric Industries has not announced any pricing yet.
SEI creates new porous Aluminum-Celmet, makes rechargeable batteries last longer
Quick: What costs hundreds of dollars and dies after four hours? If your answer included anything portable and tech-based -- you guessed right. In fact, most of our magical and exciting gadgetry has less-than-stellar means of holding a charge, but a recent breakthrough by Sumitomo Electric Industries could change all that. Employing the same process used to create Celmet (a NiMH component), researchers at the R&D company managed to coax aluminum into being a bit more receptive. The resulting Aluminum-Celmet has a whopping 98 percent porosity rate, leaving the Li-ion gate wide-open for a flood of electrical juice. And unlike its nickel-based brother, this piece de porous non-resistance has a steep corrosive threshold that could soon help power a line of high-capacity, small form rechargeable batteries. Production is already underway at Osaka Works, with SEI hoping to speed adoption of these franken-batts into our mass consuming mitts. Technical-jargony PR release after the break.
Panasonic and Sumitomo see eye to eye in this OLED game, big screens due in 2010
Ready with the proper retort to all those rumors, false starts and misquotations, the Nikkei is reporting that Panasonic and Sumitomo are zeroed in and have the tunnel vision to deliver the 40-inch plus OLED HDTVs we've been waiting for within fiscal 2010. Once organic electroluminescent product is flooding the streets, the plan is apparently to cut the power requirements of the bright, slim displays to less than a third of current LCDs by 2015, right around the time Samsung thinks this tech will be ready for the mainstream, anyone else care to make a prediction? (Registration req'd on read link)[Via Reuters & OLED-Info]
