HP Announces Tiny Wireless Memory Chip

Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed a memory chip with wireless networking capabilities that is roughly the same size as a grain of rice, the company said Monday. Prototypes of the Memory Spot chip developed by HP Labs contain 256 kilobits to 4 megabits of memory and can transfer data wirelessly at speeds up to 10Mbps. There are eight bits in a byte. This amount of storage allows the chips to hold a short video clip, digital pictures or "dozens of pages" of text, HP said, adding that the chips do not require a battery. Memory Spot chips get their power using a technique called inductive coupling, which allows power to be transferred from one component to another through a shared electromagnetic field. In the case of Memory Spot, this power is supplied by the device that is used to read and write data on the chip. Data stored on Memory Spot chips could be accessed using a variety of devices, such as specially equipped cell phones or PDAs, making them suitable for a range of applications, such as adhesive attachments applied to a paper document or printed photograph, HP said.

RFID vs. HP's new chip

[ansak]

From what I can tell, the comparison table here would go something like this:

RFID features longer range and a small uniform, pre-encoded response. (e.g. ID Badge at work) HP's new chip features shorter range and a larger response, selectable from a large pool of responses, and probably the pool of responses is changeable even after deployment.

As another poster said, the short ranges at which this thing would work will alleviate a lot of people's privacy concerns. Still I gotta say that tagging people is still tagging people.

mooooo...(NOT!)...ank
...so afraid of disorder, we turn it into a God... (Bruce Cockburn, Gospel of Bondage)

Commercial Use

[kthejoker]

I still don't understand why RF readers and things of this sort aren't included on every cell phone, along with an easy, common standard to interface with.

Pointing your cell phone at a product for price comparisons and technical specs, or getting a small video on an item in a museum, or collecting e-mail addresses on College Night, or brochures at a convention, or any other sort of "Additional Info" normally not available at the point of contact, seems to me to be an extremely sustainable business model at a minimum of cost and input.

RFID might not be a commercial utopia, but it's a good start in a direction we could've been taking 10 years ago.

Here's dreaming

[Yurka]

Man, I'd sure love me the complete PDF of a book that I just bought embedded into the back cover.

One Step Closer

[cloudkiller]

Another step towards the day when I can upgrade my computer by simply pouring a bag of crap through a hole in the top of my case. ...Hey, I sould patent that! [totallyabsurd.com] (Link barely has anything to do with the comment, it just came up in a quick google for toilet patent [google.com].)

Re:There are 8 bits in a byte.

[kahei]

Not all bytes have 8 bits. A lot of older mainframes have 7 -- that's why octal was popular once, and why UTF-7 is still widely used. A few had 9, although that wasn't widespread. Some specialized computing devices have anywhere from 5 to 10. So pointing out that it's 8, in the context of a whole new specialized chip, isn't redundant.