Cutting Edge

Tanya Vlach wants to turn her artificial eye into a bionic eye.

(Credit: Jonathan James)

Three years after losing her left eye in a car accident, San Franciscan Tanya Vlach wants to make her artificial eye more useful: She's planning to put a video camera in her eye socket with the goal of having a bionic eye.

Asked in an e-mail what her inspiration is, Vlach wrote:

The Bionic Woman and maybe Bladerunner! Ever since I lost my eye I would fantasize about having a bionic eye. So I did research and I realized that as technology becomes increasingly smaller it seemed doable to engineer a miniature video camera small enough to put inside my acrylic prosthetic. And then finally I would have a device as close to an eye as I could get. Also, I love photography and video, this would be a true P.O.V (point of view) perspective.

Vlach, a 35-year-old artist and producer, is just getting started with her project and doesn't yet have a technology developer yet. She's actively seeking help with engineering, as well as funding.

Work is already under way in various places that could serve as a starting point for Vlach. For instance, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have created a contact lens that contains an electronic circuit and LEDs. And scientists at University of Illinois and Northwestern University, meanwhile, have developed what could be a precursor to a bionic eye, though it's unclear whether that eye has quite the Web functionality that Vlach is seeking. There's also work being done in Boston on embedding chips behind the retina.

Tanya Vlach

(Credit: Jonathan James)

In her blog, "one-eyed," Vlach discusses the technical aspects of what she hopes to achieve with her "experiment in wearable technology, cybernetics, and perception."

"I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic /artificial eye," she writes. "While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality."

From her research into miniature video cameras, Vlach lists what seems like an ambitious list of specifications for her technologically advanced artificial eye: DVR capability, MPEG recording, built-in SD mini card slot, 4 GB SD mini card, mini-AV out, Firewire or USB drive, optical 3X, remote trigger, Bluetooth, and inductors (Firewire/USB, power source).

Beyond that, Vlach reckons that the eye technology could even incorporate wireless charging, allow the pupil to dilate and constrict as light changes, and use blinking to take still photos, zoom, focus, and turn on and off.

She's currently working on a science fiction screenplay and has several ideas for the technology, including making a documentary, broadcasting an online "lifecast," and doing art installations.

Since she published the post about a week ago she has received up to 150 e-mails and "some very promising suggestions." She's still poring through all of them, she says.

Vlach was injured in an accident on the way to the arts festival Burning Man in 2005. It was to be her first time at the event, which takes place every Labor Day weekend in northern Nevada.

"It was going to be my first time!" she says. "But I was swooped up in a helicopter and laid up in a hospital instead. I did finally go last year."

(First reported by Kevin Kelly's Lifestream blog.)

The world's most powerful particle accelerator will go live again in June at the earliest, after a shutdown in September.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the Large Hadron Collider, previously suggested that the apparatus would be restarted in April, following maintenance. On Monday, however, it emerged that June would be the earliest possible date for operations to resume fully. It also became apparent that the cost of the repairs alone could be as high as $16 million.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel nestled beneath the Swiss-French border in the Alps. It is designed to shoot streams of particles around the tunnel in opposing directions, smashing them into each other and thereby hopefully discovering more about the origin and nature of matter and the universe.

The particle beams are held on their paths by dipole magnets and focused by quadrupole magnets. These magnets are made of a superconducting material that needs to be cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 kelvins (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit), if it is to avoid overheating and exploding.

The LHC was successfully turned on in September, but little more than a week later, an electrical fault caused a helium leak that necessitated the complete shutdown of the machine.

This week, details began to emerge about the cost of the necessary repairs and the likely resumption date for the LHC. Repair time aside, the process will also be slowed down by the fact that the LHC needs to be out of service throughout winter; as it uses a tremendous amount of electricity, CERN cannot risk power issues at a time when citizens' homes need to be heated.

"We already said the bare minimum (repair time) included two months to warm up the sector (from its cryogenic state)," a CERN representative told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "It became clear that there was no way of doing that before we shut down the accelerator complex for winter, anyway, so that puts the earliest possible date (for the refreezing of the LHC to start) in May. When we start up our accelerator complex, getting it up and running again takes a few weeks, so that takes you into June."

CERN said the glitch and resulting shutdown had been educational, as "markers" had been identified that show when such an incident is likely to occur.

"Those markers would have allowed us to stop (the LHC before the helium leak), had we known where to look," the representative said. "We're building in additional monitoring and protection systems to make sure this kind of incident won't happen again, and this will take time."

CERN's scientists are currently working on a detailed cost analysis and timetable for the necessary repairs and subsequent reinitiation of the LHC, and will present that timetable to the organization's governing body next month.

"We expect that the repairs and the (installation of additional monitoring systems) will cost us between 10 million and 20 million Swiss francs ($8.4 million to $16.8 million)," CERN's spokesperson said. However, because the repairs will eat into CERN's supply of spare parts for the LHC, a second phase of the resumption operation will involve buying more spares, thereby raising the total costs further.

The costs for repairing the LHC and buying new spares would be "accommodated within CERN's annual budget," the spokesperson said, and the organization would not be requesting additional funds from European member states for those purposes.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Starting next month, subscribers of Comcast's cable Internet service in Oregon and southwestern Washington state will be getting their connections switched over to "wideband." The upgraded service, which was announced late last month doubles the speed of residential and business connections as well as offering two faster, more expensive plans that bring the maximum download speed to 22 and 50 Mbps respectively.

Wideband is currently available in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and parts of New England, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. According my press contact, Comcast plans to get it in "close to 10 million homes and businesses in the next couple of months," which is a good percentage given the company's overall customer base of 14.7 million subscribers.

The technology behind wideband, which is formally known as DOCSIS 3.0 brings with it the capability to hit speeds in excess of 300 Mbps, is six times faster than what Comcast is currently offering (or even capable of handling with its current network infrastructure). As mentioned before, this increase in download speed has not made a difference in Comcast's bandwidth use restriction, which requires users to stay within 250 GB of downloads per month or face a one-year suspension upon the second offense.

The crew of STS-126, the Space Shuttle launching Friday, will be delivering to the International Space Station a wastewater regeneration system that will recycle astronauts' urine.

(Credit: NASA)

If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.

According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.

The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee," one astronaut told the BBC.

The idea behind the $250 million system seems to have been to figure out a way to ensure that residents of the Space Station had a supply of fresh water. To date, the Space Station has had the luxury of getting water deliveries from newly arrived Space Shuttles. But the Shuttle program is slated for retirement after 2010, and that looks to end the program's role as, among other things, the Space Station's personal water truck.

Still, the system won't be implemented right away. First, NASA wants to be sure that it works, as designed, in a zero-gravity environment.

On Earth, astronaut testers are apparently convinced that the filtration technology works just fine.

"Some people may think it's downright disgusting," Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper told the BBC, "but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth."

Some who have tried the recycled water did report a faint taste of iodine, but they didn't see that as a problem.

"Other than that, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water," said Bob Bagdigian, who ran the system's development. "I've got some in my fridge. It tastes fine to me."

Employees at the Cheetah Conservation Fund's Biomass Energy Project use tech to convert bush into blocks of clean-burning fuel.

(Credit: Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund)

A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing power to Indian villages and building earthquake-resistant homes in Indonesia, the maker of a single-use syringe, and a group that uses technology in classrooms in India were the winners of the Tech Museum awards held Wednesday.

The Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia won the 2008 Intel Environment Award. The group converts invasive bush into clean fuel. It employs 15 people at a biomass processing plant that uses a high-pressure extrusion process to create an economically viable alternative to firewood, coal, and charcoal. The fund is working to recover 25 million acres of land in Namibia and to save endangered cheetahs.

DESI Power: Decentralised Energy Systems India won the 2008 Accenture Economic Development Award. DESI Power is helping more than 100 villages build power plants to areas that lack electricity and is creating jobs with the launch of micro-enterprises. The DESI plants use 19th-century technology--biomass gasification through agricultural waste.

A completely different type of invention took the prize for education. Described as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing system Digital Study Hall won the Microsoft Education Award. The Lucknow, India-based project records classroom lessons from experienced teachers on DVDs and distributes them to underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh. Students participating in Digital Study Hall scored nearly 400 times higher on English tests and nearly 300 times higher in math.

The Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award was given to Build Change, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that designs and trains builders and homeowners how to build earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries. The designs use local materials, and are affordable and sustainable, as well as easy to build. In Aceh, Indonesia, alone, Build Change has strengthened 4,200 homes and trained 130 builders. The group also has programs in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and Sichuan, China.

Winning the Fogarty Institute for Innovation Health Award is Marc Koska who developed a syringe that reduces the spread of disease because it can only be used once. The plunger in the K1 "Auto Disable" Syringe developed by Star Syringe locks in place when it is fully depressed, preventing it from being used repeatedly, a common cause of cross-infection among patients in the developing world. The single-use syringes save millions of people from getting infected with Hepatitis B and C and HIV.

For more information about the K1 syringe and four other Tech Awards laureates, read "Tech Museum honors tech that benefits humanity".

Digital Study Hall students benefit from watching lessons on DVD in their underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh.

(Credit: Digital Study Hall)

While computers continue to get smaller, they're constantly being pushed to do more. Whether they're doubling as a phone, a camera, or an MP3 player, there seems to be no end to the tasks we expect them to carry out. And as always, we say we want them to "do all that stuff and be smaller."

(Credit: IBM)

A limitation of the miniaturization process is that the more computers are asked to do, the more memory they require. One of the computer's basic elements, the transistor, could soon reach its miniaturization limit. The smaller we make transistors, the more susceptible they are to quantum phenomena like electrons tunneling through the barriers between wires. Which, while ticklish for the barrier, can just be really annoying.

This has apparently annoyed researchers at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, as well, albeit for different reasons. This transistor dilemma has led them to look into the viability of carbon nanotubes to help create fast, cheap, and compact memory that uses little power.

Philips Research is out with a new intelligent camera pill that can be electronically preprogrammed to deliver targeted doses of medicine to patients with digestive disorders such as Crohn's disease, colitis, and colon cancer.

Don't worry, this is not a life-size representation of the tiny Philips iPill.

(Credit: Philips)

The device comes in the form of an 11 mm x 26 mm capsule that patients swallow with water, just like any other pill. It's designed to pass through the digestive tract of its own accord, meaning you just let nature take its course with this one.

The iPill determines its location via a pH sensor that measures the acidity of the environment, which varies throughout the intestinal tract. The device then releases medicine from its drug reservoir via a microprocessor-controlled pump--either in a burst or a progressive release. Philips says the smart pill can also deliver medicine to multiple locations.

Announced at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists' annual meeting and exposition this week in Atlanta, the capsule is also designed to measure data such as local temperature, and report measurements wirelessly to an external receiver unit.

While its drug delivery system appears promising, the Philips iPill is not the first camera pill to enter the picture. Among other such products, GivenImaging created the PillCam Colon Capsule Endoscope for viewing the colon, as well the PillCam ESO for the esophagus and the PillCam SB for the gastrointestinal tract.

IBM has been hired to help rural Americans get broadband access using power lines.

On Wednesday, Big Blue announced it has signed a $9.6 million contract with International Broadband Electric Communications to bring the technology to rural America where it hopes to deliver high-speed broadband connectivity to millions of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to get it. IBM and IBEC, which will build and manage the networks, are working with over a dozen electricity cooperatives in seven states, The Wall Street Journal reported.

For years, people have hoped broadband-over-power line technology, or BPL, would allow power companies to become the third alternative in the broadband market, competing against cable operators and telephone companies. But technical limitations and interference issues with local emergency radios and short-wave ham radios have stood in the way of mass adoption.

In recent years, new modulation techniques supported by other technological advances have helped BPL evolve. Most services today are capable of delivering between 512Kbps and 3Mbps of throughput, which is comparable to most DSL offerings.

In rural areas in particular, BPL technology could finally bring high-speed Internet access to people who otherwise couldn't get it. Traditional phone and cable companies often find it too expensive to deploy new infrastructure to provide service to the far reaches of rural America.

BPL could provide an affordable technology for reaching this population because the infrastructure is already built. More than 900 electricity cooperatives in the U.S. cover 75 percent of the land mass in the U.S.

The technology and its promise of leveraging existing infrastructure has caught the attention of other major players, such as Google and EarthLink. But so far, BPL deployments have been slow to take off. According to the United Power Line Council, there were approximately 35 BPL deployments around the United States as of last year. As of the middle of last year, there were about 5,000 BPL subscribers in the U.S., according to the Federal Communications Commission.

But the big problem for BPL is that fact that there are still complaints of interference with amateur radio operators. Several companies once hot on the technology have now scaled back their hopes and are using the BPL networks to offer smart-grid monitoring. Last May, DirecTV and Current Communications sold a flagship BPL deployment in Dallas to the local utility, which plans to use the network for smart-grid monitoring.

Another company called Comtek deployed a BPL network in Manassas, Va. But after persistent complaints from radio operators, it has decided to also focus efforts on providing smart-grid monitoring.

The BPL movement was also dealt a blow earlier this year when a federal appeals court sided in part with amateur radio operators who challenged FCC rules designed to speed the nascent Internet service's rollout. The judges in the case sent the rules back to the FCC with instructions to clarify is reasoning for its rules and to publicize its studies more fully.

While IBM and IBEC have the right idea when it comes to focusing on rural and underserved markets, it seems like they still have an uphill battle in overcoming interference issues. There is no doubt that it is important to get broadband access to rural America. On the campaign trail, President-elect Barack Obama even mentioned the need for ubiquitous broadband. But there are other technologies, such as WiMax and other 4G wireless, that may offer faster speeds with fewer technical issues. Recently opened "white space" spectrum could help fill this need in rural areas. The problem is that deploying any new infrastructure whether it's wired or wireless won't be cheap. And it could take years before rural Americans ever get high-speed Internet.

A Huichol woman does bead work while her son finishes his homework by the light of a Portable Light device.

(Credit: KVA MATx)

Living in San Francisco, we take technology for granted. We have YouTube and iPhones and online maps. We get annoyed when a Web page downloads too slow or our phone call drops.

Then there are the millions of people who don't live in developed countries, who go without the Web and even electricity and light for most if not all of their day. For them, things like Windows 7 and Facebook are irrelevant, but they still dominate the technology landscape.

There are some innovators designing technology for use by the rest of the world, companies and nonprofits that are applying technology to help people improve their lives. The Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif., offers its Tech Museum of Innovation awards to projects that apply technology to benefit humanity.

Established in 2001, the awards recognize 25 laureates in the categories of education, equality, environment, economic development, and health. One laureate in each category will receive a $50,000 cash prize. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Wednesday night at which professor Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, will speak.

CNET News talked to 5 of the 25 laureates and got a glimpse of some of the technologies that are doing things like preventing spread of disease from reuse of infected needles, monitoring the air around farms for dangerous pesticides, turning the PC into a 3D design tool, and bringing light to dark places on the map.

Textiles that illuminate
Sheila Kennedy was traveling in Mexico studying solar applications in 2002 when she saw a group of native Huichol women cooking by the side of the road because they had insufficient light to cook in their homes and she had an epiphany. She saw a practical use for flexible solar panel technology and solid-state lighting that her architectural design firm in Boston, Kennedy & Violich Architecture, was experimenting with.

A Huichol woman wears a Portable Light device integrated into textiles that can be worn.

(Credit: KVA MATx)

She formed a nonprofit, the Portable Light Project, and began a collaboration with renewable-energy think tank The Rocky Mountain Institute to launch a pilot project with the Huichol in the Sierra Madre mountains in north central Mexico. The project provides a way for indigenous communities to have bright light inside their homes at night, recharge the power with the sun during the day, and charge cell phones and medical devices as well.

Participants in the project receive solar kits that they integrate into their textiles to suit their needs. The kit includes one or two thin-film 10-by-4-inch photovoltaic panels, an LED, and a control pouch with digital drive electronics and a small lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The self-contained renewable energy source is lightweight, easy to integrate into existing materials, and is customizable.

"It's an elegant textile surface that can be folded or formed," Kennedy said. "It's got great optics, with parabolic reflector shapes made from folded textiles which bounce reflected light from solid-state lighting sources."

It takes about 2.5 hours to fully charge a battery and it offers about 10 hours of light at about 100 lumens using only 1 watt. By contrast, a 100-watt, 120-volt bulb produces 17.5 lumens per watt.

Projects are under way for Nicaragua, and the Brazilian and Venezuelan Amazonias. The group also is working to use ultraviolet-emitting LEDs for a water purification capacity using portable light. And in another project, Portable Light has created a hospital blanket using the nanotechnology for medical workers in South Africa to send home with patients with HIV who are bedridden.

"Sunlight kills bacteria that causes tuberculosis, but many of the patients sit at home in the dark," Kennedy said. With the blanket "they can wrap themselves in the blanket, produce electricity, store it, and then provide power for their family and caretakers around the clock."

Syringes that save lives
Brit Marc Koska was living in the American Virgin Islands in the early 1980s, "with a first-class honors in beach bum," when he saw a newspaper article about how the reuse of syringes in developing countries would make them a major transmission route for HIV infections. He decided to work on tackling the problem and eventually developed the K1 Syringe, the world's first syringe that automatically disables after it is used once.

Marc Koska talks to some Indian boys at risk of getting infected from needle sticks while digging through a dump.

(Credit: Star Syringe )

A ring in the barrel of the syringe locks the plunger in place once it is fully depressed so it can't be used again. The syringes sell for about 5 cents, he said.

Twenty-four years later, and 17 years of no sales, Koska, now 47, heads up Star Syringe with 14 licensees around the world producing more than 2 million K1 syringes a day. It is estimated that his syringe has saved more than 5 million lives.

"The manufacturing process was the lowest hanging fruit," he said. "It was critical to make a design that would easily retrofit onto existing machinery."

Currently, half of the injections given in the developing world are unsafe (the rate rises to 65 percent in India) and the World Health Organization reports that reused syringes are believed to be responsible for 1.3 million deaths a year, mostly malaria.

"A mother taking her baby to a doctor for any routine vaccination could leave with hepatitis or HIV" because the doctor reused an unclean needle, Koska said. "It happens for many reasons, including poor distribution of supplies, but informing the public of the issue will be critical in tackling this global problem."

His next project, SafePoint Trust, does just that.

Monitoring the air for carcinogens
For decades, people living near farms in California's Central Valley complained that they got headaches, fainted, or got sick after pesticides were sprayed on nearby crops.

Jorge Alvarado operates the Drift Catcher while PANNA Scientist Karl Tupper stands by.

(Credit: Sara Bjorkqvist)

Pesticide exposure has been linked to increased incidences of certain types of cancer, birth defects, Parkinson's disease, asthma, and other illness. According to a 2007 study, autism rates for children born to California women exposed to certain pesticides during their first trimester of pregnancy were six times greater than normal. Still, communities have been told that spraying is safe. Without any proof otherwise it seemed there was nothing that could be done.

That is until Dr. Susan Kegley developed the Drift Catcher for the San Francisco-based Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA).

The device is an easy-to-use, affordable air monitoring system that measures the concentrations of hazardous pesticides in the air. A vacuum pump pulls air through two glass sampling tubes. The tubes contain a resin which traps pesticides as the air moves through. Tubes are typically changed every 24 hours and samples must remain cold until they are analyzed by PANNA scientists in the laboratory.

"The device enables communities to scientifically document when levels of pesticides in the air near their homes and playgrounds exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency says are safe," said Kathryn Gilje, executive director of PANNA.

"Now, we can amass enough data to make a change in policy to make (pesticide drift) illegal," Kegley said. "Air sampling has been around for a long time, but now you can do it cheaply enough so someone can set it up in their back yard" and start measuring when they see the tractors spraying pesticides.

The Pesticide Action Network has about 50 of the devices out in the field. The Drift Catcher has been used by community activists in California, Minnesota, Florida, Washington, Indiana, Maine, and Hawaii.

Evidence from the Drift Catcher devices likely played a role in keeping the maker of the herbicide molinate on track for voluntarily withdrawing the chemical from the market. It also played a role in the EPA requiring larger buffer zones around fumigated fields and requiring farmers to provide notice to the community about what pesticide they are using, Kegley said.

The group also is pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help farmers move away from using toxic chemicals and adopt safer alternatives.

Renewable light by the hour
Andy Schroeter learned first-hand about the difficulties people in developing countries have getting affordable access to light sources when he was working in Laos and Vietnam for a German development organization beginning in 1995. Not only are 44 percent of the population in Laos off the electricity grid, but paying for kerosene to light lamps winds up being one of the highest costs for a household.

Men in Laos get trained on how to operate solar panels that recharge lanterns rented to villagers. Note the solar panels on top of their hats.

(Credit: Sunlabob Renewable Energy)

So Schroeter created the Sunlabob Renewable Energy company to help solve that problem.

Based in Laos, the company rents large central solar charging stations to village businesses which, in turn, rent out rechargeable exchangeable solar lanterns to households. The lanterns can be used to charge mobile phones, small TVs, radios, and laptops.

"We are creating a sustainable model for a village," Schroeter said. "In rural areas in developing countries people don't have the cash to pay for initial investments for the hardware."

Each lantern has an integrated microprocessor that alerts a user when the power is low and collects data that can be used for carbon offset purposes.

The lantern light lasts for about 10 hours and costs as little as 40 cents, Schroeter said, adding that light lasts as long as three days for families in Laos.

In addition to Laos, Sunlabob is providing services to villages or has franchises in Uganda, Cambodia, Singapore, and Tanzania and will soon be operating in Afghanistan.

3D for the masses
When Daniel Ratai was 13 he wanted to design cars. But he found that using pencil and paper was too limiting and there were no computer programs that would allow him to do exactly what he wanted.

Research institutes are using Leonar3Do for pharmaceutical research.

(Credit: 3D for All)

"In kindergarten I tried to draw 3D designs on paper. I dreamed about drawing into the space," says Ratai, a Hungarian. "I could imagine the car in my head and see it on the top of a table."

So, when he was 18 he started working on a system that would let him do as he wanted. His firm, 3D For All, developed the Leonar3Do console and specialized software that works with any PC.

Sensors attach to the monitor and the user wears a pair of 3D goggles and draws with a 3D pen, creating whatever their mind can imagine in the space in front of the monitor.

The system can be used for creating virtual environments, buildings, anything. A research group is using it to control 3D microscopes for molecule docking, Ratai said.

Prototypes are currently being tested and initial systems should be available to the public for between $1,000 and $1,200 next year, he said.

LOS ANGELES--There is very little room inside a PC these days, both literally and figuratively.

Safi Qureshey, best known as the "S" in the old PC maker AST Research, is trying to get a new chip company off the ground.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News )

Tiny Netbooks leave little physical space for any added components, while brutal price competition means it's just as hard financially to convince PC makers they need something extra.

Still, that's what Safi Qureshey, who co-founded PC maker AST Research almost three decades ago, is trying to do.

His start-up, Quartics, is pitching a chip that would augment the PC's main processor and graphics card with a programmable chip for handling things like Flash movies and video conferencing.

"It's a co-processor. It does not replace anything," Qureshey said in an interview at last week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles. Quartics' main targets, he said, are Netbooks and cheap laptops that don't have a lot of horespower to spare.

"We significantly enhance the video quality of a very low-cost laptop and we enhance battery life," Qureshey said in an interview. (For more from the interview, check out the video interview below.)

The company has been trying to get off the ground for a while now, having started in 2003. It has a number of venture backers and but has not publicly announced any PC maker customers.

"We are working very closely with one. We just don't want to preannounce their name," he said.

Quartics' chips are being manufactured in sample quantities, Qureshey said, with production volumes planned for the first quarter of next year.

But the advent of Netbooks makes Qureshey hopeful that such chips are now poised to take off.

Cost will certainly be a key factor. Qureshey said the company hopes to get the volume price of its chip "in the teens" of dollars as opposed to the "twenties" where it is today. Some of that cost, he said, can be offset by using a cheaper main processor or graphics chip, he said.

Microsoft was showing off a sample of Quartics' chip in one of its booths at WinHEC.