Toshiba eyes fuel cells, Cell-based TV by 2009
Toshiba eyes fuel cells, cell-based TV by 2009
Toshiba plans to begin direct methanol fuel cells and television based on the powerful cell microprocessor in large amount.
Toshiba has been developing the fuel cells and cell chip and their readiness for commercial use coupled with continuing advances in the company’s chip making expertise are expected to be key drivers behind growth in toshiba’s digital products and electronic devices divisions.
Direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) produce electricity from a reaction between methanol, water and air. The only by-products of the reaction are a small amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide, so the fuel cells are typically seen as a much greener form of energy than traditional batteries. A big advantage of DMFCs is that they can be replenished with a new cartridge of methanol in seconds.
The spurs engine is a coprocessor that’s a chip designed to sit alongside a main processor in a system and handle heavy jobs like real-time graphics processing and video manipulation. Inside the chip there are four processor cores of the same type used in the cell chip and a hardware codec for encoding and decoding high-definition MPEG2 and H.264 video streams. Toshiba said it will launch a laptop PC that features the spurs engine.
Toshiba also planning to launch a new 1.8-inch solid-state disk (SSD) drive using multilevel NAND flash memory chips. Such chips can hold two bits of data in each cell, doubling the storage capacity within a given space.Toshiba to store up to 128G bytes in the first drives using multilevel memory.
Source: ITworld