Applied Materials (AMAT) has seen recent slippage of project schedules in its solar business “nearly across the board,” according to Citigroup analyst Timothy Arcuri. Applied has built a new business around supplying tools used to manufacture thin-film solar cells, and expectations for the business are running high. Maybe too high, in Arcuri’s view.

...WHDI, however, is camped out in a chunk of unlicensed 5GHz spectrum just like 802.11n Wi-Fi, meaning it must be able to tolerate the reasonable levels of interference only from other devices that use the same frequencies, and can broadcast at higher power levels than UWB – enough for a range of "over 100 feet." WirelessHD, a third major spec also funded by Samsung and Sony, plus Panasonic, Toshiba, LG and NEC, uses the 60GHz band, and apparently has problems unless the transmitter and receiver are within line-of-sight.

Osram development engineers have achieved new records for the brightness and efficiency of white LEDs in the laboratory. Under standard conditions with an operating current of 350 mA, brightness peaked at a value of 155 lm, and efficiency at 136 lm/W.

The company claims the RamSan-440 is the world's first non-volatile RAM-based solid state disk (SSD) to sustain up to 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and deliver up to 512GB of storage capacity in a 4U rack-mount chassis. It's also the first SSD to use RAIDed NAND Flash memory modules for data backup, and the first system to incorporate Texas Memory Systems' patented IO2 (Instant-On Input-Output) technology.

Despite the hype surrounding the promising technology, SanDisk is placing blame on Windows Vista for not providing enough of a speed boost when using SSDs... ...(but) It is quite true that SanDisk's SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition.