close
    • chevron_right

      Automatic bike transmission concept is wild and spiky—and could be a big shift

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 30 November - 22:13

    Haven Mercer's prototype front assembly for an automatic bike transmission

    Enlarge / Haven Mercer's prototype front assembly for an automatic bike transmission. (credit: Haven Mercer)

    Depending on how you look at it, either a lot or not very much has changed about the way bikes shift gears since the mid-19th century .

    A lot has been refined along the transmission path, in which your feet push cranks, those cranks turn a big gear, and a chain connects that big gear to a smaller gear on the rear wheel. Shifting has picked up lots of improvements, be they electronic or wireless, as have derailleurs and internal gearboxes. Materials and tolerances have only improved over the decades.

    But in almost all cases, you're still manually adjusting something to move the chain and change gears, depending on the resistance you're feeling on the bike. Even the most outlandish recent ideas still involve indexed movement between different-sized gears.

    Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    • chevron_right

      Intel hit with $2.2 billion patent judgment

      Timothy B. Lee · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 2 March, 2021 - 22:33

    A multistory building with an Intel logo on the wall of its top floor.

    Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

    A Texas jury has ordered Intel to pay $2.18 billion in damages for infringing two patents. The lawsuit was filed by VLSI Technology LLC, a 4-year-old firm that Intel says has no products and no sources of revenue besides patent litigation.

    The patents at issue in the case previously belonged to NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company that spun off from Philips in 2006. NXP acquired the patents when it bought Freescale Semiconductor (itself a spinoff of Motorola) in 2015. Intel's lawyer told jurors that NXP would get a portion of the proceeds from the lawsuit.

    The two patents focus on methods for minimizing the power consumption of computing chips. One way to do this is by varying the system voltage: setting a higher voltage when high performance is needed, then lowering the voltage to conserve power afterwards. One patent claims the concept of storing information about a memory chip's minimum voltage in nonvolatile memory so the system can ensure that the memory circuit has a high-enough voltage.

    Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    index?i=1jo9zZldMmw:dsXIJ9AEXuk:V_sGLiPBpWUindex?i=1jo9zZldMmw:dsXIJ9AEXuk:F7zBnMyn0Loindex?d=qj6IDK7rITsindex?d=yIl2AUoC8zA