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"  WASHINGTON \u2014 The pool of engineering geeks here at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is about as deep as you&amp;#039;re likely to find anywhere on the planet. These are the people who design the microprocessors, displays and memory that run our computers, phones and digital televisions. And the IEDM, an annual conference thrown by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is where they flock from the worlds of academia and industrial labs to present papers on new research.  When you register for the conference, they instantly hand you a book of the proceedings that&amp;#039;s 1000-plus pages thick. The lingua franca of the conference is purportedly English, but a brief look at the schedule of presentations reveals a cryptic vocabulary of engineering patois. Titles include &amp;quot;A 16-Byte Nonvolatile Bistable Polymer Memory Array on Plastic Substrates,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Tuning PMOS Mo(O,N) Metal Gates to NMOS by Addition of DyO Capping Layer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Flexibility of Space-Time Continuum Using Advanced Flux-Capacitance&amp;quot; (OK, that last one was more of my lame humor). Despite the highly technical lingo, the IEDM provides an interesting perspective on the future of the world of electronics. Papers range from the eminently marketable (the highlight of the meeting is supposed to be the dueling announcements of Intel&amp;#039;s new 45-nanometer &amp;quot;high-k&amp;quot; chips and a joint 32nm chip project by IBM, AMD, Freescale, Sony and Toshiba) to the theoretical (researchers from Stanford and Bosch propose spiral sensor arrays that could be manufactured in a wound-up, compact format, then stretched out over a large area, such as an airplane wing, to create a skin of connected sensors to monitor a structure&amp;#039;s health).  There&amp;#039;s a lot going on here, but my favorite research has been in the flexible and organic electronics session. One group from the University of Tokyo demonstrated a &amp;quot;communications sheet&amp;quot; (pictured above and at bottom right) that could allow devices placed on it to communicate with one another while it inductively powers and/or charges them. The beauty of the system is that it uses printed circuitry and memory, so that it could, theoretically, be produced like wallpaper. Why is that important? Because it&amp;#039;s a step toward integrating electronics into floors, walls and furniture. If you could cover the surface of your desk with a cheap laminate that would instantly network and power any device placed on it, you could work around both the mess of plugs as well as the confusion of wireless protocols (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband).  Yesterday was just the first of three days here, and over the course of this conference I expect to be both amazed by innovative research as well as bored to tears by engineering jargon. I&amp;#039;ll give you daily updates on the former without torturing you with the latter. \u2014Glenn Derene The IEDM tome Spiral sensor arrays from Stanford and Bosch can wind up then stretch over, say, an airplane wing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a4679/4236570/>