Following my retirement, we have closed our company for new business.

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly, our email portal remains open and I would be delighted to hear from you and provide ongoing support or advice.

Richard Thomson

support@rta-instruments.com

Companies represented up to the end of December 2023. Please now contact them directly.

k-Space Associates, Inc.
Phone: +1 (734) 426-7977
requestinfo@k-space.com
https://www.k-space.com

STAIB INSTRUMENTS GmbH
Phone: +49 8761 76 24 0
sales@staibinstruments.com
https://www.staibinstruments.com/

Thursday 20 November 2014

In brief

An Apple 1 computer motherboard last month sold at auction for $905,000. Time to look in that cupboard? IBM have agreed to pay Global Foundries Inc. $1.5bn to take over its semiconductor manufacturing activities. IBM is to focus on fundamental semiconductor research and the development of future cloud, mobile, big data analytics and secure transaction-optimized systems. Using 20,000 Amperes, the high field magnet at HZB in Germany is now consistently producing magnetic fields over 25 Tesla. The system, which has one regular conducting and one superconducting coil connected in series, will be used for neutron scattering experiments.

The Third Man (or woman)?

Congratulations to Shuji Nakamura and co-workers for being awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics"for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Our newsletter editor, John Grange, met with Nakamura several years ago whilst in Japan not long after visiting Leo Esaki at IBM, a previous physics prize winner. He may not manage a hat-trick but it is fun to speculate on who could be candidate number three.

Four for all

There will be four connected devices for every person on the planet by 2020 according to a new survey from Strategy Analytics. They predict that there will be 33 billion devices connected to the internet by the end of the decade. Currently, there are 12 billion online machines in operation, equating to 1.7 devices per person with the PC making up 10 per cent of this figure. Strategy Analytics say that the mix will continue to move away from both PCs and Smartphones with wearables and smart devices connected to the ‘Internet of Things’ representing the core areas of growth.