Technical Excellence Awards 2014

Here at PCMag, we're pretty focused on consumer products. But for the last 31 years, we have also brought you an annual look at the technology underneath the hood in our Technical Excellence (TechEx) Awards, which cover the breakthroughs in science, coding, materials, and more that will have a major impact on the world of technology in the years to come.

In the past, we've handed the award to some truly game-changing technologies, from the first 386-based computer in the 1980s to the Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the Apple iPhone 5s last year. In between, there have been breakthroughs in software, chipsets (just about every cool thing Intel and Nvidia ever made), product designs (the iPad was so amazing in 2010), to clothing (remember when it was a big deal that gloves worked with a touch-screen smartphone?).

We've also handed the TechEx Award to tech that went nowhere (we miss you PalmOS). That happens when you're focusing on the under-lying technology that powers our gadgets. Some of the items on this new list may never make it to market, but they might just explode off shelves as the next big thing. So let's jump in and see what the future has in store.

Curious about our previous years of TechEx? Check out TechEx from 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Storage

STORAGE

Samsung 850 Pro's 3D NAND and RAM Caching
In 2005, we handed out a TechEx award to 3-bit-per-cell NAND chips—the innards of 16GB memory cards, which had somehow squeezed in more capacity (three whole levels) by using multilevel cells. What a difference nine years makes.

Now, we have 3D NAND with RAM caching in large (256GB) solid-state drives, a process that this year was commercialized by Samsung in the 850 Pro . Other vendors will join soon, like Intel. It works by stacking the levels horizontally, not vertically, allowing for more levels, ultra-high density, and even more reliable production.

Why does it matter for end users? Longer product life. While SSDs are wicked fast and easy as is, they've always had one Achilles heel: a finite number of times to write to the chips inside. 3D NAND doubles what you get in today's SSDs, allowing as much as 40GB to be written/read every day for a decade. It'll have a major impact on the price of SSDs going forward.

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Power

POWER

Titanium Dioxide Nanotubes on Lithium-ion Batteries
We all know, and frequently tolerate, the role of lithium-ion batteries in our everyday lives. From tiny headsets and phones to PCs and our cars, they are everywhere, doing a respectable but not great job. The limitations—the time it takes to charge them and the overall limited lifespan (about 10 years)—are a pain, at best, for our mobile society.

Now, what if you had a better battery you could charge to 70 percent—in just two minutes? And what if it lasted 20 years? That would drastically change your daily routine, as well as your smartphone/tablet/laptop/car upgrade cycles.

The new tech comes from Nanyang Technology University (NTU) in Singapore, where developers led by Associate Prof Chen Xiaodong have found that using titanium dioxide-based (Ti0₂) nanotubes in a gel on the negative pole of a lithium-ion battery provides exactly those benefits. Advanced Materials journal has already published their findings. They're building a large-scale prototype and might even get it to market in a couple of years.

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Lockheed Martin's Nuclear Fusion
In nuclear fission—the kind we have in nuclear plants here on planet Earth—an atom is split and dangerous radiation leaks out. In nuclear fusion, atoms are combined. The energy output is just as fantastic—and it's safe. That's why fusion is considered the holy grail of energy production. Because it's almost impossible to do outside of a star.

The Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Program known as Skunk Works (named for the moonshine factory from the Li'l Abner comics) is on to something new. Called the CFR (compact fusion reactor)—that compact part is critical, as it implies "smaller than a star"—it could be the beginning of creating an aircraft that never needs refueling. And who knows what compact fusion reactors could mean for fuel on the ground.

Lockheed is years from even having a viable prototype outside of a lab. The final unit would hopefully fit inside a tractor trailer—and could potential power up to 80,000 homes. Here's Lockheed's informational video on the topic.

Imaging

IMAGING

Lytro Illum
Lytro is no stranger to our TechEx awards—in 2011, the company's first Light Field Camera made the cut. Three years later, it's back with the $1,599 Illum ($1,220.00 at Amazon) , its first device to look like a true camera instead of a flashlight. It comes with a 30–250mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.0 lens and a touch-screen LCD screen on the back.

A Lytro takes a shot using light-field (or plenoptic) photography, where every possible ray of light is processed. So you can actually re-focus the image after the picture is taken. There are mobile apps and software for Mac and Windows to perform the after effects; check it out below.

Similar tech is coming from other companies—Intel is working on RealSense, which will allow after-the-shoot focusing, or "depth photography," as it uses three lenses to take one shot. RealSense will also incorporate 3D scanning at home plus gesture control.

Health

HEALTH

Ecosphere PowerCube
The truck-sized Ecosphere Powercube at first looks like nothing more than a giant set of portable photovoltaic solar panels, all extending from drawers in the top, expanding the footprint by 400 percent or more. And that's an accurate description up to a point. But because it's portable in nature (coming in 10-, 20-, and 40-foot ISO shipping container footprints) it's perfect for military, humanitarian, or disaster relief, where power is needed for communications, creating potable water, and a lot more. The first one was built in July, and will hopefully be the first of many.

HealthPatch
Imagine you've just had minor surgery and are feeling great, but your doctors want to keep you in the hospital for an extra two days just to monitor your condition. HealthPatch is a device that will let you go home instead. It's an adhesive bandage filled with sensors that read your vital statistics, such as heart and respiratory rates. Doctors can monitor you from afar, and call you back to the hospital if something seems off, or send help to your home if, for example, the device detects a fall.

HealthPatch, which received FDA clearance this year, could effectively lower the cost of your healthcare when you're sick or convalescing, and let you spend more time in your home instead of the hospital. It's a huge step toward bridging the work of fitness and health trackers with actual medicine.—Jill Duffy

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Security

SECURITY

EyeLock Myris
Biometric security for home PCs isn't entirely new, but using your eyeball as the metric is a novel approach. EyeLock is now marketing its $279.99 Myris scanner—which plugs right into a USB port—to home users, even though the encrypted digital signature it uses, looking at 240 points on the eye, is worthy of big business and government contracts. EyeLock says that there's a 1 in 1.5 million chance of a false positive; only DNA would be a better match.

CertainSafe
Everybody's using cloud storage systems for personal and business data, even when company policy says otherwise. If your company has to comply with HIPAA or other standards for protection, the mere act of using a non-compliant cloud storage system could be a costly violation. That's where CertainSafe comes in.

This entirely cloud-based service not only encrypts your data, its MicroEncryption system scatters the encrypted bits across multiple servers. A hacker who breached the encryption on one server would get nothing but bits and pieces without the other parts of the file. CertainSafe maintains PCI Level One certification and is fully HIPAA compliant.—Neil J. Rubenking

Displays and Printing

DISPLAYS

Kyocera Brigadier with Sapphire Screen
There was talk for a long time that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus would have sapphire screens rather than ion-strengthened glass. The promise of sapphire is that the surface is virtually unbreakable and scratch proof. That didn't happen for Apple (and maybe that's a good thing), but it worked out for Kyocera.

The Japanese company claims to be the largest manufacturer of single crystal sapphire products, and it put that to the test with a new Android-based phone, the Kyocera Brigadier , available for $50 from Verizon in the U.S. Guess what? Sapphire delivers. Our reviewer tried to scuff it up with stones, steel wool, and a knife: not a scratch. It's even submersible in up to 4 feet of water. If you're looking to avoid a cracked screen in the future, and are willing to settle for a less-than-optimal phone, the Brigadier is reporting for duty.

PRINTING

Microscale 3D Printing
It's safe to say that 3D printing is a known quantity and only getting better. But microscale printing lets the tech truly shine. Imagine being able to print with materials to get features as small as one micrometer—or 10 times smaller than a red blood cell. Researchers at Harvard, Princeton, and Cambridge are already working on it, and some are actually printing things to replace human tissue, like the cells in a retina. It's only a matter of time before we are printing sensors, chips, and batteries. The secret is in the "ink," but getting that to work at room temperature without getting destroyed by the print nozzles involved is taking a lot of work. Eventually, it might lead to breakthroughs where you can print out genetic-specific bandages—or even new body parts.

Materials

MATERIALS

Newlight Technologies Aircarbon
We've known the future was plastics since The Graduate. But 50+ years of plastic has used up a lot of fossil-fuel oil and created a ton of noxious byproduct. In typical manufacturing, three times as much CO₂ is created than actual usable plastic.

Newlight Technologies says its AirCarbon material—which has been in the works since 2003—is a plastic created by "sequestering carbon emissions that would otherwise become part of the air." It takes all that greenhouse gas and makes it into biodegradable resin, suitable for all sorts of products, from furniture to packing film. It's all based on decades-old science, but Newlight thinks its method is the first to make it cost effective. Your next PC, phone, chair, etc., might be made from chemicals you personally exhaled.

Graphene Mass Production
Graphene as a material has been around a long time, hailed as the durable wonder-conductor that will replace silicon in microprocessors. Chips will be able to get ever smaller and more effective that way. One problem: making graphene in volume is a pain.

Several steps have been taken in the last year to change that. Samsung's got a new technique to grow single crystal graphene right on silicon wafers—and it's reusable. Researchers at the University of Dublin are attempting mechanical exfoliation of graphene, a souped-up version of how graphene was originally found using exfoliation via Scotch tape (for real). Finally, researchers at Chonbuk National University and the Korean Research Institute of Chemical Technology have worked out a way to get carbon fiber, a graphene substitute, in nanosheets used by solar cells. It's a lot quicker (and leads to less degradation) than the CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) method used to create graphene today. All told, these are great steps. But we're still several years away from chips made from the stuff.

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Networking and Design

NETWORKING

Full-Duplex Wireless Circulator Circuit
There's a big difference between full-duplex—sending and receiving data at the same time (like when you're on a landline phone and able to talk at the same time as the person on the other end)—and half-duplex (one person talks at a time). Radios today—even the kind use by Wi-Fi and LTE networks, fast as they may be—are only half-duplex. So they can only send or receive.

That may change soon. While some are working on software workarounds, researchers at the University of Texas are tackling it in hardware, according to the journal Nature. They've designed a circuit called a circulator that transmits signals in a way that won't get any interference from signals coming in. That could effectively double the throughput capability of many wireless systems.

There are still questions about what this means for heat generation and battery life, but there's plenty of time to work that out. It'll take a few years before this advance makes it to handsets and routers.

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DESIGN

Lenovo Yoga 3 Hinge
The Lenovo Yoga—a hybrid laptop/tablet, which flips over backward—already had a pretty cool hinge in previous versions. But the hinge on the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro ($949.99 at Lenovo) has an utterly unique design. Rather than the two dual-axle hinges, it's more like a metal watchband strap with 813 hand-assembled components that runs the full length of the device. It'll hold the screen in any position you want, whether as a laptop, upright like a tent, backwards for kiosk mode, or flat as a tablet.

The Yoga 3 Pro also got an Intel Core M-70 processor inside, and it runs with just one tiny fan, making it thinner and better able to take advantage of that hinge design.

Software

SOFTWARE

LiveLight
Have you ever looked at footage from a security camera or CCTV? It can be mind-numbingly dull watching nothing happen for a long, long time. Minutes turn to hours. Hours into...sleep.

Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department is taking on the task for bored security people (and film editors) with LiveLight. It automatically summarizes unedited video without human intervention. It takes out all the repetitive boring stuff, so what's left is just what you want. For example, footage of a front door will only show the entries and exits; footage of a road can be told just to look for accidents. Check out some of the results.

Software Indistinguishability Obfuscation
Say it five times fast. It's something cryptographers and software creators have long dreamed of—a way to completely hide their code within some gobbledygook, obscuring it completely from prying eyes that would hack it, reverse-engineer it, or steal it. It's never been truly possible. Even commercial packages that promise to mystify attackers are just a speed bump. All the bad guys typically need is time.

Amit Sahai, an M.I.T. grad who's now a computer science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been pondering this for years. In 2014, he co-published two papers on the topic of creating a universal obfuscator. It would allow the code to work as intended—but without revealing itself to the outside world. It's a few years away from going commercial, but the potential—everything from truly secure communications to completely hack-proof software—has got the cryptography community very excited already. (Read more at Quanta Magazine.)

Processors

PROCESSORS

Intel Core M
As our lead systems analyst Joel Santo Domingo put it: "Core processing power without a cooling fan. Hot."

That's the promise of Intel's new 14 nanometer (nm) transistors. They're significantly smaller than the last generation at 22nm, and use about half the power consumption (4.5 watts instead of 11.5)—perfect for tablets and ultra-light laptops

The first system with Core M inside was Lenovo's Yoga 3 Pro, which already gets TechEx kudos for its cool hinge. Unfortunately, the 3 Pro with Core M isn't entirely fanless (maybe), but it's close. Other systems using Core M include the latest HP Envy x2.

There may be some discrepancies in claims versus what's delivered, but Core M still represents a major leap forward. With multiple versions of the chip in the pipeline running as high at 2.9GHz, it should be gracing many a system in the coming years.

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VISC CPU 'Virtual Core' Design
If you've been around computing much at all you've probably heard of "virtual machines." That's when you can run software emulating an entire system on top of your existing computer—like getting Windows to run on a Mac.

Now, imagine that at level of your computer's microprocessor. That's the promise of Variable Instruction Set Computing (VISC), as created by Soft Machines, a well-funded startup run by chip experts. A modern processor typically has several cores, but most software only utilizes one core at a time. A VISC virtual core would allow for the use of all the cores, for better efficiency. You can read more granular coverage on it from ExtremeTech. Suffice it to say, should Soft Machines land some licensing partners like Intel, AMD, or ARM (Soft Machines is not planning to make chips), it could make a big difference in future computing.

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