Month: October 2010

Categories
Research

When scientists meet engineers

Most innovations “just happens” when the conditions are right, and they in turn create new conditions that enable more innovations. It’s like catalysis – when barriers for interactions are removed, they happen, just because they can. Telephony, for example, enabled many people to share thoughts and ideas in real-time, catalyzing the industrial revolution. Internet enabled interactions between any computers, catalyzing the IT revolution. Nanotechnology is now enabling interactions between any devices and the environment, catalyzing things we don’t yet know will happen. Quflow wishes to take part in this development by bringing nano-researchers and engineers together around industrialization projects for mobile devices. Below are glimpses of such a project that currently is looking for industrial partner(s) willing to get involved:

Categories
Discussions

Big problems – small solutions

Mobile devices contribute more and more to the every-day life. Their abundance and rapid development has led to very short product life-cycles which cause quality, health and recycling problems, and customers start to look for better and more sustainable alternatives (http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1010/green-brands/flat.html).

All major mobile product manufacturers nowadays use generic platforms instead of custom designs. They can shop around for platforms that fit their complete product portfolio and roadmap best, and also change platform and component suppliers since they all are designed to fit generic platform architectures. This change in design methodology make it much easier and faster to introduce and establish new technologies that are smaller, more powerful, environmentally friendly, flexible and future-proof – exactly what is needed now.

Sustainable engineering of consumer devices means a much reduced amount of production waste, careful choice of good commodity components, integration of technologies with robust and scalable performance , and in general designing for a life together with the customer rather than a brief financial transaction.

Categories
Research

Technologies for sustainable devices

Have you experienced that the first software updates make the device better, but after some year it starts to get more and more sluggish and drains the battery? It has started to assume newer hardware exist and need to emulate it with software instead and that can be very inefficient.

Turning your device to waste is not what the app developer want, and is not good for the environment either. If the hardware chips inside the device were re-configurable instead of frozen to an old design, it would not get outdated as fast. Alternatively, if the complete device was manufactured with very low environmental impact and using decomposable parts, it would not matter as much when it does get outdated. But it would still need to be small, cheap, fast and power efficient – otherwise the product won’t sell. With latest nanoelectronics and material technologies this is finally becoming feasible! Examples of new research to consider in technology roadmaps:

Joakim Pettersson, the founder of Quflow, was doing early nanoelectronics research 15 years ago and are working with experts on nanodevices that are industrialized now. Quflow can help companies analyze and industrialize in this new era of extremely power efficient, sustainable and small devices.

2D honey-comb pattern of carbon and its electron structure
Graphene and its 2D electronic band structure (from http://www.als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/154graphene.html)
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Menu

Consultancy offerings

Quflow can help with one or more of the following tasks to make sure your product exceed expectations:

Step 1: Find a modern platform series for your product family where all hardware and software components already play well together and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Step 2: Find main message that will build the value of the product family and preferably a unique message for each product.

Step 3: Find soft quality criteria (excellent/good/poor) that relate most to the intended customer.

Step 4: Find soft design challenges (hard/standard/easy) that contribute most to the main value.

Step 5: Find solutions to design challenges through regularly updated and aggregated risk/opportunity analyses.

Step 6: Construct the most efficient system design, product optimizations and integration guidelines based on regularly updated design solutions using research, lessons learned, modeling, benchmarking, prototyping, identification and maturity/cost/value roadmaps for each design challenge in use-cases and scenarios where system performance is most critical.

Step 7: Connect people into small and effective teams focussed on quality parameters that can be continuously benchmarked and designs that are easy to integrate without any need for guarantee repairs. Develop methodologies and training that stimulate creativity, team-working and quality improvements across all disciplines and organizations involved.

Step 8: Product engineering and verification such as driving and participating in product adaptation, requirement coverage analysis, competitor analysis, lab testing, focus testing, field testing, certifications, volume qualification, feedback harvesting and continuous improvement activities.